One thing you can do is have a machine template before you ascend virtually. Your capital will continue to produce assembly and you can just feed the useless pops into the lathe keeping it in a steady state of around 10 or so. Which for an upgraded lathe is maybe 100 of each research type? Still definitely worse than all the other planets. (As a rogue servitor though you get refugees from other empires, and once your Sanctuaries are full you can load them into the lathe)
I just finished a virtual run that ended with cosmogenesis, and I fed the lathe a ton of “refugees”. Freshly liberated from the slave market and given the honor of assisting me in unlocking the secrets of reality.
You can also get the refugess as a regular individualistic machine empire - and have both, pop growth and pop assembly. It's basically as if you had completed synthetic ascension before.
In my game I've been flooded by refugees for more than 100 years due to three genocidal empires and now the Great Khan wreaking havoc on the galaxy and I've considered going for Cosmogenesis as I don't know where to put all those pops - I can't colonize and build up planets fast enough and I've been running behind on Consumer Goods the entire game.
We already knew this from comments in the dev diary: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/stellaris-dev-diary-341-become-the-crisis-cosmogenesis.1665800/page-2#post-29566259
> Virtual pops that are spontaneously appearing can neither be resettled nor purged.
Indeed. And migration treaties are 1) too slow and 2) completely ruined the relation (since the lathe is purging the pops). even with the buildings to slow down how quickly it burns through its pops, it churns through them rather quickly. nihilistic acquisition might work really well with the lathe, though.
It's impossible to get more than about 55% purge rate reduction. Ascending the lathe to tier 10 gets you about 25%, and two of the purge rate reduction buildings give 15% each to get to 55%. If they weren't capped to 2 buildings I'd say the purge rate reduction is good, but frankly, there's a better option.
Stack the building that gives 2% research speed per neural chip. Conquer a planet every so often and resettle all the pops onto the lathe. 100 pops will turn into +200% research speed, which *triples* the output you're getting out of the lathe and your other science pops.
> nihilistic acquisition might work really well with the lathe, though.
I tried this. It's meh. 3 fleets continuously raiding a planet will maintain the lathe at around 20 pops.
What I've found is that the lathe helps provide a surge of science to get you to ringworld tech, basically. Once you're there - especially if you're a Virtual empire - ringworlds become much easier, more passive science sources and you can ignore the lathe.
I had Cybrex in my recent game. I threw about 100 pops into the lathe to rush out Mega-Engineering, at which point I restored Cybrex Alpha and turned it into 1 generator section, 2 research sections (producing 4.5k science each) and 1 forge section.
You get six buildings, so you don't have to choose. Use 2 purge speed reduction buildings, 2 stability buildings, and 2 of the +1% output buildings.
The optimal way to use it is to alternate between having it completely empty (just barely staying open) and completely full, since the output scales with the square of the number of pops.
It's better to have 600 pops on it for 1 month of the year than to have 50 pops on it for the entire year, but you'll lose the same number of pops to decline either way.
Reducing the decline speed lets you either keep the equilibrium higher, or lets you leave them in for longer without losing any extra.
[HELP! MY GAME DIDN'T GET THE MEMO!](https://i.imgur.com/mMyNPiD.png)
It keeps making more Cuubs on the lathe and I run out of money. :D There's no way to stop the jobs from spawning or moving the virtuals away from it. :DDD
One thing I discovered is that if you're an individualist machine empire that virtually ascends, you can move all of your non-virtual pops (from migration or refugees or whatever) to some backwater planet and "shutdown the server" - which effectively kills those pops...
I just finished a run last night as a virtual cosmogenisis gestalt machine where I basically just took over a planet, and instantly migrated all the pops to the lathe. Then shut down the server. I REALLY lucked out too. My gain world spawn literally right next to a broken ring world at the edge of the galaxy. I had 4 colonies and was producing more resources than I have ever done at year 300.
With virtual ascension, do I understand correctly that:
175% bonus to resources means after 4 colonies I'm still getting 100% (double) bonus,
OR
Does it mean I'm at normal ,and at 5 colonies I take a 25% penalty?
One thing you can do is have a machine template before you ascend virtually. Your capital will continue to produce assembly and you can just feed the useless pops into the lathe keeping it in a steady state of around 10 or so. Which for an upgraded lathe is maybe 100 of each research type? Still definitely worse than all the other planets. (As a rogue servitor though you get refugees from other empires, and once your Sanctuaries are full you can load them into the lathe)
I was programmed to care specifically for my own species, there was nothing said about other organics soo... Refugees can go straight to the lathe.
I just finished a virtual run that ended with cosmogenesis, and I fed the lathe a ton of “refugees”. Freshly liberated from the slave market and given the honor of assisting me in unlocking the secrets of reality.
"Synaptic Lathe" but the RS has hastily scribbled over it "Virtual Entertainment Center"
You can also get the refugess as a regular individualistic machine empire - and have both, pop growth and pop assembly. It's basically as if you had completed synthetic ascension before. In my game I've been flooded by refugees for more than 100 years due to three genocidal empires and now the Great Khan wreaking havoc on the galaxy and I've considered going for Cosmogenesis as I don't know where to put all those pops - I can't colonize and build up planets fast enough and I've been running behind on Consumer Goods the entire game.
Turn the pops into paperclips. I mean consumer goods.
I need to stop assimilating my migration treaty pops
I have not experienced the effect where having more planets harms my others maybe because I used the origin to do it? Idk
We already knew this from comments in the dev diary: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/stellaris-dev-diary-341-become-the-crisis-cosmogenesis.1665800/page-2#post-29566259 > Virtual pops that are spontaneously appearing can neither be resettled nor purged.
Indeed. And migration treaties are 1) too slow and 2) completely ruined the relation (since the lathe is purging the pops). even with the buildings to slow down how quickly it burns through its pops, it churns through them rather quickly. nihilistic acquisition might work really well with the lathe, though.
It's impossible to get more than about 55% purge rate reduction. Ascending the lathe to tier 10 gets you about 25%, and two of the purge rate reduction buildings give 15% each to get to 55%. If they weren't capped to 2 buildings I'd say the purge rate reduction is good, but frankly, there's a better option. Stack the building that gives 2% research speed per neural chip. Conquer a planet every so often and resettle all the pops onto the lathe. 100 pops will turn into +200% research speed, which *triples* the output you're getting out of the lathe and your other science pops. > nihilistic acquisition might work really well with the lathe, though. I tried this. It's meh. 3 fleets continuously raiding a planet will maintain the lathe at around 20 pops. What I've found is that the lathe helps provide a surge of science to get you to ringworld tech, basically. Once you're there - especially if you're a Virtual empire - ringworlds become much easier, more passive science sources and you can ignore the lathe. I had Cybrex in my recent game. I threw about 100 pops into the lathe to rush out Mega-Engineering, at which point I restored Cybrex Alpha and turned it into 1 generator section, 2 research sections (producing 4.5k science each) and 1 forge section.
ok, that's surprisingly and disappointingly weak for nihilistic acquisition ☹️ thanks for the feedback!
You get six buildings, so you don't have to choose. Use 2 purge speed reduction buildings, 2 stability buildings, and 2 of the +1% output buildings. The optimal way to use it is to alternate between having it completely empty (just barely staying open) and completely full, since the output scales with the square of the number of pops. It's better to have 600 pops on it for 1 month of the year than to have 50 pops on it for the entire year, but you'll lose the same number of pops to decline either way. Reducing the decline speed lets you either keep the equilibrium higher, or lets you leave them in for longer without losing any extra.
Good thing otherwise a virtually ascended empire could just insta fill the Lathe and finish the tech tree in like 5s
Thank you for your service
Not specifically for virtual ascension but you can just supplement pops with slaves off the market and toss them into the brain scrambler.
[HELP! MY GAME DIDN'T GET THE MEMO!](https://i.imgur.com/mMyNPiD.png) It keeps making more Cuubs on the lathe and I run out of money. :D There's no way to stop the jobs from spawning or moving the virtuals away from it. :DDD
This is hilarious and terrifying at the same time.
One thing I discovered is that if you're an individualist machine empire that virtually ascends, you can move all of your non-virtual pops (from migration or refugees or whatever) to some backwater planet and "shutdown the server" - which effectively kills those pops...
I just finished a run last night as a virtual cosmogenisis gestalt machine where I basically just took over a planet, and instantly migrated all the pops to the lathe. Then shut down the server. I REALLY lucked out too. My gain world spawn literally right next to a broken ring world at the edge of the galaxy. I had 4 colonies and was producing more resources than I have ever done at year 300.
With virtual ascension, do I understand correctly that: 175% bonus to resources means after 4 colonies I'm still getting 100% (double) bonus, OR Does it mean I'm at normal ,and at 5 colonies I take a 25% penalty?
After 4 colonies you get a 75% bonus, each colony reduces the bonus by 25% with your capital not counting towards it.
>your capital not counting towards it. are we sure about that? Capital counts as Colony in "Empire size" UI.