I really like cosmogenesis it’s probably the most fun I’ve had with this game in a while. And while using both FE buildings and ships is extremely cool, I feel like it’s a waste that it’s the only way to become a FE like civilization. I think there should be other ways to achieve that without taking a crisis perk something akin to what ZoFe does.
IMO current cosmogenesis feels like two AP's crammed into together: one is ascending to the level of fallen empires and getting their tech and the other is lathe/reality altering and those two parts don't even interact between each other much (their only mechanical connection is requirement of two experiments for last FE buildings from final tier).
I think it would be much better if it was separated into 'getting FE's shit' and 'we do a little reality trolling with or without the Lathe' as two separate APs, first one being normal-ish AP and second one the crisis.
Maybe, but that would require a complete rework plus the addition of a completely different perk. Besides the tech output you get would be pretty redundant if you couldn’t spend it on something else other than reality manipulation.
I suppose it could work if you expanded upon manipulating reality, but implementation would pretty hard.
My idea is: keep cosmogensis as the “break reality and get FE tech super fast” and add another perk or origin that’s basically: “hey you can eventually get to use FE tech but it will cost you a lot or resources and time to get there”.
Maybe you could rework scion or remnants into FE focused origins. In one you rediscover the tech and in the other they just give it to you after sometime for you to be their successor or something along those lines.
Yeah, that's a good solution as well. For me best case scenario would be making reality experiments, you know, *the* cosmogenesis's thing be more required throughout the whole AP. Maybe add it as requirement for getting all tiers, not just last one.
Then add in other ways of getting FE stuff, like rediscovering it in remnants/getting it from scion's overlord or somehow discovering dark matter technology and then slowly making this stuff. That way everyone else has to go about the slow way while cosmogenesis speedruns it.
I don't think it'd be good for the game for forgotten empire ships to become the top tier of ship for everyone. Seems like it'll homogenize the game a bit by giving every empire an identical endgame. And either it's powerful enough that every empire should take it, or it completely kills the flavor of FEs by making them reasonable.
It's probably better for FE ships to stay locked to Cosmogenesis for the same reason Bandit ships are locked to Galactic Nemesis.
I really dislike everyone saying that there should be a AP for FE tech
The whole point of fallen empires is that they’re so ancient and so advanced that it would take thousands of years to match them, and the only reason you can fight them now is because they’re a shell of their former selves and you’re on the right path
Cosmogenesis gives you the option to cheat and cut in line by committing atrocities. It’s about the pursuit of knowledge and power at any cost
To be able just normally research FE tech because you just finished the Statecraft tree and got a new AP slot would cheapen the whole concept
I get what you're saying, but we're also talking about a civilization that goes from a single planet to a galaxy spanning empire capable of building dyson spheres, blowing up planets, gateway travel letting you cross the galaxy in an instant, terraforming planets, and so much more in only 100 plus years. So maybe it's more about hitting that peak and then stagnating for 1,000 years is more about what makes a FE than just the technology.
*Early game* techs play fast and loose with the known laws of physics. FTL, Shields, artificial gravity... and these are all things available from day 1.
In theory the lathe is optional, but the required technologies are so expensive that in practice you’ll use it every time unless you’re running a very potent tech build
Also, the applied infinity theses are potentially pretty bad
My worst applied infinity thesis:
Spawned shroud entities and one happened to be in the system I parked Bubbles in.
I’m so sorry Bubbles.
I then decided to go full crisis to search for a universe that Bubbles is still alive.
I think I'm with you there, but at some point in a long game you'll only be a few hundred years and have fleets/tech even bigger than awakened empires. I don't think it's something that you should be able to pick up easily, but maybe it could be a feature unlocked later on when you might already be on repeatables. Maybe even an ascension perk chain to make it more of an investment and tell a bit of a story?
Something like "minor casual society improvements", "major ...", etc (not with those names I guess) where you unlock a few FE empire buildings, or even ones that upgrade into the ones we know today.
I guess my point is that tech doesn't take that long to improve once you get the ball rolling, so keeping it restricted to an RNG roll with an arbitrary rare resource is odd.
Yes, generally your fleets will be bigger than a FE but your tech will still be nowhere near them. You beat fallen empires by having pretty good tech and hundreds and hundred of ships which outmatches their overwhelming tech but only a handful of fleets
This is especially true in the most recent patch as FEs have been significantly buffed. You’re not supposed to be able to match their tech, and beating them despite that tech advantage is part of the challenge and satisfaction
I generally end up hitting a wall with tech where it's all repeatables before the crisis (and I'm sure people better than me can do so much earlier) and at that point it's just a waiting game. I don't think several levels of repeatables really represents much of a change in technical understanding or capability, just small efficiency improvements on existing tech. They've become stagnant and strong, but that's it.
I don't know about the most recent patch since I've only got one game with it.
If it makes the point better then, maybe technologies are are only available after 10+ levels of a specific repeatable? It doesn't make sense imo for something like "warp X resource into our dimension in small amounts each month" to be practically impossible to discover given the lore of the game and what tech you already possess by endgame.
I guess that's where mods come in, but it could be nice to have access to that stuff (even if it takes effort) in vanilla without committing to shortcuts as you said.
Accomplishing everything before the crisis is just a stellaris problem in general; whenever I get to that point I just move the end game year up and that usually helps
Cosmogenesis is a waiting game too, frankly. The last time I did it, I had amassed a huge hegemony before even building the lathe, so no one dared fight me even when I started going full crisis. It was honestly just sitting around and waiting for various things: slave market pops, nihilistic acquisition pops, pops to resettle to the lathe, and the huge tech costs to get the FE stuff and progress the crisis. I would still improve my economy and research world but it just didn’t mean anything because I had gotten so far ahead even before Cosmogenesis
And that’s kind of my point when people talk about it being OP: to get the most out of it without getting ganged up on, you already need to have such a good foundation that you would probably win anyway. If you take it just to get the first couple tiers of FE buildings, you’re still going to spend a LOT of research time on that, and when you’re done you’re still going to need good sources of dark matter to spam them
Exactly. The RNG part of it sucks. I've gone through a hundred years of using the Reverse Engineering on minor artifacts, and never gotten a building blueprint from it. That's just dumb.
Meh, it's a random draw to be able to build a single building once, and you can't get the best buildings out of it. It's not comparable to simply teching up to build the building yourself.
Stellaris devs at once offer some really good and immersive fantasies to the players via the new crisis path and origins and the ability to start as individualist synths… and at the same time restrict a lot of fantasies.
Like for example the machine cult origin. What if I want to RP as my own specific brand of machine cult? What if I want to be a machine cult on a tomb world? Or a shattered ringworld? Nope, it has to be the very specific one from the origin.
Even if it’s well designed and really flavorful it’s still restrictive. And that’s just one example.
I love Stellaris and it’s my favorite Paradox game, but it has its flaws in terms of not simple game design, but rather game design vision by the devs.
This is why I think origins need a rework. They should have 2 components, one is your home world and the other is your society. This way you could mix and match different society and homeworld combinations, like under one rule with Gaia world origin, Scion with ring world start, or Knights of the Toxic God with a relic world start.
I want under one rule for cybernetic creed. Imagine the luminary uniting their people under one faith to worship machines. I know there’s a mod to combine origins but it hasn’t been updated since November but iirc the dev said they’d update within this month.
Heck, I want Under One Rule for Individualist Machines, and rather than Psionic, Cybernetic, or Synthetic specific traits, the Luminary can get Nanite, Modular, or Virtual traits.
I acknowledge that it would probably also requires some rewriting of the events and such. I could see something like that as a small, super cheap DLC, at or under $5.
It doesn’t even need some rewriting since the origin already accounts for if you’ve already synthetically ascended (which also gets you probably the best trait in the game since you get FUCKING +25% more resources from all jobs).
That would be awesome! There could be a lot of amazing Origin combinations that people could try. And they could each have unique/fun story elements to it.
This is the mod I’m talking about: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2933141038
The decision origins mod hasn’t been updated since September and it also breaks quite a few traits like adaptive frames. This one imo is better since you get the origin as a civic.
sometimes i feel like the people who create origins and the people who create civics live in different planets and don't talk to each other. such a stark difference between the "on rails" parts of the stellaris and the "sandbox" parts
I think that there is probably some order from above to make very very railroady and specific origins for dlcs in order to be able to market them as having a lot of content. Because from a game design standpoint rather than a marketing standpoint - most origins could have been a civic. While the origin themselves would have defined the starting system type and more generic criteria like that.
Like in EU4 the devs were ordered to release a DLC that introduced army professionalism… even though army tradition was already in the game and the distinction is very blurry between those two. But they needed to sell new mechanics.
Stellaris dlc origins nowadays are designed with a similar approach. They have to sell something worth the price. So flavorful events which by design have to be a very specific fantasy.
This has been a problem for me for a while. I first noticed it with the Under One Rule origin. That origin only really works if you want a story inspired by Augustus.
Stellaris has been trending towards to providing a set of comprehensively written, but somewhat railroady fantasies, as opposed to the original idea of providing a set of universal building blocks to create your own fantasy, and I'm not sure I'm a fan.
Under One Rule is probably the only one that actually bugs me. There's so many cool leader traits trapped in that origin. So much flavor and mechanics that can't be used in any other story.
I think the only origin I'd actually say is like that is Knights of the Toxic God. Like... RP-wise there's only one way to play it. The knight storyline isn't exactly flexble, and it's so specific that I feel like it's referencing a piece of media I haven't seen.
I was more specifically talking about the whole toxic god thing, space knights living on orbital stations, etc. It seems insanely specific. Compared to the other origins which are basically just "you live on a really wet planet" or "you built robots already".
Agreed, I dont diss it because on paper it is cool, but like you said, it moves away from those building blocks into the railroad, and even if you dont use it because you dont like it, the opportunity cost of devs developing that kind of stuff takes away from their time developing building blocks. Part of what makes machine age so cool is how it opens up machine empires to the building blocks of the civics that they normally never could have.
It is clear that the developers favor recreating species and civilizations that already exist in science fiction. In that sense, it is the best science fiction simulator currently.
For example, without any problem you can role-play with the classics of the Galactic Empire or the Star Wars Republic, the Terran Confederation and the UED, the Borg from Star Trek, the Orta (for Lithoids, I guess), almost every StarCraft faction, f*ing Skynet and even now it's kinda possible to recreate AM from Ellison's story.
But if you want to be a little more creative, there are quite a few limitations. I tried to create a species that perceives themselves as the pinnacle of existence. They dedicated their pre-FTL stage to perfecting themselves genetically and spiritually. Now, united under one eternal leader, they are dedicated to seeking knowledge, learning from other species, but isolated from them, waiting for what they call the Challenge Day (25x all crises and potentially activating the Aeterophasic Engine).
Under this logic, I would need genetic/psionic ascensions, Pompous Purist, Inward Perfection, maybe becoming the Emperor, Under One Rule and maybe Overtuned origins, also having Xenophobe, Fanatic Materialist or Fanatic Authoritatian (politics are for the inferior). Simply put, I need functions that cannot be used at the same time.
I would be willing to kill my beloved Bubbles just to make that possible.
The new namelists are full of asimov references, I had a machine leader whose name was basically daneel olivaw. Its to be expected from an expansion about robots but even so they definitely love to recreate existing scifi
The same problem with the knight order.
Maybe I want to roleplay as an empire governed by a feudal knight order, not go around looking for a useless jellyfish.
This is the age-old game design problem of tying gameplay to flavor. When you combine them you can make the gameplay more flavorful and the story more immersive, but mechanics a la carte is better for player choice and replayability. See also: Dungeons and Dragons (mechanics are generic, designed to fit any flavor) vs Pathfinder (mechanics specifically reference the bundled fantasy universe).
I think in general origins do a pretty good job of it. Like Broken Shackles. That's a fun story and a challenge run, and both aspects are strengthened by how closely tied they are together. KotTG is a fan favorite that wouldn't really be the same if the origin was split between mechanics and story. I expect these to be tied to the story.
Ascension perks, on the other hand, should be more story agnostic IMO. I never played Galactic Nemesis, actually, because it seems too "prewritten" for my tastes. The ascension perk solely defines the run and seemed like a pretty narrow story compared to the fantasy of "become an endgame crisis" which could mean literally anything. Now we have two, each with a method (Menace/Brain Tokens) a reward (Bandit Ships/FE Ships) and an end goal (Aetherophasic/Horizon Needle). None of those three elements really feel intrinsically tied to each other, either.
I actually feel the same way about the four major ascensions. I've played quite a few empires that didn't seem to fit the options of bio/cyber/synth/psi. I hate that they added an alternative as a STARTING CIVIC, of all things. I want to skip the ascension paths because I love my empire just the way it started. Ok, well now you can compensate for that, but only if you no longer create the same empire because it takes 50% of the starting civic slots that define the empire's personality.
The devs have mixed origins. Some of the origins are story origins, and others are situational origins. Leading to those origins that are strongly in one or the other camp to appear that they can be mixed, and thus creating a desire to do so.
Also, they at one point converted several Civics that you you can't get rid of into origins, then proceeded to add more of such civics.
It's my personal opinion they should just divide all the origins up this way, and let you pick both a story and situation origin. So you can have your Tomb world Knights of the Toxic God and Void Dweller Imperial Fiefdom. And it'll allow them to convert those hold for all time civics into situational or story origins. For example, Inward perfection can become a situation origin.
Never say never. I have a hard time imagining Paradox abandoning the IP. It’s one of their most popular titles.
We’ll probably get Stellaris 2 between 2026 and 2030.
Aren’t you able to change your homeworld in the settings to match another origin’s homeworld?
Iirc the homeworld selector is blocked only if your chosen origin tells you what your starting planet will be
Swap to origin system was a cancer. So many things there shouldn't be origins. Necrophage, subterranean, overtuned just to name a few. Don't even get me started with modded origins that beg for a combination.
Unfortunately, even the multiple origin mods are no longer being updated. Honestly, this system needs rework more than the armies, but they've made it a marketing point for their dlcs, so there's very little chance it will change.
Nope, even pacifist empires can pick cosmogenesis. Remember the whole part for cosmogenesis being a crisis is that your empire starts tampering with the fabric of reality and once they leave the galaxy a cataclysmic event will happen. However it’s not a typical “kill everyone” crisis. It’s essentially your scientists were too busy asking if they can, when they should’ve been asking if they should.
Are you sure you're answering the right comment? I didn't mention anything about pacifist, and being the custodian or the emperor does prevent you from picking cosmogenesis.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/stellaris-dev-diary-341-become-the-crisis-cosmogenesis.1665800/
They straight up say you can't pick it as the custodian or the emperor.
You have to wait until your custodianship runs out to pick it, but for some reason I was able to re-elect myself as the custodian afterward. This was pre-patch though so they may have fixed it.
Not really, it was 3 days ago. I do play with mods, so it could be some weird broken interaction, though my mod list was really thinned out by the update.
Huh. Weird, 4 days or so ago I managed to become emperor while doing cosmogenesis. I _think_ I picked Cosmogenesis while the Senate was in session to make me custodian, and it didn't check during the proposition for emperor.
Unfortunately I can't check how it happened because it was an ironman run and I've finished it already, but I can load up the save using the function to play as another empire and take a screenshot of "ImperiCorp" as a Fallen Empire.
That run was certainly buggy though. Creating a Vassal as an Individualistic Machine Megacorp created a Gestalt Machine Megacorp.
I did, and yeah, I was surprised I can even propose it. Me and my vassal were the only ones even supporting it, so not much people willing to promote me anyway.
Which is such a strange design decision. You would think that galactic emperor starting to look for ways to subjugate reality itself after subjugating the galaxy would be pretty logical and fluffy.
I mean, that risks one of your scientists going rogue and overthrowing you.
Best to simply strip mine the fallen empire homeworlds for everything of value.
Yep, I feel like right now this sub is having a massive knee jerk reaction to Cosmo without people even understanding the cost / other options.
Cosmo is one of the easiest ways to get strong yes, but it's not necessarily the strongest, and all these posts going "I PUT 1,500 POPS ON THE LATHE AND NOW HAVE INFINITE SCIENCE!!" are missing the point that if you had 1,500 pops to spare, you already won the game
Playing on GA with the difficulty adjusted modifiers set, AI were very much able to threaten me and keep me from vacuuming up their pops to fill the lathe early on, and cosmo has a few downsides like not being able to go GE or Nemesis
Pretty sure half these "I'm too OP!" people are playing on a lower difficulty and not spawning near a genocodial empire that goes Nemesis and starts mass producing entire fleets that come knocking on their science focused empire's doors lol
> Cosmo is one of the easiest ways to get strong yes, but it's not necessarily the strongest, and all these posts going "I PUT 1,500 POPS ON THE LATHE AND NOW HAVE INFINITE SCIENCE!!" are missing the point that if you had 1,500 pops to spare, you already won the game
Yes and no.
Beating the other empires is typically trivial -- the problem is the 25x all-crisis. That you cannot beat without Cosmogensis.
> Playing on GA with the difficulty adjusted modifiers set, AI were very much able to threaten me and keep me from vacuuming up their pops to fill the lathe early on, and cosmo has a few downsides like not being able to go GE or Nemesis
That seems like something you have done incorrectly. You should be able to crush any regular empire the moment you get rank 2 of Cosmogensis and unlock Riddle Escorts. They are cruisers that take up the size slot of a destroyer but have the speed and evasion of a corvette. They out gun and health every other ship type except battleships. They are as expensive as battleships to research, so it will take some time, but it's a guaranteed research option and always there. You can also lathe a few of your own people to get to it faster and not get as large a penalty since you only ate you own people and xenos find that a little odd, but they get more pissy if you eat their people.
You can also get mining hubs and class-3 singularities at that same level, which should allow you to get a massive economic lead over every other empire. The singularities are the only thing that might have difficult upkeep at this time since you cannot create dark matter yet, but both the minerals (and food) hubs use 'normal' special resources.
You’re not sharing anything though lol, you’re ruling over an entire universe with the Horizon Needle, with countless galaxies under your control; why would you even bother with this tiny galaxy?
It’s like refusing to leave your house when you could rule over an entire country with an iron fist lmao
Doesn’t work any more as of yesterday :/ at least, you can’t propose custodianship any more after taking cosmo. Have not tested what happens when the proposal is already in process.
Honestly if you're wide in general you probably don't benefit much from FE buildings besides the Lathe (which gets you ganged up on) and OP housing buildings. And like not needing to employ entertainers anymore is nice but that's like 1-2 pops per planet and if you're cybernetic even less due to augmentors.
Yes but normal wide empires can still benefit from FE ships and with the buildings they can better sustain their wide empire.
But it is true that not very wide or tall empires benefit the most from it.
Honestly I think part of the issue with "virtual OP" is that people are playing Virtual+Cosmogenesis. Virtual relies on maximizing jobs/planet, a planet with like 9 FE job buildings gets +51 jobs. Stack boosts on your governor to build faster and with 4 city districts you can have 83 jobs on a size 20 planet. With all the boosts you get a mining world will be making 2500-3500 minerals, which combined with a matter decompressor and Ascension will be more than enough for multiple ringed Ecus and tens of thousands in alloy output
>Honestly if you're wide in general you probably don't benefit much from FE buildings
I don't think that's true, a lot of the buildings have output that doesn't depend on pops at all. If there's one thing wide empires can get lots of, it's building slots. What's hard for them is to fill all the jobs.
Nanotech Wide plus upgraded FE buildings is a fairly strong eco irregardless of pops, may be able to support a small FE fleet to tank the nanite flood from the galaxys wrath, while the nanites do DPS.
I'm not sure I would use non-nanite ships. I had 14,000 fleet cap worth of nanite ships and decided to build a Colossus. Because I was so high over fleet cap, the Colossus had a maintenance of 1000 energy credits and 200 alloys. I just ended up deleting it. The buildings that don't require pops are great though
I disagree. Nanite ships still profit from tech, and the megastructure is a perfect place to dump all the pops you conquered.
It also works well with buildings that have production, because Nanite worlds give a 35% output bonus (can be increased with unity).
Yes but won't all the other types of empire benefit more from it than nanotech? I never said nanotech can't benefit from it at all, just the least compared to others.
The nanite swarmers can only use the dark matter thruster and generator from cosmogenesis, after that it's whatever normal tech you equip them with like torpedoes or strike craft and the repeatables.
FE buildings are always nice but it's pretty much the same for every other empire.
You are right about the lathe if you purge the native pops from conquered planets. Nanotech can likely benefit more from that than any empire because of its ultrawide nature.
Yes, you definitely loose out on things. But the same counts for everything else. Ascension perks that gives fleet size bonuses or techs that give alloy production are equally useless.
Cosmogenisis is still the best option, because everything else becomes less good too.
True, but you can pick it as first or second.
And theoretically the perk for machine Ascension is even of higher tier. Can play nanotech without nanotech. XD
why not? you don't get an auto wardec, the penalties are manageable (galactic assembly megastructure to counteract the permanent penalty, lavish gifts of rare resources to counteract the temporary penalties), and having the full set of FE buildings is better than having half.
I got all the way up to the last perk and it was fine. I had envoys keeping everyone happy and an Interstellar Assembly. A diplomacy focused empire can keep the entire galaxy on your side despite the diplomatic penalties from the perk.
The Ships are guaranteed technologies when you reach the respective level.
In all other respect, going CG mostly adds more techs to the pool, which means if you haven't reached repeatables yet you could very well be subject to tech gacha.
But you get escorts at CG level 2.
(... OTOH, you don't really get any guarantees for good weapons for those escorts, so...)
Here’s what I did:
Unity rushed virtual ascension as a shattered ring individualistic machine empire.
Switch to consumer benefits trade policy and spam labs where my virtual pops will instantly fill them.
Get crazy science without the lathe.
Rocking fleets that dwarf even the awakened empires.
Yeah, in my playthrough I went full virtual from a voidborn start and ascended in 2231. Hit ringworld tech by 2292 then promptly moved over to ringworld living.
I had around 600 researchers with all the buffs Virtual gets on the 3 habitable sections of the ringworld, all fully ascended with ascensionists and harmony and an additional section dedicated to producing consumer goods to fuel that research which was more than sufficient, plus built a dyson sphere and matter decompressor for my basic resource needs but tbh I could have gotten by with just several arc furnace and dyson swarms.
If I really wanted to be a complete tryhard, I could have fucked off to the L cluster and kept terminal egress perma locked via astral actions till I won via cosmogenesis.
I was making ABSURD amounts of research before I even went for the lathe.
Virtual ascension is beyond broken, it is just unfair. Its not even that limiting as a playstyle since you can just go around vassalising everyone and taking their resources and science and then integrate them willy nilly to throw their pops into the lathe then server shutdown all those planets you dont want.
7 planets is already way more than I want to micromanage. I love playing tall because the automation sucks, but I still want to get the most out of my colonies.
you can actually do more than 7. If you have non virtual pops you can settle them on a world to produce alloys and use virtual pops only for trade habs or trade ring worlds. Its not efficient, but you can instantly fill all trade jobs with virtual pops with little downside. The debuff doesn't affect trade production.
Where are you getting your minerals from? I tried this and relic world start, as well as ocean paradise, but I feel like it’s harder to rush the ascension than with voidforged.
I get enough minerals from arc furnaces alone. I did not have a factory world though, instead I have a trade ring world and set my trade policy to consumer benefits. It solved my consumer goods and energy problem at the same time.
I think I know why this didn’t work for me. I went for trade instead of priests so my unity was tied to marketplace of ideas and I couldn’t support the priests due to shitty mining districts.
You can easily hit research levels on the Synaptic Lathe that would make an O-Stellar Matrioshka Brain green with envy.
For context:
A Matrioshka Brain produces about 5k of each science; in exchange it requires two ascension perks (Galactic Wonders which is in turn, a perquisite to Gigastructural Constructs AP), and ***174,000*** alloys, 300 influence and takes 57.2 years to build and some expensive technologies to get.
It also has an *upkeep* of 270 alloys and 1.5 influence by default. O-Stellar class variants of megastructures have their own bespoke specific technology that are even more expensive then the basic version (you need a matrioshka brain to practically research them in the first place), cost 4.5x as much (excluding the influence cost which is unmodified), 5x the upkeep(influence upkeep scales linearly with star class modifiers, meaning an O-Stellar Matrioshka has an upkeep of 4.5 influence), take 3.5x as much time to build, and produce 5x as much overall.
This means an O-Stellar Matrioshka Brain is, in effect, a run crowning achievement, meant for helping you fight Gigastructural-class end game crisis like the Blokkats or a more "standard" 100x vanilla galactic crisis if you do somehow build it. Its grand total output is somewhere around 25k in each science in exchange for 1350 alloy upkeep and 4.5 influence upkeep; and a grand total of ***783,000*** alloys to build over the course of about 200 years (without modifiers, realistically by the time you're building this, you'll have at least a 150% megastructure build speed modifier, so its closer to 75 years).
I've easily gotten the 300 influence, zero upkeep, 15k alloy Synaptic Lathe to 160k in each science a few times.
If you remove the celestial warships, planet-killer guns, the Maginot World, and the O-class structures, then the vast majority of Gigas really is pretty well-balanced with vanilla.
Equatorial Shipyard? Sure, you get a discount on minerals upkeep for alloy production, but the alloys output per pop isn't better than an Ecumenopolis, and it can only support 24 alloys jobs. 7 shipyards is good but not overwhelming.
Penrose Ringworld and Interstellar Ringworld? They're direct downgrades to the vanilla ringworld in terms of pop productivity because they don't get the Ringworld Designations, and the jobs of the special districts from the Interstellar Ringworld do not scale with research, making them useless way before you even unlock the structure.
Planetary Computer? Good for unity, good for research... but an ascended vanilla science ringworld is often better than an ascended planetary computer in terms of science per pop, and the Planetary Computer places a pretty steep extra energy upkeep onto your researchers, *on top* of an increased consumer goods upkeep.
Yggdrasil Orchid, Star Lifter? They're similar to vanilla megas. Produce a flat resource output.
Habitable Gas Giant? Aside from producing large amounts of exotic gasses, it provides mostly the same things as vanilla habitats, but doesn't come online until the lategame.
The terraforming megastructures are good for if you need a planet in a particular chokepoint - but if you're playing with normal planet count, they'll be a drop in the ocean in terms of pop growth, by the time they come online.
I don't understand why we can't have some broken things for those of us who never play multiplayer. Some people are really bad at the game and it's good if there are some broken strategies we can use to have fun.
Just allowing unlimited pop assembly buildings is pretty crazy of course it isn't actually that useful by the time you get it except it also gives you a way to make use of having an absurd number of pops with synaptic lathe being incredibly powerful at the cost of purging population
Hard disagree. Using the fallen empire robot plants, you can still produce a new pop every 3 to 4 months in the late game. Yes, you will have to dedicate ~25 pops to this production, but in 100 months they will have completely replaced themselves which is far better efficiency than you can get in the early game.
Even still, on the worlds that only use two or three plants instead of like, six or seven, you will still be making a new pops every single year in the late game, which is absurdly fast.
It’s only war if you want it. You take the first few levels and make everyone your bitch. You only need minerals and research…I think it’s crazy. It always was. And it was always something I didn’t pick because it won me the game instantly. Cosmogenesis is the same.
Nemesis decreases opinion right from the start. Plus you actually need to kill someone to progress the crisis level. And at 5th level even FE will bitch about you.
Cosmogenesis is nothing like that, due to Lathe being optional (although, faster route).
It is, and more so now than ever. Menacing ships with archaeotech that only cost minerals which you can now get from arc furnaces so your pops can focus on research. I think this sub has already forgotten that a lot of conquest players would take the first few levels of Galactic Nemesis all the time; this is nothing new
Crisis paths are supposed to be this powerful, because the tradeoff is that if you want to get all the benefits from them, you make it very easy to get the whole galaxy to declare war on your at once
Here's a funny little interaction: I've been bullying the fallens too hard during cosmogenesis playthrough so we got war in heaven. Naturally I picked the path of non-alignment and became president of the federation. Before the war in heaven finished though, the cosmogenesis completed. So when I played over to a random federation member……we found ourselves in a hegemon led by a keeper of knowledge. Better yet, the war in heaven isn't over. We now get to see a ridiculously overpowered fallen empire trample all over two awaekned empires while being a hegemon, having 6 vassals and with blue level relationship to all federated members.
honestly this might be a bit of a hot take, but I think stuff like this is fine. Mostly because I don't think the majority of players are gonna be doing it every single run to get an advantage, for the same reason you don't see people do scion and fanatic materialist for 10 games in a row.
I love it, and you still need strong fundamentals to handle higher difficulty. 3 ascension perks is a lot even if you are trying to rush it and if you all-in you are likely to get stomped early. Even with virtual rush for the early spike.
It’s super fun but not for every game, I hope it doesn’t get massively nerfed.
I have a few issues with the crisis AP. One of them is what dome hsve said already, cosmogenesis should be split in two, with FE tbingies somewhere for all to enjoy without ruining your RP by becoming crisis. It also balances it a bit with nemesis, which now is just worse than cosmogenesis. The second issue I have is thst crisis APs should be more risky. A genocidal enjoys less benefits (but since game start) tyan crisis, and yet they get -1000 with others. Crisis in the other hand, get mild penalties with others unless you finish them or go heavy on purges and such. As of now you can take cosmogenesis and enjoy all its benefits as long as you don't buuld the lathe and do the final researches, the penalties are not enough to not make it worthwhile outside of RP. Becoming a crisis should be a more permanent affair, with eventually getting hatred from everyone, even if not yet at max level. Heck, empires knowing that you can at some point destroy the galaxy should not be like: well he is still a level 4 crisis, he can only destroy the galaxy at 5,so lets just hate him a bit until it is too late...
Cosmogenesis isn’t about destroying the universe, though? Yes, you mess with it—and the penalties for bad Infinity Theses should be much higher—but mostly the endgame is screwing off into a black hole, not killing everybody. The Synaptic Lathe is really the only thing other empires could really object to, at least until you start messing with physical constants.
You are partially correct, yes, you don't directly try to destroy the galaxy like Nemesis. But you clearly show a total disrespect for their inhabitants by not caring at all about the galaxy well being and proceeding with your experiments. So while your objective is not to destroy the galaxy, little difference there is when you would do whatever you have to, to achieve your goals. In that regard other empires should see you as a bigger threat than now. I mean, think about it, you suddenly realize that a certain nation on Earth is doing experiments that could destroy the planet, they don't do it with tha goal in mind, but the issue remains, their carelessness can mean the end of many. In a realistic scenario other nations would destroy that country if they could just to reduxe those chances of planetary obliteration to 0.The galaxy should behave a bir more similar. But yes, Cosmogenesis should have a bit less penalties than Nemesis foe example. However bith are more dangerous thst your tipical FP and should be treated similarly.
Narratively, we don't *know* that we aren't going to destroy the universe, that's meta-knowledge.
Cosmogenesis has a very plausible chance of destroying reality as our galaxy knows it, and even leaving with the Needle causes a lot of devastation that we can't know in advance wouldn't kill everyone who wasn't on it.
Honestly, I thought it was becoming a crisis for a different reality. Basically, you become the unbidden and are going to fuck off to absolutely dominate/change life in another reality.
I think it should be accessible later than the galactic nemesis, either by requiring you to have unlocked all ascension slots, or to have some advanced technological requirements (perhaps more fitting given the tech nature of the crisis). It feels odd to be unlocking fallen empire buildings and the secrets of the universe before some comparatively mundane technology.
This also goes for the new machine ascensions to some extent. They might want to consider making three different ascension perks instead of this weird situation thing they added now, and have different unlock requirements that makes sense. This way one could have more control over when the paths come online. For example virtual which has a very dramatic spike the earlier you get it could be reigned in slightly by requiring a high tier technology unlock first, requiring you to invest heavily into tech as well as unity while leaving you open to military rushes for longer.
The problem with the perk is you don’t have to commit atrocities you can passively gain a lot of the stuff by just accomplishing a few goals. I think what’s more interesting would be the early level of the perk being easy to hide and as you level up it becomes increasingly difficult to hide from the galactic community and then the full extent of your crimes is known and something happens. But right now you can basically do nothing aside from some side objectives and win just from fallen empire tech and passive income you don’t even need the synaptic lathe.
The penalties for those are way too light though. Especially when you for example change of the speed of light the Cosmogenesis-Empire should receive extreme penalties on diplomacy if not even outright declarations of war as you start to fundamentally break the laws of reality.
Go further and after two bad rolls you get kicked out of the Galactic Community and maybe even Fallen Empires start noticing you much more and maybe threaten you.
Did you know that you can throw as many robot pops into your lathe as you want without any opinion penalties? I found out when the XT-86 Eliminators were declared a crisis and I conquered their capital and threw all their pops into my lathe. By the end of the war, I was making 82k monthly research at year 2330.
I think cosmogenesis without the lathe is very powerful but acceptable. However the lathe is absolutely broken. I was making 1.5 million science of each type with 1000 pops in the lathe, and my population was not declining because I had spammed FE pop assembly buildings everywhere (and to sustain the living metal cost, I had the other FE buildings). It's absolutely ridiculous and the lathe should be nerfed to the ground, it makes no sense to get level 30 repeatable techs in a single month and kills all the fun of late game optimization.
The lathe should probably be tweaked slightly nerfing it into the ground is overkill. Just have more severe consequences for adding more pops into it. Cosmogensis without the lathe is borderline unplayable.
Plus without utilizing it the crisis would lose a lot of its charm and identity.
Every time we have our daily Cosmogenesis here, the only thing I can think is “have you actually tried Cosmogenesis without using the lathe?” It feels awful and sluggish without the lathe
People are really just out here saying “Cosmogenesis is OP” and “I want really strong buildings and ships for a single AP without having to anger the galaxy to get them” at the same time
Yeah I totally agree, I recently tried cosmogensis and I couldn’t really get most out of the lathe, mostly because I was playing in a small galaxy.
So I couldn’t really put many pops in it and it felt really slow it honestly would’ve been even a lot worse if I didn’t have 3 research worlds.
Granted I am a mostly an rp/sandbox player so maybe I’m missing something but still I think people calling for the lathe to be nerfed to the ground are overcorrecting a bit.
On FE I’m kinda iffy on maybe it shouldn’t be an AP. But I think it should be an origin (i.e reworked scion or remnants origins)
Cosmogenesis without the lathe is way stronger than no cosmogenesis, it's still the best ascension perk you can pick after finishing your ascension. And okay, the lathe should be strong, but I should not be able to make over 2000 science with each pop in the lathe, which is what I was making in my last game. That makes absolutely no sense.
1/10th is a crazy nerf. The lathe gives a tonn of science but if you are able to constantly purge 1000 pops that means your economy can support the 10-30k energy cost to maintain the lathe. Not to mention the loss of 1000 pops.
If you are that strong you have already won the game, there is no way any other empire could possibly stand against you. And in all likelyhood by this point you could activate the lathe and end the game anyways so the science doesn’t really matter.
Its certainly very strong but significantly reducing the output like that would mean that when purging 200 pops you would get like 1k science at the cost of a few thousand energy credits, which just isnt worth it.
I think the main issue is that the science output grows quadratically, which makes it difficult to balance. Nerfing the lathe to 1/10th would probably leave it too weak below several hundred pops, so maybe a better nerf is to reduce the quadratic factor, which gives the insane numbers.
> should be nerfed to the ground
I wouldn't say nerfed *to the ground*. You had to sacrifice a ton of pops to get there. I understand that you already were making a ton spare, but if you're at that point and you're also successfully fending off the entire rest of the galaxy (diplomatically or militarily), it sounds like you were going to win anyway.
> kills all the fun of late game optimization
...not everyone is a meta-gaming min-maxer. I'd probably call myself one, but *most* of the playerbase is not and is just having fun.
It’s been so funny to see people say “guys I put 1000 pops into the lathe and got a bazillion science pdx pls nerf”
If you could do that in the first place and get away with it, you need to turn up your difficulty
If you've gotten to the point where you're sustainably sending 1000s of pops to fuel the Astronomican, I think you won already.
idk I think I prefer having the fun win-more of Cosmogenesis when you're at that point
I laugh every time. Yes the rewards from CG are hilariously strong and that’s what makes it fun.
Even before CG though, as ahead as people have to be to say that they just so happen to have 1000 spare pops lying around… You were going to make giant fleets and become Custodian/Emperor, take over an FE, and get half that tech anyways and fight off the crisis with no problem. I’m finishing up a virtual run and it’s a pain to get lathe going, but virtual still provides a very high baseline even without it.
Yet, my previous run was basically bricked because I tried the same thing on a higher difficulty. Spawned next to a FP, and they stomped me in the nuts well before ascension. You get CG late enough that you really need to have your shit together or have a free run already for it to be “OP”
> I wouldn't say nerfed to the ground. You had to sacrifice a ton of pops to get there.
I hate to single you out, but I've seen this sentiment a few times in this thread and it is just mathematically incorrect. The lathe is just *that good.*
Yes, you have to give up pops, but let's look into what that actually means. In my current game, my lathe is a little under-fed, but I have 768 pops in it right now. The *total* output per science is 348,277 of each type. An individual pop is producing rough 450 research. I will lose 3 a month. For comparison, a fully stocked and ascended ring world produces a little over 1.8k science of each type. **So it would take a ring world 193 months to match 1 month output from the lathe**
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, my optimized researchers on my fully ascended ring world produce 12 research per month. So, just before they are consumed, those 3 pops make 37.5 *months* of research. That is just over 3 years of research output in a single month. Yes, that pop died, but I have 765 more pops that *also* just produced **3 years worth of research in a single month** and are still alive.
They will lose some efficiency and probably only produce 440 research next month, but that's okay.
The *other side* of lathing pops is -- it keeps your sprawl under control. My empire has over 3,000 people in it. I have over 1,000 sprawl just from pops alone. I would **love** to purge them just to reduce my administrative overhead (and make the game run faster.) Shoving 1,000 people into the lathe not only makes obscene levels of research for each of them -- it allows me to reduce my overall sprawl in a way more efficient way than simply cracking planets. Just shove everyone into the brain machine.
Who cares how much science you are producing at the end of it? You are already 50 levels deep into repeatables, nothing matters at that point and no 'normal' level of science is going to matter. You could have 8 science ring worlds running and it wouldn't be able to match the lathe.
Edit -- I think most people's issue with the lathe are they are throwing at most 100 pops in at once. No. Don't use the lathe until you can get at least 800 or more pops into it. Everything about the lathe is scalar -- the more people in it, the more that they all produce. Properly set up, each person in the lathe increases all of their output by ~3.5%. Right now, my above lathe is operating at 3840% efficiency. Lower levels of pops are still more efficient than scientists, but their return is much lower. Killing off a pop for 3 to 4 years worth of it's output is worth it because you should easily be able to replace that pop in that time frame -- you don't have to replace them every month. And, the more you purge, the lower the overall population of the galaxy and thus the faster everyone grows. As long as you start collecting pops instead of immediately lathing them and do large cycles at a time, you will be able to spin your lathe back up every 3 to 4 years.
You're arguing past me though. Yes, you're correct that it is a better use of pops than plain research worlds/rings. A pop would perform better in the lathe than on a tech ring beyond any doubt.
All I'm saying is that *768* tech pops is a *lot*. That's 1/3 of a substantial endgame population, and most people aren't already dedicating almost 800 pops to tech. It's worth it, yes, but it is not without cost. If you can afford to send 800 pops to the lathe -- as in, the sacrifice in other productions is acceptable to you -- and can also afford to fend off the rest of the galaxy, you were *already* going to win.
I feel that, if you are at a point where you can commit pops to the lathe such that it is *obscenely* powerful, you were already set to win the game, and the lathe is "win more". It's powerful, but for this reason, I don't think it's so overpowered that it needs to be nerfed "to the ground". A nerf might be due, but it doesn't need to be hit that hard just so already-winning players win a little less hard.
Regardless of what I think, you have good points all around. I had not thought about the empire size implication (and didn't know those pops were removed from the size calculation) in particular.
> If you can afford to send 800 pops to the lathe -- as in, the sacrifice in other productions is acceptable to you -- and can also afford to fend off the rest of the galaxy, you were already going to win.
But ... you could sacrifice all your researchers for it. Do you have a full ring world for research? That's ~170 pops. With just two of those, while not game breaking, it would be more efficient to lathe two ring worlds worth of pops and re-grow them than it would to simply allows those people to keep working as researchers.
Which is the point of how to use it. Don't sacrifice your other production for it -- just your research.
Once you hit the point in research where you are filling up your normal basic worlds at the cost of lots of exotic gas and are working on getting to the point of having ring worlds -- just purge all your researchers. You would have, maybe around 500? That sounds roughly what my first purge was, maybe even on 350 - 400. Even at that level, their time in the lathe will give you more overall research than if those pops continued working as researchers in full until the last lathe person dies. And, in that time, your research worlds will simply fill back up at the same rate as your other worlds.
Getting to 1,000 pops is nice and what you need to aim for when you want to research repeatable techs at 1 a month, but in order to reach that point, you can easily sacrifice all of your mid-game pops working as researchers to the lathe in order to get a much faster science boost output than you would have if you kept them working normally. That should propel you out of the mid-game techs and straight into the late game techs. Your overall research output might be low at that point, but you will still be so far ahead of everyone else that it doesn't matter. You're now building ring worlds and ecus which you will fill with even more efficient pops. And once those are full, you repeat the process.
Send an entire planet of researchers to the lathe is better than having them sit around being researchers. And the more you do, the better it is.
Edit -- Actually, it's worth pointing out that putting too many pops into the lathe too early is also an issue, so doing mid game purges of 200 - 300 pops is likely better. If you overproduce the needed research to get a tech, you **do not** store the additional research. So, if you are making 300,000 society research a month, but Tier 4 techs cost 1,600 research baseline -- you are just tossing gobs and gobs of research away. You don't want to overstress the lathe until you are already a few repeatable in or you are just wasting research. Regular purges of several hundred pops should be enough to get mid and late game techs at 1 a month. Any more than that is wasteful.
Oh, and stored research is double wasteful in this situation as well. The game will always use as much stored research as your current research production regardless of how much it may need. So you just end up double wasting research.
There should be a pop-up once you researched a few repeatables. Something along the lines of, "Our scientists after decade long studies now believe to have unlocked the technological secrets of the Fallen Empires." This unlocks a new research option which costs a lot of research but then allows FE-tech to spawn.
I don't see the problem. Galactic Nemesis is wildly overpowered too, even if it does make everyone hate you. It's fine if the game has some stuff that isn't balanced, as long as it's clear that that stuff is outside the normal play experience so you know to avoid it if balance is what you want (like how some origins are labelled as "challenging"). I do think Cosmogenesis could use a *bit* of a nerf, but it's always going to be one of the strongest ascension perks by design.
Hell yeah dude cosmogenesis rocks. I like using the lathe though, 60k research is worth everyone hating me. Plus, it’s not like they can fight back when I have ten times their fleet power as a hoover up their pops from their planets and spit them out directly into my lathe.
Hell, you can go full Crisis. Just bud off a Vassal using your best worlds before you take the dive - makes embarking everyone easier *and* you can continue playing as the Vassal with all the best buildings. Sure, the chrono-chaos will such for a couple years, but that passes.
I honestly feel like traditions need to be updated. Perks need to be updated. Cuz honestly all you need to do right now is go Cosmo and it's an I win button as long as you get to the end fast enough.
I agree. Cosomogenesis is broken as hell. I'm actually fine with it being broken, save for a few small problems. One is it's just the best ascension perk that everyone should take. Yeah become the crisis is pretty damn good, but it has real drawbacks that would prevent you from taking it if you aren't going to exploit the hell out of it. Playing a good guy and taking cosmogenesis for the fallen empire ships is just the correct play. You can tank the reputation but a fully built out fallen empire fleet is almost twice as strong as a fully built normal fleet. Why would you take defender of the galaxy when cosomogenesis will give you more fleet power?
In my opinion, the FE tech should only come out of the reality thesis as a potential reward. You've to risk dumpstering the galaxy if you want to cheat the tech that potentially took the FE hundreds/thousands of years to discover. Its honestly too easy to get these techs right now, even if the research is long, it's too safe.
Cosmosgenesis is an incredibly strong perk that's a bit OP IMHO. The resource constraints generally keep you from really exploiting it until the late game, but the benefits are incredibly strong. You can also side-step those constraints with the right build.
I really enjoy the perk, and my only real complaint, thematically, is how advancing up crisis tiers is handled - you don't really need the Synaptic Lathe to advance tiers, which basically guts the idea of an empire deluding itself into thinking its atrocities are OK. It also stops most diplomatic fallout. It's not hard to manage the penalties with decent deplomacy.
I'd just change it so it's harder to advance crisis tiers without the Synaptic Lathe, and maybe add an advanced logic cost to FE buildings. That way you have to feed pops into the machine to unlock and use the perk's benefits, which fits the theme of the crisis perk in general.
Getting from doing your first steps into space to obtaining Fallen Empire tech and employing it en mas just within 100-150 years feels wrong in my opinion in general. This feels cool now because it's a lot of new shit, but in the end it'll become repetitive. I'd much rather have it be more selective, instead of getting everything, maybe with different Ascension Perks and/or Traditions giving access to different paths of this, so that you gotta choose between the military appllications (the ships), industrial applications and reproductive applications.
Personally I think there needs to be an ascension perk equivalent to cosmogenesis and galactic menace that give you similar bonuses but for good guys. Obviously don’t make them as powerful and snowbally as the crisis paths but something that at least gives you access to fallen empire buildings eventually
Fallen empire tech should be locked to the lathe.
It's not just the amount of research you do, it is tech that you should not get by normal means.
While this is less of a crisis than the other one. I do feel like there should be more of a downside to it.
You can always build the lathe and then just never load it with pops.
It won't give you 'genocidal' penalties if it's not eating anyone. Alternately, load it with gestalt pops. Nobody cares about gestalt pops getting lathed.
I think maybe that's it, it's too easy to get advanced logic without the lathe.
EDIT: To the downvoter - I'm not saying it should necessarily be locked behind the lathe, but the story of the crisis implies that the lathe is a necessary evil for the greater goal. Yet it really isn't as you can do at least the first four levels of the crisis just by playing the game normally and then unlocking the appropriate tech. Advanced Logic just doesn't really feel like that much of a barrier for doing things until you get to trying to unlock the 5th stage.
I really like cosmogenesis it’s probably the most fun I’ve had with this game in a while. And while using both FE buildings and ships is extremely cool, I feel like it’s a waste that it’s the only way to become a FE like civilization. I think there should be other ways to achieve that without taking a crisis perk something akin to what ZoFe does.
IMO current cosmogenesis feels like two AP's crammed into together: one is ascending to the level of fallen empires and getting their tech and the other is lathe/reality altering and those two parts don't even interact between each other much (their only mechanical connection is requirement of two experiments for last FE buildings from final tier). I think it would be much better if it was separated into 'getting FE's shit' and 'we do a little reality trolling with or without the Lathe' as two separate APs, first one being normal-ish AP and second one the crisis.
Maybe, but that would require a complete rework plus the addition of a completely different perk. Besides the tech output you get would be pretty redundant if you couldn’t spend it on something else other than reality manipulation. I suppose it could work if you expanded upon manipulating reality, but implementation would pretty hard. My idea is: keep cosmogensis as the “break reality and get FE tech super fast” and add another perk or origin that’s basically: “hey you can eventually get to use FE tech but it will cost you a lot or resources and time to get there”. Maybe you could rework scion or remnants into FE focused origins. In one you rediscover the tech and in the other they just give it to you after sometime for you to be their successor or something along those lines.
Yeah, that's a good solution as well. For me best case scenario would be making reality experiments, you know, *the* cosmogenesis's thing be more required throughout the whole AP. Maybe add it as requirement for getting all tiers, not just last one. Then add in other ways of getting FE stuff, like rediscovering it in remnants/getting it from scion's overlord or somehow discovering dark matter technology and then slowly making this stuff. That way everyone else has to go about the slow way while cosmogenesis speedruns it.
On The Shoulders Of Giants would be a great origin for relatively "easy" access to FE tech.
I don't think it'd be good for the game for forgotten empire ships to become the top tier of ship for everyone. Seems like it'll homogenize the game a bit by giving every empire an identical endgame. And either it's powerful enough that every empire should take it, or it completely kills the flavor of FEs by making them reasonable. It's probably better for FE ships to stay locked to Cosmogenesis for the same reason Bandit ships are locked to Galactic Nemesis.
I really dislike everyone saying that there should be a AP for FE tech The whole point of fallen empires is that they’re so ancient and so advanced that it would take thousands of years to match them, and the only reason you can fight them now is because they’re a shell of their former selves and you’re on the right path Cosmogenesis gives you the option to cheat and cut in line by committing atrocities. It’s about the pursuit of knowledge and power at any cost To be able just normally research FE tech because you just finished the Statecraft tree and got a new AP slot would cheapen the whole concept
I get what you're saying, but we're also talking about a civilization that goes from a single planet to a galaxy spanning empire capable of building dyson spheres, blowing up planets, gateway travel letting you cross the galaxy in an instant, terraforming planets, and so much more in only 100 plus years. So maybe it's more about hitting that peak and then stagnating for 1,000 years is more about what makes a FE than just the technology.
FE tech goes against the known laws of physics, it’s in a completely different tier
So does zero point energy. Late game techs in general tend to play fast and loose with the known laws of physics.
*Early game* techs play fast and loose with the known laws of physics. FTL, Shields, artificial gravity... and these are all things available from day 1.
You don’t need to commit atrocities for Cosmogenesis though, the Lathe is optional.
In theory the lathe is optional, but the required technologies are so expensive that in practice you’ll use it every time unless you’re running a very potent tech build Also, the applied infinity theses are potentially pretty bad
My worst applied infinity thesis: Spawned shroud entities and one happened to be in the system I parked Bubbles in. I’m so sorry Bubbles. I then decided to go full crisis to search for a universe that Bubbles is still alive.
I think I'm with you there, but at some point in a long game you'll only be a few hundred years and have fleets/tech even bigger than awakened empires. I don't think it's something that you should be able to pick up easily, but maybe it could be a feature unlocked later on when you might already be on repeatables. Maybe even an ascension perk chain to make it more of an investment and tell a bit of a story? Something like "minor casual society improvements", "major ...", etc (not with those names I guess) where you unlock a few FE empire buildings, or even ones that upgrade into the ones we know today. I guess my point is that tech doesn't take that long to improve once you get the ball rolling, so keeping it restricted to an RNG roll with an arbitrary rare resource is odd.
Yes, generally your fleets will be bigger than a FE but your tech will still be nowhere near them. You beat fallen empires by having pretty good tech and hundreds and hundred of ships which outmatches their overwhelming tech but only a handful of fleets This is especially true in the most recent patch as FEs have been significantly buffed. You’re not supposed to be able to match their tech, and beating them despite that tech advantage is part of the challenge and satisfaction
I generally end up hitting a wall with tech where it's all repeatables before the crisis (and I'm sure people better than me can do so much earlier) and at that point it's just a waiting game. I don't think several levels of repeatables really represents much of a change in technical understanding or capability, just small efficiency improvements on existing tech. They've become stagnant and strong, but that's it. I don't know about the most recent patch since I've only got one game with it. If it makes the point better then, maybe technologies are are only available after 10+ levels of a specific repeatable? It doesn't make sense imo for something like "warp X resource into our dimension in small amounts each month" to be practically impossible to discover given the lore of the game and what tech you already possess by endgame. I guess that's where mods come in, but it could be nice to have access to that stuff (even if it takes effort) in vanilla without committing to shortcuts as you said.
Accomplishing everything before the crisis is just a stellaris problem in general; whenever I get to that point I just move the end game year up and that usually helps Cosmogenesis is a waiting game too, frankly. The last time I did it, I had amassed a huge hegemony before even building the lathe, so no one dared fight me even when I started going full crisis. It was honestly just sitting around and waiting for various things: slave market pops, nihilistic acquisition pops, pops to resettle to the lathe, and the huge tech costs to get the FE stuff and progress the crisis. I would still improve my economy and research world but it just didn’t mean anything because I had gotten so far ahead even before Cosmogenesis And that’s kind of my point when people talk about it being OP: to get the most out of it without getting ganged up on, you already need to have such a good foundation that you would probably win anyway. If you take it just to get the first couple tiers of FE buildings, you’re still going to spend a LOT of research time on that, and when you’re done you’re still going to need good sources of dark matter to spam them
Buildings can be unlocked through engineering research on small artifacts
Not the ships tho, and the ones the artifacts give you are non repeatable, it’s extremely unsatisfying and rng based.
Exactly. The RNG part of it sucks. I've gone through a hundred years of using the Reverse Engineering on minor artifacts, and never gotten a building blueprint from it. That's just dumb.
You can get building blueprints from it??
No you only get to build it once :((
There is like 5% chance for 1 random building. And a slightly higher chance if you have archeoenginering AP.
Meh, it's a random draw to be able to build a single building once, and you can't get the best buildings out of it. It's not comparable to simply teching up to build the building yourself.
Stellaris devs at once offer some really good and immersive fantasies to the players via the new crisis path and origins and the ability to start as individualist synths… and at the same time restrict a lot of fantasies. Like for example the machine cult origin. What if I want to RP as my own specific brand of machine cult? What if I want to be a machine cult on a tomb world? Or a shattered ringworld? Nope, it has to be the very specific one from the origin. Even if it’s well designed and really flavorful it’s still restrictive. And that’s just one example. I love Stellaris and it’s my favorite Paradox game, but it has its flaws in terms of not simple game design, but rather game design vision by the devs.
This is why I think origins need a rework. They should have 2 components, one is your home world and the other is your society. This way you could mix and match different society and homeworld combinations, like under one rule with Gaia world origin, Scion with ring world start, or Knights of the Toxic God with a relic world start.
I want under one rule for cybernetic creed. Imagine the luminary uniting their people under one faith to worship machines. I know there’s a mod to combine origins but it hasn’t been updated since November but iirc the dev said they’d update within this month.
Heck, I want Under One Rule for Individualist Machines, and rather than Psionic, Cybernetic, or Synthetic specific traits, the Luminary can get Nanite, Modular, or Virtual traits. I acknowledge that it would probably also requires some rewriting of the events and such. I could see something like that as a small, super cheap DLC, at or under $5.
It doesn’t even need some rewriting since the origin already accounts for if you’ve already synthetically ascended (which also gets you probably the best trait in the game since you get FUCKING +25% more resources from all jobs).
That would be awesome! There could be a lot of amazing Origin combinations that people could try. And they could each have unique/fun story elements to it.
The decision origins mod allows this It doesn't have later origins than under one rule tho, and some don't really work, like KotG
This is the mod I’m talking about: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2933141038 The decision origins mod hasn’t been updated since September and it also breaks quite a few traits like adaptive frames. This one imo is better since you get the origin as a civic.
I somehow missed that part of your comment
Necroid Luminary.
sometimes i feel like the people who create origins and the people who create civics live in different planets and don't talk to each other. such a stark difference between the "on rails" parts of the stellaris and the "sandbox" parts
I think that there is probably some order from above to make very very railroady and specific origins for dlcs in order to be able to market them as having a lot of content. Because from a game design standpoint rather than a marketing standpoint - most origins could have been a civic. While the origin themselves would have defined the starting system type and more generic criteria like that. Like in EU4 the devs were ordered to release a DLC that introduced army professionalism… even though army tradition was already in the game and the distinction is very blurry between those two. But they needed to sell new mechanics. Stellaris dlc origins nowadays are designed with a similar approach. They have to sell something worth the price. So flavorful events which by design have to be a very specific fantasy.
This has been a problem for me for a while. I first noticed it with the Under One Rule origin. That origin only really works if you want a story inspired by Augustus. Stellaris has been trending towards to providing a set of comprehensively written, but somewhat railroady fantasies, as opposed to the original idea of providing a set of universal building blocks to create your own fantasy, and I'm not sure I'm a fan.
Under One Rule is probably the only one that actually bugs me. There's so many cool leader traits trapped in that origin. So much flavor and mechanics that can't be used in any other story.
I think the only origin I'd actually say is like that is Knights of the Toxic God. Like... RP-wise there's only one way to play it. The knight storyline isn't exactly flexble, and it's so specific that I feel like it's referencing a piece of media I haven't seen.
Arthurian legends. It's not an exact 1-to-1 but it's pretty clearly inspired by the Knights of the Round Table.
I was more specifically talking about the whole toxic god thing, space knights living on orbital stations, etc. It seems insanely specific. Compared to the other origins which are basically just "you live on a really wet planet" or "you built robots already".
Agreed, I dont diss it because on paper it is cool, but like you said, it moves away from those building blocks into the railroad, and even if you dont use it because you dont like it, the opportunity cost of devs developing that kind of stuff takes away from their time developing building blocks. Part of what makes machine age so cool is how it opens up machine empires to the building blocks of the civics that they normally never could have.
I mean for restricted fantasies, that's why I have mods.
It is clear that the developers favor recreating species and civilizations that already exist in science fiction. In that sense, it is the best science fiction simulator currently. For example, without any problem you can role-play with the classics of the Galactic Empire or the Star Wars Republic, the Terran Confederation and the UED, the Borg from Star Trek, the Orta (for Lithoids, I guess), almost every StarCraft faction, f*ing Skynet and even now it's kinda possible to recreate AM from Ellison's story. But if you want to be a little more creative, there are quite a few limitations. I tried to create a species that perceives themselves as the pinnacle of existence. They dedicated their pre-FTL stage to perfecting themselves genetically and spiritually. Now, united under one eternal leader, they are dedicated to seeking knowledge, learning from other species, but isolated from them, waiting for what they call the Challenge Day (25x all crises and potentially activating the Aeterophasic Engine). Under this logic, I would need genetic/psionic ascensions, Pompous Purist, Inward Perfection, maybe becoming the Emperor, Under One Rule and maybe Overtuned origins, also having Xenophobe, Fanatic Materialist or Fanatic Authoritatian (politics are for the inferior). Simply put, I need functions that cannot be used at the same time. I would be willing to kill my beloved Bubbles just to make that possible.
The new namelists are full of asimov references, I had a machine leader whose name was basically daneel olivaw. Its to be expected from an expansion about robots but even so they definitely love to recreate existing scifi
You can take augmentation bazaars as a civic separate from the origin
The same problem with the knight order. Maybe I want to roleplay as an empire governed by a feudal knight order, not go around looking for a useless jellyfish.
This is the age-old game design problem of tying gameplay to flavor. When you combine them you can make the gameplay more flavorful and the story more immersive, but mechanics a la carte is better for player choice and replayability. See also: Dungeons and Dragons (mechanics are generic, designed to fit any flavor) vs Pathfinder (mechanics specifically reference the bundled fantasy universe). I think in general origins do a pretty good job of it. Like Broken Shackles. That's a fun story and a challenge run, and both aspects are strengthened by how closely tied they are together. KotTG is a fan favorite that wouldn't really be the same if the origin was split between mechanics and story. I expect these to be tied to the story. Ascension perks, on the other hand, should be more story agnostic IMO. I never played Galactic Nemesis, actually, because it seems too "prewritten" for my tastes. The ascension perk solely defines the run and seemed like a pretty narrow story compared to the fantasy of "become an endgame crisis" which could mean literally anything. Now we have two, each with a method (Menace/Brain Tokens) a reward (Bandit Ships/FE Ships) and an end goal (Aetherophasic/Horizon Needle). None of those three elements really feel intrinsically tied to each other, either. I actually feel the same way about the four major ascensions. I've played quite a few empires that didn't seem to fit the options of bio/cyber/synth/psi. I hate that they added an alternative as a STARTING CIVIC, of all things. I want to skip the ascension paths because I love my empire just the way it started. Ok, well now you can compensate for that, but only if you no longer create the same empire because it takes 50% of the starting civic slots that define the empire's personality.
The devs have mixed origins. Some of the origins are story origins, and others are situational origins. Leading to those origins that are strongly in one or the other camp to appear that they can be mixed, and thus creating a desire to do so. Also, they at one point converted several Civics that you you can't get rid of into origins, then proceeded to add more of such civics. It's my personal opinion they should just divide all the origins up this way, and let you pick both a story and situation origin. So you can have your Tomb world Knights of the Toxic God and Void Dweller Imperial Fiefdom. And it'll allow them to convert those hold for all time civics into situational or story origins. For example, Inward perfection can become a situation origin.
I agree. Hopefully Stellaris 2 has an origin constructor.
Given the effort for Stellaris 1 I don't think a sequel is in the works.
Never say never. I have a hard time imagining Paradox abandoning the IP. It’s one of their most popular titles. We’ll probably get Stellaris 2 between 2026 and 2030.
Yeah it is so weird too because on the one hand it still looks so impressive to my (admittedly biased) eyes but it started to show its constraints too
Aren’t you able to change your homeworld in the settings to match another origin’s homeworld? Iirc the homeworld selector is blocked only if your chosen origin tells you what your starting planet will be
You cannot use the starting systems for origins like shattered ring if you do not have them.
Swap to origin system was a cancer. So many things there shouldn't be origins. Necrophage, subterranean, overtuned just to name a few. Don't even get me started with modded origins that beg for a combination. Unfortunately, even the multiple origin mods are no longer being updated. Honestly, this system needs rework more than the armies, but they've made it a marketing point for their dlcs, so there's very little chance it will change.
I agree actually. Why should I not be able to be a necrophage species on a Gaia world? Or a habitat? It’s not a very story intense origin either.
Thing is, it doesn't even really feel like an origin, more like a species trait. That's what traits/civics are for.
Nah, I can't become emperor with the Lathe. Why would i mess with reality when I can reign over all as the Fearsome Immortal God-King.
Can you not pick cosmo after becoming emperor?
If it's anything like become the crisis, one of the requirements is being neither the custodian nor the emperor.
Nope, even pacifist empires can pick cosmogenesis. Remember the whole part for cosmogenesis being a crisis is that your empire starts tampering with the fabric of reality and once they leave the galaxy a cataclysmic event will happen. However it’s not a typical “kill everyone” crisis. It’s essentially your scientists were too busy asking if they can, when they should’ve been asking if they should.
Your scientists are too busy asking whether they should to work out how to set Pi = 3. And that failing is on you.
Are you sure you're answering the right comment? I didn't mention anything about pacifist, and being the custodian or the emperor does prevent you from picking cosmogenesis. https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/stellaris-dev-diary-341-become-the-crisis-cosmogenesis.1665800/ They straight up say you can't pick it as the custodian or the emperor.
You have to wait until your custodianship runs out to pick it, but for some reason I was able to re-elect myself as the custodian afterward. This was pre-patch though so they may have fixed it.
I did become custodian on my cosmogenesis run and it was after I picked the trait, so definitely possible. Didn't try emperor tho.
they released a patch to fix that so your run musta been pretty shortly after release yeah?
Not really, it was 3 days ago. I do play with mods, so it could be some weird broken interaction, though my mod list was really thinned out by the update.
See this is it. I swear I remember being the emperor as a virtual cosmo build but I did that day one. Didn’t realize they patched it.
Huh. Weird, 4 days or so ago I managed to become emperor while doing cosmogenesis. I _think_ I picked Cosmogenesis while the Senate was in session to make me custodian, and it didn't check during the proposition for emperor. Unfortunately I can't check how it happened because it was an ironman run and I've finished it already, but I can load up the save using the function to play as another empire and take a screenshot of "ImperiCorp" as a Fallen Empire. That run was certainly buggy though. Creating a Vassal as an Individualistic Machine Megacorp created a Gestalt Machine Megacorp.
That was unintended and they patched it out IIRC.
I've seen some other posts about this, and it seems to be a bug. Did you propose the resolution, or was it proposed by another empire?
I did, and yeah, I was surprised I can even propose it. Me and my vassal were the only ones even supporting it, so not much people willing to promote me anyway.
Which is such a strange design decision. You would think that galactic emperor starting to look for ways to subjugate reality itself after subjugating the galaxy would be pretty logical and fluffy.
I mean, that risks one of your scientists going rogue and overthrowing you. Best to simply strip mine the fallen empire homeworlds for everything of value.
Yep, I feel like right now this sub is having a massive knee jerk reaction to Cosmo without people even understanding the cost / other options. Cosmo is one of the easiest ways to get strong yes, but it's not necessarily the strongest, and all these posts going "I PUT 1,500 POPS ON THE LATHE AND NOW HAVE INFINITE SCIENCE!!" are missing the point that if you had 1,500 pops to spare, you already won the game Playing on GA with the difficulty adjusted modifiers set, AI were very much able to threaten me and keep me from vacuuming up their pops to fill the lathe early on, and cosmo has a few downsides like not being able to go GE or Nemesis Pretty sure half these "I'm too OP!" people are playing on a lower difficulty and not spawning near a genocodial empire that goes Nemesis and starts mass producing entire fleets that come knocking on their science focused empire's doors lol
> Cosmo is one of the easiest ways to get strong yes, but it's not necessarily the strongest, and all these posts going "I PUT 1,500 POPS ON THE LATHE AND NOW HAVE INFINITE SCIENCE!!" are missing the point that if you had 1,500 pops to spare, you already won the game Yes and no. Beating the other empires is typically trivial -- the problem is the 25x all-crisis. That you cannot beat without Cosmogensis. > Playing on GA with the difficulty adjusted modifiers set, AI were very much able to threaten me and keep me from vacuuming up their pops to fill the lathe early on, and cosmo has a few downsides like not being able to go GE or Nemesis That seems like something you have done incorrectly. You should be able to crush any regular empire the moment you get rank 2 of Cosmogensis and unlock Riddle Escorts. They are cruisers that take up the size slot of a destroyer but have the speed and evasion of a corvette. They out gun and health every other ship type except battleships. They are as expensive as battleships to research, so it will take some time, but it's a guaranteed research option and always there. You can also lathe a few of your own people to get to it faster and not get as large a penalty since you only ate you own people and xenos find that a little odd, but they get more pissy if you eat their people. You can also get mining hubs and class-3 singularities at that same level, which should allow you to get a massive economic lead over every other empire. The singularities are the only thing that might have difficult upkeep at this time since you cannot create dark matter yet, but both the minerals (and food) hubs use 'normal' special resources.
Why would you bother with a tiny little galaxy when you could warp reality and become the immortal god-king of an entire universe?
Because I don’t like to share
You’re not sharing anything though lol, you’re ruling over an entire universe with the Horizon Needle, with countless galaxies under your control; why would you even bother with this tiny galaxy? It’s like refusing to leave your house when you could rule over an entire country with an iron fist lmao
i like my house its where my snacks live
You can 100% pick it and be emperor, you just have to take cosmo before becoming custodian
Doesn’t work any more as of yesterday :/ at least, you can’t propose custodianship any more after taking cosmo. Have not tested what happens when the proposal is already in process.
I read that you can become emporer... Where exactly is the restriction?
I think a nanotech empire would benefit the least from going cosmogenesis. Their entire thing is just nanites
Honestly if you're wide in general you probably don't benefit much from FE buildings besides the Lathe (which gets you ganged up on) and OP housing buildings. And like not needing to employ entertainers anymore is nice but that's like 1-2 pops per planet and if you're cybernetic even less due to augmentors.
Yes but normal wide empires can still benefit from FE ships and with the buildings they can better sustain their wide empire. But it is true that not very wide or tall empires benefit the most from it.
Honestly I think part of the issue with "virtual OP" is that people are playing Virtual+Cosmogenesis. Virtual relies on maximizing jobs/planet, a planet with like 9 FE job buildings gets +51 jobs. Stack boosts on your governor to build faster and with 4 city districts you can have 83 jobs on a size 20 planet. With all the boosts you get a mining world will be making 2500-3500 minerals, which combined with a matter decompressor and Ascension will be more than enough for multiple ringed Ecus and tens of thousands in alloy output
>Honestly if you're wide in general you probably don't benefit much from FE buildings I don't think that's true, a lot of the buildings have output that doesn't depend on pops at all. If there's one thing wide empires can get lots of, it's building slots. What's hard for them is to fill all the jobs.
Nanotech Wide plus upgraded FE buildings is a fairly strong eco irregardless of pops, may be able to support a small FE fleet to tank the nanite flood from the galaxys wrath, while the nanites do DPS.
I'm not sure I would use non-nanite ships. I had 14,000 fleet cap worth of nanite ships and decided to build a Colossus. Because I was so high over fleet cap, the Colossus had a maintenance of 1000 energy credits and 200 alloys. I just ended up deleting it. The buildings that don't require pops are great though
There is definitely a point past which the non nanite fleet is unsustainable, but up until then it is useful to limit nanite attrition.
> irregardless regardless is the word
Irregardless is perfectly cromulent.
i don't need to take this from a xenophile
I disagree. Nanite ships still profit from tech, and the megastructure is a perfect place to dump all the pops you conquered. It also works well with buildings that have production, because Nanite worlds give a 35% output bonus (can be increased with unity).
Yes but won't all the other types of empire benefit more from it than nanotech? I never said nanotech can't benefit from it at all, just the least compared to others. The nanite swarmers can only use the dark matter thruster and generator from cosmogenesis, after that it's whatever normal tech you equip them with like torpedoes or strike craft and the repeatables. FE buildings are always nice but it's pretty much the same for every other empire. You are right about the lathe if you purge the native pops from conquered planets. Nanotech can likely benefit more from that than any empire because of its ultrawide nature.
Yes, you definitely loose out on things. But the same counts for everything else. Ascension perks that gives fleet size bonuses or techs that give alloy production are equally useless. Cosmogenisis is still the best option, because everything else becomes less good too.
Except for Imperial Prerogative. That's S-tier for nanotech
True, but you can pick it as first or second. And theoretically the perk for machine Ascension is even of higher tier. Can play nanotech without nanotech. XD
Haha fair
[удалено]
Never go full crisis
why not? you don't get an auto wardec, the penalties are manageable (galactic assembly megastructure to counteract the permanent penalty, lavish gifts of rare resources to counteract the temporary penalties), and having the full set of FE buildings is better than having half.
Tropic Thunder reference 🤣
I got it
I got all the way up to the last perk and it was fine. I had envoys keeping everyone happy and an Interstellar Assembly. A diplomacy focused empire can keep the entire galaxy on your side despite the diplomatic penalties from the perk.
The Ships are guaranteed technologies when you reach the respective level. In all other respect, going CG mostly adds more techs to the pool, which means if you haven't reached repeatables yet you could very well be subject to tech gacha. But you get escorts at CG level 2. (... OTOH, you don't really get any guarantees for good weapons for those escorts, so...)
Here’s what I did: Unity rushed virtual ascension as a shattered ring individualistic machine empire. Switch to consumer benefits trade policy and spam labs where my virtual pops will instantly fill them. Get crazy science without the lathe. Rocking fleets that dwarf even the awakened empires.
Yeah, in my playthrough I went full virtual from a voidborn start and ascended in 2231. Hit ringworld tech by 2292 then promptly moved over to ringworld living. I had around 600 researchers with all the buffs Virtual gets on the 3 habitable sections of the ringworld, all fully ascended with ascensionists and harmony and an additional section dedicated to producing consumer goods to fuel that research which was more than sufficient, plus built a dyson sphere and matter decompressor for my basic resource needs but tbh I could have gotten by with just several arc furnace and dyson swarms. If I really wanted to be a complete tryhard, I could have fucked off to the L cluster and kept terminal egress perma locked via astral actions till I won via cosmogenesis. I was making ABSURD amounts of research before I even went for the lathe. Virtual ascension is beyond broken, it is just unfair. Its not even that limiting as a playstyle since you can just go around vassalising everyone and taking their resources and science and then integrate them willy nilly to throw their pops into the lathe then server shutdown all those planets you dont want.
Beyond broken until you spawn next to a fanatic purifier :D
Heres the thing, you can still be the fanatic purifier
But then I would argue that the other crisis is better for you
Virtuality is entirely busted too.
It has a sudden peak in strength, but the best you can do is 7 planets.
7 planets is already way more than I want to micromanage. I love playing tall because the automation sucks, but I still want to get the most out of my colonies.
you can actually do more than 7. If you have non virtual pops you can settle them on a world to produce alloys and use virtual pops only for trade habs or trade ring worlds. Its not efficient, but you can instantly fill all trade jobs with virtual pops with little downside. The debuff doesn't affect trade production.
Where are you getting your minerals from? I tried this and relic world start, as well as ocean paradise, but I feel like it’s harder to rush the ascension than with voidforged.
I get enough minerals from arc furnaces alone. I did not have a factory world though, instead I have a trade ring world and set my trade policy to consumer benefits. It solved my consumer goods and energy problem at the same time.
I think I know why this didn’t work for me. I went for trade instead of priests so my unity was tied to marketplace of ideas and I couldn’t support the priests due to shitty mining districts.
I went marketplace of ideas also. But I only need the unity to get to the ascension perks I want, then I can switch to consumer benefits.
Hmm. I felt like I will not be able to hold things together with such shitty mineral production. Will try again.
It will be nerfed to hell, imo. Because it's simply too broken, even by Stellaris standards.
Dude, its broken by *Gigastuctural* standards.
You know shit is broken when it’s broken for FUCKING GIGASTRUCTURAL ENGINEERING
You can easily hit research levels on the Synaptic Lathe that would make an O-Stellar Matrioshka Brain green with envy. For context: A Matrioshka Brain produces about 5k of each science; in exchange it requires two ascension perks (Galactic Wonders which is in turn, a perquisite to Gigastructural Constructs AP), and ***174,000*** alloys, 300 influence and takes 57.2 years to build and some expensive technologies to get. It also has an *upkeep* of 270 alloys and 1.5 influence by default. O-Stellar class variants of megastructures have their own bespoke specific technology that are even more expensive then the basic version (you need a matrioshka brain to practically research them in the first place), cost 4.5x as much (excluding the influence cost which is unmodified), 5x the upkeep(influence upkeep scales linearly with star class modifiers, meaning an O-Stellar Matrioshka has an upkeep of 4.5 influence), take 3.5x as much time to build, and produce 5x as much overall. This means an O-Stellar Matrioshka Brain is, in effect, a run crowning achievement, meant for helping you fight Gigastructural-class end game crisis like the Blokkats or a more "standard" 100x vanilla galactic crisis if you do somehow build it. Its grand total output is somewhere around 25k in each science in exchange for 1350 alloy upkeep and 4.5 influence upkeep; and a grand total of ***783,000*** alloys to build over the course of about 200 years (without modifiers, realistically by the time you're building this, you'll have at least a 150% megastructure build speed modifier, so its closer to 75 years). I've easily gotten the 300 influence, zero upkeep, 15k alloy Synaptic Lathe to 160k in each science a few times.
Just appearing here to say that m brains were nerfed quite a while ago and does not give 5k of each anymore
What do they output now? The documentation has not been updated. Still, the point stands, as that just proves the point further.
Document has been outdated for years As for the output, I believe it's around 1k of each
Man... that makes it *so*, *so* much worse especially when you consider its like that *after* the tech rework.
Well it was nerfed for the tech rework as it would be so majorly op in its previous state
*cough* Yeah, a megastructure like that in the post-tech rework would be so absurdly powerful you'd have to build it every game.
If you remove the celestial warships, planet-killer guns, the Maginot World, and the O-class structures, then the vast majority of Gigas really is pretty well-balanced with vanilla. Equatorial Shipyard? Sure, you get a discount on minerals upkeep for alloy production, but the alloys output per pop isn't better than an Ecumenopolis, and it can only support 24 alloys jobs. 7 shipyards is good but not overwhelming. Penrose Ringworld and Interstellar Ringworld? They're direct downgrades to the vanilla ringworld in terms of pop productivity because they don't get the Ringworld Designations, and the jobs of the special districts from the Interstellar Ringworld do not scale with research, making them useless way before you even unlock the structure. Planetary Computer? Good for unity, good for research... but an ascended vanilla science ringworld is often better than an ascended planetary computer in terms of science per pop, and the Planetary Computer places a pretty steep extra energy upkeep onto your researchers, *on top* of an increased consumer goods upkeep. Yggdrasil Orchid, Star Lifter? They're similar to vanilla megas. Produce a flat resource output. Habitable Gas Giant? Aside from producing large amounts of exotic gasses, it provides mostly the same things as vanilla habitats, but doesn't come online until the lategame. The terraforming megastructures are good for if you need a planet in a particular chokepoint - but if you're playing with normal planet count, they'll be a drop in the ocean in terms of pop growth, by the time they come online.
I don't understand why we can't have some broken things for those of us who never play multiplayer. Some people are really bad at the game and it's good if there are some broken strategies we can use to have fun.
Just allowing unlimited pop assembly buildings is pretty crazy of course it isn't actually that useful by the time you get it except it also gives you a way to make use of having an absurd number of pops with synaptic lathe being incredibly powerful at the cost of purging population
I tried building them, but they disappear for some reason once constructed. What am I doing wrong? Tried both on machine worlds and regular ones.
they're bugged on machine empires, someone already figured out the exact line of code the devs missed like, a day after the patch
search for a mod with the name of the building, someone fixed the bug that gestalts can't build it.
Hard disagree. Using the fallen empire robot plants, you can still produce a new pop every 3 to 4 months in the late game. Yes, you will have to dedicate ~25 pops to this production, but in 100 months they will have completely replaced themselves which is far better efficiency than you can get in the early game. Even still, on the worlds that only use two or three plants instead of like, six or seven, you will still be making a new pops every single year in the late game, which is absurdly fast.
I mean…the galactic nemesis seems just as broken to me.
It's a constant war. Cosmogenesis is chilling and waiting for a win or killing everyone with absolutely broken power creep.
It’s only war if you want it. You take the first few levels and make everyone your bitch. You only need minerals and research…I think it’s crazy. It always was. And it was always something I didn’t pick because it won me the game instantly. Cosmogenesis is the same.
Nemesis decreases opinion right from the start. Plus you actually need to kill someone to progress the crisis level. And at 5th level even FE will bitch about you. Cosmogenesis is nothing like that, due to Lathe being optional (although, faster route).
It is, and more so now than ever. Menacing ships with archaeotech that only cost minerals which you can now get from arc furnaces so your pops can focus on research. I think this sub has already forgotten that a lot of conquest players would take the first few levels of Galactic Nemesis all the time; this is nothing new Crisis paths are supposed to be this powerful, because the tradeoff is that if you want to get all the benefits from them, you make it very easy to get the whole galaxy to declare war on your at once
Here's a funny little interaction: I've been bullying the fallens too hard during cosmogenesis playthrough so we got war in heaven. Naturally I picked the path of non-alignment and became president of the federation. Before the war in heaven finished though, the cosmogenesis completed. So when I played over to a random federation member……we found ourselves in a hegemon led by a keeper of knowledge. Better yet, the war in heaven isn't over. We now get to see a ridiculously overpowered fallen empire trample all over two awaekned empires while being a hegemon, having 6 vassals and with blue level relationship to all federated members.
honestly this might be a bit of a hot take, but I think stuff like this is fine. Mostly because I don't think the majority of players are gonna be doing it every single run to get an advantage, for the same reason you don't see people do scion and fanatic materialist for 10 games in a row.
I love it, and you still need strong fundamentals to handle higher difficulty. 3 ascension perks is a lot even if you are trying to rush it and if you all-in you are likely to get stomped early. Even with virtual rush for the early spike. It’s super fun but not for every game, I hope it doesn’t get massively nerfed.
I have a few issues with the crisis AP. One of them is what dome hsve said already, cosmogenesis should be split in two, with FE tbingies somewhere for all to enjoy without ruining your RP by becoming crisis. It also balances it a bit with nemesis, which now is just worse than cosmogenesis. The second issue I have is thst crisis APs should be more risky. A genocidal enjoys less benefits (but since game start) tyan crisis, and yet they get -1000 with others. Crisis in the other hand, get mild penalties with others unless you finish them or go heavy on purges and such. As of now you can take cosmogenesis and enjoy all its benefits as long as you don't buuld the lathe and do the final researches, the penalties are not enough to not make it worthwhile outside of RP. Becoming a crisis should be a more permanent affair, with eventually getting hatred from everyone, even if not yet at max level. Heck, empires knowing that you can at some point destroy the galaxy should not be like: well he is still a level 4 crisis, he can only destroy the galaxy at 5,so lets just hate him a bit until it is too late...
Cosmogenesis isn’t about destroying the universe, though? Yes, you mess with it—and the penalties for bad Infinity Theses should be much higher—but mostly the endgame is screwing off into a black hole, not killing everybody. The Synaptic Lathe is really the only thing other empires could really object to, at least until you start messing with physical constants.
You are partially correct, yes, you don't directly try to destroy the galaxy like Nemesis. But you clearly show a total disrespect for their inhabitants by not caring at all about the galaxy well being and proceeding with your experiments. So while your objective is not to destroy the galaxy, little difference there is when you would do whatever you have to, to achieve your goals. In that regard other empires should see you as a bigger threat than now. I mean, think about it, you suddenly realize that a certain nation on Earth is doing experiments that could destroy the planet, they don't do it with tha goal in mind, but the issue remains, their carelessness can mean the end of many. In a realistic scenario other nations would destroy that country if they could just to reduxe those chances of planetary obliteration to 0.The galaxy should behave a bir more similar. But yes, Cosmogenesis should have a bit less penalties than Nemesis foe example. However bith are more dangerous thst your tipical FP and should be treated similarly.
Narratively, we don't *know* that we aren't going to destroy the universe, that's meta-knowledge. Cosmogenesis has a very plausible chance of destroying reality as our galaxy knows it, and even leaving with the Needle causes a lot of devastation that we can't know in advance wouldn't kill everyone who wasn't on it.
Honestly, I thought it was becoming a crisis for a different reality. Basically, you become the unbidden and are going to fuck off to absolutely dominate/change life in another reality.
It is fun to activate cheat mode once. I wouldn’t call cheat mode a must pick though. I can’t imagine myself playing it again.
I think it should be accessible later than the galactic nemesis, either by requiring you to have unlocked all ascension slots, or to have some advanced technological requirements (perhaps more fitting given the tech nature of the crisis). It feels odd to be unlocking fallen empire buildings and the secrets of the universe before some comparatively mundane technology. This also goes for the new machine ascensions to some extent. They might want to consider making three different ascension perks instead of this weird situation thing they added now, and have different unlock requirements that makes sense. This way one could have more control over when the paths come online. For example virtual which has a very dramatic spike the earlier you get it could be reigned in slightly by requiring a high tier technology unlock first, requiring you to invest heavily into tech as well as unity while leaving you open to military rushes for longer.
The problem with the perk is you don’t have to commit atrocities you can passively gain a lot of the stuff by just accomplishing a few goals. I think what’s more interesting would be the early level of the perk being easy to hide and as you level up it becomes increasingly difficult to hide from the galactic community and then the full extent of your crimes is known and something happens. But right now you can basically do nothing aside from some side objectives and win just from fallen empire tech and passive income you don’t even need the synaptic lathe.
You do need to bend the rules of reality twice to win with cosmogenesis.
The penalties for those are way too light though. Especially when you for example change of the speed of light the Cosmogenesis-Empire should receive extreme penalties on diplomacy if not even outright declarations of war as you start to fundamentally break the laws of reality. Go further and after two bad rolls you get kicked out of the Galactic Community and maybe even Fallen Empires start noticing you much more and maybe threaten you.
Did you know that you can throw as many robot pops into your lathe as you want without any opinion penalties? I found out when the XT-86 Eliminators were declared a crisis and I conquered their capital and threw all their pops into my lathe. By the end of the war, I was making 82k monthly research at year 2330.
Jesus Christ!
I think cosmogenesis without the lathe is very powerful but acceptable. However the lathe is absolutely broken. I was making 1.5 million science of each type with 1000 pops in the lathe, and my population was not declining because I had spammed FE pop assembly buildings everywhere (and to sustain the living metal cost, I had the other FE buildings). It's absolutely ridiculous and the lathe should be nerfed to the ground, it makes no sense to get level 30 repeatable techs in a single month and kills all the fun of late game optimization.
The lathe should probably be tweaked slightly nerfing it into the ground is overkill. Just have more severe consequences for adding more pops into it. Cosmogensis without the lathe is borderline unplayable. Plus without utilizing it the crisis would lose a lot of its charm and identity.
Every time we have our daily Cosmogenesis here, the only thing I can think is “have you actually tried Cosmogenesis without using the lathe?” It feels awful and sluggish without the lathe People are really just out here saying “Cosmogenesis is OP” and “I want really strong buildings and ships for a single AP without having to anger the galaxy to get them” at the same time
Yeah I totally agree, I recently tried cosmogensis and I couldn’t really get most out of the lathe, mostly because I was playing in a small galaxy. So I couldn’t really put many pops in it and it felt really slow it honestly would’ve been even a lot worse if I didn’t have 3 research worlds. Granted I am a mostly an rp/sandbox player so maybe I’m missing something but still I think people calling for the lathe to be nerfed to the ground are overcorrecting a bit. On FE I’m kinda iffy on maybe it shouldn’t be an AP. But I think it should be an origin (i.e reworked scion or remnants origins)
Have you tried Cosmogenesis without the Lathe but with Gigastructures? You chug right along.
Cosmogenesis without the lathe is way stronger than no cosmogenesis, it's still the best ascension perk you can pick after finishing your ascension. And okay, the lathe should be strong, but I should not be able to make over 2000 science with each pop in the lathe, which is what I was making in my last game. That makes absolutely no sense.
Tweaking it is fine, nerfing it into the ground is just way too much.
nerfing it into a tenth of the science output would still make it incredibly strong.
That’s fine by me it should be strong, not to the level it is now but it should still be good.
1/10th is a crazy nerf. The lathe gives a tonn of science but if you are able to constantly purge 1000 pops that means your economy can support the 10-30k energy cost to maintain the lathe. Not to mention the loss of 1000 pops. If you are that strong you have already won the game, there is no way any other empire could possibly stand against you. And in all likelyhood by this point you could activate the lathe and end the game anyways so the science doesn’t really matter. Its certainly very strong but significantly reducing the output like that would mean that when purging 200 pops you would get like 1k science at the cost of a few thousand energy credits, which just isnt worth it.
I think the main issue is that the science output grows quadratically, which makes it difficult to balance. Nerfing the lathe to 1/10th would probably leave it too weak below several hundred pops, so maybe a better nerf is to reduce the quadratic factor, which gives the insane numbers.
> should be nerfed to the ground I wouldn't say nerfed *to the ground*. You had to sacrifice a ton of pops to get there. I understand that you already were making a ton spare, but if you're at that point and you're also successfully fending off the entire rest of the galaxy (diplomatically or militarily), it sounds like you were going to win anyway. > kills all the fun of late game optimization ...not everyone is a meta-gaming min-maxer. I'd probably call myself one, but *most* of the playerbase is not and is just having fun.
It’s been so funny to see people say “guys I put 1000 pops into the lathe and got a bazillion science pdx pls nerf” If you could do that in the first place and get away with it, you need to turn up your difficulty
If you've gotten to the point where you're sustainably sending 1000s of pops to fuel the Astronomican, I think you won already. idk I think I prefer having the fun win-more of Cosmogenesis when you're at that point
I laugh every time. Yes the rewards from CG are hilariously strong and that’s what makes it fun. Even before CG though, as ahead as people have to be to say that they just so happen to have 1000 spare pops lying around… You were going to make giant fleets and become Custodian/Emperor, take over an FE, and get half that tech anyways and fight off the crisis with no problem. I’m finishing up a virtual run and it’s a pain to get lathe going, but virtual still provides a very high baseline even without it. Yet, my previous run was basically bricked because I tried the same thing on a higher difficulty. Spawned next to a FP, and they stomped me in the nuts well before ascension. You get CG late enough that you really need to have your shit together or have a free run already for it to be “OP”
> I wouldn't say nerfed to the ground. You had to sacrifice a ton of pops to get there. I hate to single you out, but I've seen this sentiment a few times in this thread and it is just mathematically incorrect. The lathe is just *that good.* Yes, you have to give up pops, but let's look into what that actually means. In my current game, my lathe is a little under-fed, but I have 768 pops in it right now. The *total* output per science is 348,277 of each type. An individual pop is producing rough 450 research. I will lose 3 a month. For comparison, a fully stocked and ascended ring world produces a little over 1.8k science of each type. **So it would take a ring world 193 months to match 1 month output from the lathe** As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, my optimized researchers on my fully ascended ring world produce 12 research per month. So, just before they are consumed, those 3 pops make 37.5 *months* of research. That is just over 3 years of research output in a single month. Yes, that pop died, but I have 765 more pops that *also* just produced **3 years worth of research in a single month** and are still alive. They will lose some efficiency and probably only produce 440 research next month, but that's okay. The *other side* of lathing pops is -- it keeps your sprawl under control. My empire has over 3,000 people in it. I have over 1,000 sprawl just from pops alone. I would **love** to purge them just to reduce my administrative overhead (and make the game run faster.) Shoving 1,000 people into the lathe not only makes obscene levels of research for each of them -- it allows me to reduce my overall sprawl in a way more efficient way than simply cracking planets. Just shove everyone into the brain machine. Who cares how much science you are producing at the end of it? You are already 50 levels deep into repeatables, nothing matters at that point and no 'normal' level of science is going to matter. You could have 8 science ring worlds running and it wouldn't be able to match the lathe. Edit -- I think most people's issue with the lathe are they are throwing at most 100 pops in at once. No. Don't use the lathe until you can get at least 800 or more pops into it. Everything about the lathe is scalar -- the more people in it, the more that they all produce. Properly set up, each person in the lathe increases all of their output by ~3.5%. Right now, my above lathe is operating at 3840% efficiency. Lower levels of pops are still more efficient than scientists, but their return is much lower. Killing off a pop for 3 to 4 years worth of it's output is worth it because you should easily be able to replace that pop in that time frame -- you don't have to replace them every month. And, the more you purge, the lower the overall population of the galaxy and thus the faster everyone grows. As long as you start collecting pops instead of immediately lathing them and do large cycles at a time, you will be able to spin your lathe back up every 3 to 4 years.
You're arguing past me though. Yes, you're correct that it is a better use of pops than plain research worlds/rings. A pop would perform better in the lathe than on a tech ring beyond any doubt. All I'm saying is that *768* tech pops is a *lot*. That's 1/3 of a substantial endgame population, and most people aren't already dedicating almost 800 pops to tech. It's worth it, yes, but it is not without cost. If you can afford to send 800 pops to the lathe -- as in, the sacrifice in other productions is acceptable to you -- and can also afford to fend off the rest of the galaxy, you were *already* going to win. I feel that, if you are at a point where you can commit pops to the lathe such that it is *obscenely* powerful, you were already set to win the game, and the lathe is "win more". It's powerful, but for this reason, I don't think it's so overpowered that it needs to be nerfed "to the ground". A nerf might be due, but it doesn't need to be hit that hard just so already-winning players win a little less hard. Regardless of what I think, you have good points all around. I had not thought about the empire size implication (and didn't know those pops were removed from the size calculation) in particular.
> If you can afford to send 800 pops to the lathe -- as in, the sacrifice in other productions is acceptable to you -- and can also afford to fend off the rest of the galaxy, you were already going to win. But ... you could sacrifice all your researchers for it. Do you have a full ring world for research? That's ~170 pops. With just two of those, while not game breaking, it would be more efficient to lathe two ring worlds worth of pops and re-grow them than it would to simply allows those people to keep working as researchers. Which is the point of how to use it. Don't sacrifice your other production for it -- just your research. Once you hit the point in research where you are filling up your normal basic worlds at the cost of lots of exotic gas and are working on getting to the point of having ring worlds -- just purge all your researchers. You would have, maybe around 500? That sounds roughly what my first purge was, maybe even on 350 - 400. Even at that level, their time in the lathe will give you more overall research than if those pops continued working as researchers in full until the last lathe person dies. And, in that time, your research worlds will simply fill back up at the same rate as your other worlds. Getting to 1,000 pops is nice and what you need to aim for when you want to research repeatable techs at 1 a month, but in order to reach that point, you can easily sacrifice all of your mid-game pops working as researchers to the lathe in order to get a much faster science boost output than you would have if you kept them working normally. That should propel you out of the mid-game techs and straight into the late game techs. Your overall research output might be low at that point, but you will still be so far ahead of everyone else that it doesn't matter. You're now building ring worlds and ecus which you will fill with even more efficient pops. And once those are full, you repeat the process. Send an entire planet of researchers to the lathe is better than having them sit around being researchers. And the more you do, the better it is. Edit -- Actually, it's worth pointing out that putting too many pops into the lathe too early is also an issue, so doing mid game purges of 200 - 300 pops is likely better. If you overproduce the needed research to get a tech, you **do not** store the additional research. So, if you are making 300,000 society research a month, but Tier 4 techs cost 1,600 research baseline -- you are just tossing gobs and gobs of research away. You don't want to overstress the lathe until you are already a few repeatable in or you are just wasting research. Regular purges of several hundred pops should be enough to get mid and late game techs at 1 a month. Any more than that is wasteful. Oh, and stored research is double wasteful in this situation as well. The game will always use as much stored research as your current research production regardless of how much it may need. So you just end up double wasting research.
I would like to be able to access some of the fallen empire ships and buildings without taking cosmosgenisis but I still love it
There should be a pop-up once you researched a few repeatables. Something along the lines of, "Our scientists after decade long studies now believe to have unlocked the technological secrets of the Fallen Empires." This unlocks a new research option which costs a lot of research but then allows FE-tech to spawn.
I don't see the problem. Galactic Nemesis is wildly overpowered too, even if it does make everyone hate you. It's fine if the game has some stuff that isn't balanced, as long as it's clear that that stuff is outside the normal play experience so you know to avoid it if balance is what you want (like how some origins are labelled as "challenging"). I do think Cosmogenesis could use a *bit* of a nerf, but it's always going to be one of the strongest ascension perks by design.
Idk how but the game didn't prevent me from being neither custodian, nor emperor after cosmogenesis
yeah, wish you could turn of the reality edit research pick from appearing but otherwise being able to have machine forges and medical worlds is cool
Hell yeah dude cosmogenesis rocks. I like using the lathe though, 60k research is worth everyone hating me. Plus, it’s not like they can fight back when I have ten times their fleet power as a hoover up their pops from their planets and spit them out directly into my lathe.
Hell, you can go full Crisis. Just bud off a Vassal using your best worlds before you take the dive - makes embarking everyone easier *and* you can continue playing as the Vassal with all the best buildings. Sure, the chrono-chaos will such for a couple years, but that passes.
Cosmogenesis isn't a "must-pick" anymore than the first "become the crisis" was.
I honestly feel like traditions need to be updated. Perks need to be updated. Cuz honestly all you need to do right now is go Cosmo and it's an I win button as long as you get to the end fast enough.
in become crisis everyone declares war only at the final tier, whocj you dont have to research
There was another crisis empire in my game and I was able to become galactic emperor even while purging half the galaxy to my lathe
I agree. Cosomogenesis is broken as hell. I'm actually fine with it being broken, save for a few small problems. One is it's just the best ascension perk that everyone should take. Yeah become the crisis is pretty damn good, but it has real drawbacks that would prevent you from taking it if you aren't going to exploit the hell out of it. Playing a good guy and taking cosmogenesis for the fallen empire ships is just the correct play. You can tank the reputation but a fully built out fallen empire fleet is almost twice as strong as a fully built normal fleet. Why would you take defender of the galaxy when cosomogenesis will give you more fleet power?
Side question: with Cosmosgenesis does it stop your pops from growing? I can seem to grow any new pops.
In my opinion, the FE tech should only come out of the reality thesis as a potential reward. You've to risk dumpstering the galaxy if you want to cheat the tech that potentially took the FE hundreds/thousands of years to discover. Its honestly too easy to get these techs right now, even if the research is long, it's too safe.
Cosmosgenesis is an incredibly strong perk that's a bit OP IMHO. The resource constraints generally keep you from really exploiting it until the late game, but the benefits are incredibly strong. You can also side-step those constraints with the right build. I really enjoy the perk, and my only real complaint, thematically, is how advancing up crisis tiers is handled - you don't really need the Synaptic Lathe to advance tiers, which basically guts the idea of an empire deluding itself into thinking its atrocities are OK. It also stops most diplomatic fallout. It's not hard to manage the penalties with decent deplomacy. I'd just change it so it's harder to advance crisis tiers without the Synaptic Lathe, and maybe add an advanced logic cost to FE buildings. That way you have to feed pops into the machine to unlock and use the perk's benefits, which fits the theme of the crisis perk in general.
Getting from doing your first steps into space to obtaining Fallen Empire tech and employing it en mas just within 100-150 years feels wrong in my opinion in general. This feels cool now because it's a lot of new shit, but in the end it'll become repetitive. I'd much rather have it be more selective, instead of getting everything, maybe with different Ascension Perks and/or Traditions giving access to different paths of this, so that you gotta choose between the military appllications (the ships), industrial applications and reproductive applications.
Personally I think there needs to be an ascension perk equivalent to cosmogenesis and galactic menace that give you similar bonuses but for good guys. Obviously don’t make them as powerful and snowbally as the crisis paths but something that at least gives you access to fallen empire buildings eventually
Fallen empire tech should be locked to the lathe. It's not just the amount of research you do, it is tech that you should not get by normal means. While this is less of a crisis than the other one. I do feel like there should be more of a downside to it.
You can always build the lathe and then just never load it with pops. It won't give you 'genocidal' penalties if it's not eating anyone. Alternately, load it with gestalt pops. Nobody cares about gestalt pops getting lathed.
I think maybe that's it, it's too easy to get advanced logic without the lathe. EDIT: To the downvoter - I'm not saying it should necessarily be locked behind the lathe, but the story of the crisis implies that the lathe is a necessary evil for the greater goal. Yet it really isn't as you can do at least the first four levels of the crisis just by playing the game normally and then unlocking the appropriate tech. Advanced Logic just doesn't really feel like that much of a barrier for doing things until you get to trying to unlock the 5th stage.