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[Rolan7]

Funnily enough at higher difficulties the AI has been reported as being quite improved. It'll deliberately seize chokepoints, launch coordinated wars on threats, and generally give you a harder time of things and keep you on your toes. A higher difficulty with scaling difficulty on can pull ahead of the player quite well long before the AI bonus mid-game peak.

I think they optimized the AI to manage itself well on higher difficulties, meaning on lower difficulties it can sometimes explode in on itself.

Although it'd be nice to be able to mix up the AI difficulty for different empires within a game, pick a range that AI empires get sorted into. Would be nice for some AI empires to explode in on themselves regardless since not every empire should be a success, rather than either all empires being dumdum or all empires being exponential boomboom.

I really doubt the AI's any different, it's probably just the nature of its bonuses on higher difficulties.  There's a flat Stability bonus, cheap/free resettlement, and naturally a resource bonus.  Considering that serious overcrowding is naturally mitigated now, I'm more surprised that the AI is still able to have revolts at all.
(Unless it gets vassalized by a player, of course, which immediately strips all of its bonuses...  That must be crippling to an established empire on later difficulties, but I only play Captain)

As a side note, I´m really enjoying the machine intelligence I cooked up. Basic setup is a quickly replicating machine intelligence which starts in a ruined ringworld.

My headcanon is that they´re emergent programming from the ringworld´s maintenance system subroutines. As such, their goals are to repair the ringworld and get up and running, and build tall instead of wide. Unless there are particular strategic resources to be taken from them, neighbouring organic empires would be made into tributaries rather than conquered outright.

Nice!  I also just started a MI on a ruined ringworld.  It's an otherwise default Tebrid Homolog because, well... I like exploiting broken mechanics before they get patched, and I've never given Driven Assimilators a proper try before.  Seems like an excellent time for it!

And what luck, I spawned next door to a Federation :O  Perfect for what I have in mind:  A cluster of three homeworlds belonging to different "empires".  They're mostly boxed in now, and I predict they're going to survive till the end of the game~

The plan is to keep them around and independent, but periodically raiding them for pops via Nihilistic Acquisition.  By the endgame- heck, by the midgame they'll be my primary source of pops.  Plus all that unity and society research I guess!  I just have to protect them from the rest of the galaxy.  I don't know how far I'll go with it though, I mostly just want to play with the loophole a bit.  I'm not really invested in playing Borg.

Hm, rogue servitors can get nihilistic acquisition too...  Oh but that'd be a heck of a challenge mode since the biotrophies would just prevent drones from being constructed   I guess its a fine time to try authoritarian xenophiles too (again picking up nihilistic acquisition).  Can't enslave species, but can technically use that wonky 40% slavery civic.  Or play it nice with social welfare.

[Great Order]

Has anyone got a mod that removes the empire-wide pop penalty but maintains the planetary one? I've got one that removes both right now, but I want that S-curve growth on my planets.

[Criptfeind]

I was pulled back to playing stellaris with my friends recently, not played since early in the planet and economy update. I'm wondering if maybe we're just thinking about this wrong, or do machine empires (at least, not driven assimulator ones) seem ridiculously weak because their pop growth is super slow? Like, everyone else can get pop growth naturally but a machine empire has to build everybody, and they don't even build that much faster than roboticists and hiveminds build pop (who also get to grow naturally) and they have to pay more to do it. And then since population is basically the key to everything low pop robots just freaking suck, like, okay, they are slightly more efficient in some things then organics, but not nearly enough to make up for their slow pop growth. It doesn't really matter if a robot generator or scientist is like 20% better then a organic farmer or scientist if they have 1/2 or 1/3 the pop... Not to mention everyone else can conquer others for big quick boosts to population but robots are stuck with just the pops they can slowly grow themselves unless they get very lucky to neighbor another machine empire so past the early game it's really hopeless for them.

[Greatness942]

I was pulled back to playing stellaris with my friends recently, not played since early in the planet and economy update. I'm wondering if maybe we're just thinking about this wrong, or do machine empires (at least, not driven assimulator ones) seem ridiculously weak because their pop growth is super slow? Like, everyone else can get pop growth naturally but a machine empire has to build everybody, and they don't even build that much faster than roboticists and hiveminds build pop (who also get to grow naturally) and they have to pay more to do it. And then since population is basically the key to everything low pop robots just freaking suck, like, okay, they are slightly more efficient in some things then organics, but not nearly enough to make up for their slow pop growth. It doesn't really matter if a robot generator or scientist is like 20% better then a organic farmer or scientist if they have 1/2 or 1/3 the pop... Not to mention everyone else can conquer others for big quick boosts to population but robots are stuck with just the pops they can slowly grow themselves unless they get very lucky to neighbor another machine empire so past the early game it's really hopeless for them.

You're definitely going about it wrong. Machine Empires don't need certain resources (like food) and can gain access to powerful techs and ships down the line. If anything, I'd say they're easier than biological empires, at least by the mid-game.

[forsaken1111]

As someone who just defeated everyone and destroyed the galaxy with a machine empire, they're certainly not weaker than other choices. They do play very differently though.

[Greatness942]

Even as someone who, in his current playthrough, fought against a Machine Empire (with no special traits, so they weren't Driven Assimilators, Determined Exterminators, or Rogue Servitors) and managed to win, I can tell you they're quite strong.

If Pop Growth is that much a dealbreaker to you, then just create a Machine Empire with the benefits of pop growth traits and Civics.

[Telgin]

Robot assembly for organic empires sucks right now and it can easily take 10-20 years to build one robot pop after mid game.  I know that machine empires get more pop assembly than organics, but I'm not sure how much.  3-4x as much I think?  They would lag behind organics due to the S-curve growth organics get early game either way, but population growth just sucks after mid game right now for everyone, by design.

For an amusing anecdote, I tried a void dweller start where I'm only putting robots on planets.  This was already a not great idea in 2.8, but the pop assembly speed is so low I'm expecting these planets to have ~10 pops by end game.  A normal build would never do this, but I just want to see what happens.

[Iceblaster]

I swear I made a post in this thread that's now gone -never got a message saying it was removed or anything, sooo weirder-, so here's it in a quote. Showing posts on my profile shows it oto, so that's even weird.

they keep trying to fix lag caused by pops and never once consider why performance was so much better when they had tiles

Like sure call it a problem of complexity doing it, but I swear I never once had to worry about lag by pops whenever the planetary tile system existed, yet nowadays its the most common issues.

[Telgin]

Generally speaking I'm glad they moved to the new jobs system since it's more granular, but won't deny that it both added complexity that the AI can't really handle and performance problems.  It is also admittedly a little sad that you don't get to see your pops anymore unless you go digging through menus.

Going back to tiles, or even reduced pop counts from that era, would be pretty hard though.  By adding intermediate steps in the production pipeline for things like alloys and consumer goods, they made it harder to make the jobs less granular.

On another note, I've discovered that the Galactic Custodian logic is a little... wonky.  I'm actually not sure what criteria it uses to choose the custodian, but in my current game I had the ketlings spawn in a system in my empire that was isolated and despite the fact that they had one system, locked into my empire with closed borders, they were elected the custodians who were supposed to fight off the Great Khan.

I think they may actually have the strongest fleet in the galaxy, so maybe that's why.  The spawned with 5k fleet power despite having no industrial base, and certainly had more than I did at the time because oh boy a habitat only empire sucks in 3.0 without majorly gaming the system.  It's so hard to get more than about 15 pops on a habitat... and balancing your economy is quite tough with that, the janky pop growth, and the fact that you're burning 5 alloys per month per habitat in upkeep...

[Great Order]

Custodians appear to be based off of who likes who, rather than who is most powerful. I think you might only be able to nominate yourself, too, because I can't nominate any AI players to be them, but that might only be if there's no active crisis.

The guys that supported me becoming custodian (and after that, the emperor) all loved me to bits, anyone that was just happy with me or disliked me were all opposed. I had no abstentions in that vote.

[ChairmanPoo]

I was pulled back to playing stellaris with my friends recently, not played since early in the planet and economy update. I'm wondering if maybe we're just thinking about this wrong, or do machine empires (at least, not driven assimulator ones) seem ridiculously weak because their pop growth is super slow? Like, everyone else can get pop growth naturally but a machine empire has to build everybody, and they don't even build that much faster than roboticists and hiveminds build pop (who also get to grow naturally) and they have to pay more to do it. And then since population is basically the key to everything low pop robots just freaking suck, like, okay, they are slightly more efficient in some things then organics, but not nearly enough to make up for their slow pop growth. It doesn't really matter if a robot generator or scientist is like 20% better then a organic farmer or scientist if they have 1/2 or 1/3 the pop... Not to mention everyone else can conquer others for big quick boosts to population but robots are stuck with just the pops they can slowly grow themselves unless they get very lucky to neighbor another machine empire so past the early game it's really hopeless for them.

They are ludicruloisly strong, esp if you use one of the special starts (ringworld, machine planet) and combine it with fast assembly from traits and civics. Early on it will be fairly strong but not unreasonably so. Down the line you'll be making so much base resources that you wont know what to do with them. I'm regularly buying alloys just to avoid topping up my energy reserves and THEN selling minerals to avoid topping up the mineral reserves.

[Dunamisdeos]

I have driven assimilator which means my pop growth is along two lines, and also I chose fast machine pop assembly traits.

Nothing I've played compares to this in terms of sheer pop speed.

[Telgin]

Assimilators are probably the strongest type of empire right now, since stealing pops isn't penalized by the empire wide pop growth hamfist.  Paradox is apparently planning to tweak that by reducing the penalty size in 3.0.3, which is something, but just delays the problem...

"We know you hate it, but we know better so just hang in there."

Also, if the Galactic Custodian empire is destroyed, the game crashes.  Known bug that I hope is fixed in 3.0.3, since it makes my current save unplayable.  The Ketlings, in their tiny little 1 system empire that keeps getting elected, were magically destroyed by something despite being isolated within my borders.  After the popup about the custodian being destroyed, the game consistently freezes or crashes.

I should have let the Grey Tempest eat them when I was aware enough to reject their nomination.  If nothing else, the struggles of this habitat only run made fighting the Grey Tempest a lot rockier since I could barely scrape together 50K fleet power.  I wouldn't have even bothered to open the L-gate if another empire weren't in the process of trying to do the same.  As an aside, I kind of hate dealing with the Grey Tempest since their motherships can 1-shot battleships with their titan weapon so I consistently lose exactly 1 every single fight.  The shot must bypass shields and armor.  Maybe crystal plating gives them enough HP to survive that, but I haven't tried it.  Advanced hulls alone aren't enough.

[Rolan7]

My assimilator run got nipped in the bud by that federated start I was so excited to nom, but that was overconfidence on my part (and not being used to shattered ring).

I tried again as a friendly federation building tree of life hive and it's super effective. My allies kept getting rebellions which I "helped" with, grabbing dozens of pops each time. The xenophage modifier is very kind or even nonexistent depending on ethics- as long as you aren't promising to do it to everyone I suppose! And I grabbed evolution mastery fast which lets me welcome the pops to the collective~

I missed an opportunity to play as hiveminded "humans" in Alpha Centauri as a SMAC reference, poo. I renamed some things anyway.

Kinda want to be a legit nice Custodian, and use espionage to break up federations so they'll join me peacefully, but I think I can wait. Enjoying the update though, wonky state-wide pop ceiling aside. And the performance might be worth it. Particularly not so bad for federations and vassalizers since it's by state.

[Loud Whispers]

Remind yourself  that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer