cruczi

Join Date 01/2013

Yor - Fast Assembly etc make no sense at all?

Hey am I missing something?

I'm playing a game as Yor and as you know you start with the ability to increase pop by +1 with Assembly that costs 100 to build.

Now here's what it says on the tech tree:

Spark of Life gives you Fast Assembly that increases pop by +1.5 and costs 200 to build
Spark Replication gives you High Capacity Assembly that increases pop by +2 and costs 300 to build
Spark Continuation gives you Ultimate Assembly that increases pop by +3 and costs 400 to build

Obviously, all of these are worse than the base Assembly. Fast gives only 0.75 pop per 100 cost, High Capacity gives only 0.66 pop per 100 cost, and Ultimate gives again 0.75 pop per 100 cost. In all cases it makes a lot more sense to just build regular Assemblies which is more efficient. Even if Ultimate gave you +4 pop (i.e. same cost/pop), building 4 regular Assemblies would be better than 1 Ultimate because increasing pop incrementally gives you raw production bonuses earlier than waiting for a bigger bunch of pop to be built.

Even on a high production planet, it's going to be pretty tough to have high enough production where it'd take just 1 turn to build even a Fast Assembly. Assuming a balanced 33% research 33% social 33% military split, you'd need a crazy amount of raw production just to get to 200 social production. And even if you did manage that, you could still just do one regular Assembly and use the production surplus for something else the next turn, so often you wouldn't even need Fast Assembly. Often you'd be in the situation where you're just 1 away from the pop limit.

Tried googling about this issue but came up with nothing. Surely someone else has noticed this too? (Game is up to date at 3.01)

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What expansions do you play with? In my games (all expansions and DLCs) there is just one project 'Manufacture Population' that costs 100p, 1 Durantium and 1 Promethion and gives +1 Population. Or is your tech tree campaign-specific (I never play campaigns)?

Quoting ,

quoting post

I regularly get more than 1k Social Production on my key planets in my games, so reaching 200 should be no problem, even if you don't have Crusade expansion (citizens).

Also, remember that you can use colony ships to ferry population from your high-production worlds to your other worlds.

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Quoting Croc411,

reply 1

Just the base game, and New Game, not campaign.

I regularly get more than 1k Social Production on my key planets in my games, so reaching 200 should be no problem, even if you don't have Crusade expansion (citizens).

I guess I've never played to such a late stage where production can be so high. But Fast Assembly isn't a late game tech, it's really cheap to research, so it should be relevant during early game.

Also, remember that you can use colony ships to ferry population from your high-production worlds to your other worlds.

Well thanks for the tip, but I knew this already. I'm not looking for tips specifically though since I do have the basic game mechanics down, just wondering about why Fast Assembly and further upgrades seem worse than the basic Assembly.

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Actually, this is true for a lot of techs, especially manufacturing techs and research tech in general. They tried to nerf tech upgrades so much that most upgrades are not worth it at all unless you had nothing else to do on your colonies. Think of upgrades as more of a luxury than a necessity for maximum efficiency.

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barrybeal

Join Date 04/2003

There is no sense to this - when Brad took over the development of Crusade - one of the things that kind of got tossed aside was development of the Synthetic races. They gave them ability to build up to 100, I think, population on a planet without cities, they allowed them to have large populations on planets without morale issues and nerfed the manufacture pop tech from building 2 pops to 1 pops at 100 manufacturing. Then they removed the Spark of Life/Fast assembly techs that used to give improved population building efficiency (essentially population "growth" techs for synthetics). The "Hive" manufacturing hub buildings were never added back into Crusade from Standard although there was a post indicating this might happen shortly after Crusade launch.. Essentially Synthetics got ignored after the Crusade launch much like the Mercenary expansion never got redone after Crusade changed everything as far as Ship/Starbase/Shipyard hitpoints, weapons damage rebalance and manufacturing/research building bonuses nerfs Additionally I don't understand how Synthetic economy works now since they are locked out of the normal economy buildings..

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In my opinion, Synthetic races are better than ever before. I play Intrigue, with all DLC.

In the version I play, there is only one tech to increase population, early on and cheap, so long as you have D and P. Mining those is crucial to the success of a Synthetic race, and while pop is "capped" at planet class, using colony ships to overpopulate does not result in negative population growth.

They are stronger now than ever.

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Regarding economy .. they do have a rather cheap planet project (strip mine), and the ( +25% + 0.3 raw per level ) per-planet buildings ... not to mention Tourism playing such a large role now .. I do not see it as an issue

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AdamMG I have just the base game. You play a different game... Obviously you don't see the techs I'm talking about as an issue, you don't even have those techs.

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I wondered what all the fuss was about too -- I have Intrigue/Crusade and a good chunk of DLC, and the Yor have exactly one pop assembly.

The rest, as you've described them, make no sense.

The GC3 balance / tech trees have been in pretty good flux for a while -- Synthetic races in particular were all over the map for a while, as others have noted. I feel they've settled into a pretty good place, at least where the expansions are concerned.

I do hope that SD keeps up with the fine tuning, but balancing one set of data (full game / all expansions) is difficult and time consuming, never mind several combinations of expansions and DLCs. I'm guessing they put their efforts towards the "full game" experience. Hell, I'm hoping they do, because if spending money on expansions gives me a poorer experience I'm gonna be a little disappointed.

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Quoting SilasOfBorg,

reply 8

I'm guessing they put their efforts towards the "full game" experience. Hell, I'm hoping they do, because if spending money on expansions gives me a poorer experience I'm gonna be a little disappointed.

And if spending money on the base game gives me a poorer base game than those who pay for expansions, I'm gonna be a bit disappointed. In fact I am a bit disappointed. I don't understand why SD don't release the patches and fixes and balance changes to base game civs for players who have the base game. Tech tree design flaws (yes it's a flaw, not a balance issue) like the one I've described here would be very easy for SD to fix in the base game, and there's no obvious reason why you would require the DLC content for that fix. Doesn't seem fair to me.

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Quoting cruczi,

reply 9

In fact I am a bit disappointed. I don't understand why SD don't release the patches and fixes and balance changes to base game civs for players who have the base game.

I have a feeling it boils down to limited resources going towards the biggest bang for Stardock's buck. Each expansion and DLC multiplies the possible balancing, testing and error space somewhat exponentially. Even the best devs will, I think, just give up after a while and just rely on user error reports to fix the more glaring problems. Don't forget guys, all evidence points towards Brad and the rest of SD staff loving what they do -- but the mathematics of DLCs and expansions are working against them. It's a self-inflicted problem, to be sure, but that seems to be the cost of turning a profit in the games industry these days.

IMHO at some point it would be worthwhile for SD to package all expansions and DLC into a "Gold" version and just say "buy or upgrade to this, we can no longer realistically test or balance all the combinations of expansions and DLC", then they'd be back down to one code stream. Of course, pricing and upgrade options would be a gigantic nightmare unless they just released it for free into the base game, which might piss off a lot of people who paid for said expansions and DLC... so that couldn't happen for a while.

Myself, I'm still unable to play the game in the mode for which I specifically purchased it - MP games over GOG have had issues with every released version and point release of GC3. Right now play is pretty stable, but reloading a saved session crashes both joiner and host. I'm sure if this happened on Steam it would have been fixed already, but I'm well aware that MP, never mind the GOG version of the game, are one of those "limited resources" things, just like your base game issues.

If I had one criticism of Stardock right now it would be the support process. For the issue I just described above, I opened a ticket, collected and sent all information to Stardock, then found out they're not using support tickets any more and I should post to the forum. So I did that and had no reply for a month until I bumped the thread, at which point I was asked to recreate the problem and send an error report through the game. So I will dutifully try that once I can catch my MP buddy, but my confidence in the support "process" is around zero at the moment. Yeah, stuff is getting fixed, but it kind of screams "disorganized mess" to me.

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