Hey Montu, you didn't mention how Overturned allows you to start Incubators + Pre-Planned Growth, for up to +100% pop growth in the early game if you damn the consequences! (60% once the worlds start to fill up) It's almost too many pops around!
@@gabrieljoseozanan6989 Pretty sure with genetic ascension you can add Budding (+1 MPG/50pops), Vat-Grown (+25% pop growth speed) and/or Fertile (+30% pop growth speed) as well. Maybe not fertile though. So you can almost constantly have doubled pop growth compared to other empires
@@MorganSaph Psyborgs got removed. Now Assimilation will remove one trait to add the other. And indeed, Overturned Bio Ascension has very much outmatched pop growth, specially on hives.
The Flesh is Weak is the best for Megacorp, because you can increase Trade Value by 25% with "Trading Algorithms" to make your Space Cyberpunk fantasy real
"Chaos claims the unwary or the incomplete. A true man may flinch away its embrace, if he is stalwart, and he girds his soul with the armour of contempt." -from The Spheres of Longing Inquisitor Gideon Ravenor The Armour of Contempt by Dan Abnett, p. 3
Fuck u. Now bio will sucks because wide empires have very large penalties. Nice, hardest for microcontrol ascencion will worse than fucking magic of whinning to devs, and sale race ass to shit from another dimension. Wp paradox. P.s. overtuned I didn’t write because I won’t to buy a pack for this shit, I’m talking about starting from something like habitat/relic world.
You didn't mention the Durable trait for cyborgs, which halves your amenities requirements, thus freeing many pops and building slots on all your worlds. Best non-growth trait in the game imho. Also, base cyborg assembly is higher than robot assembly, and it is affected by gene clinics, which makes them quite decent in the midgame.
A spiritualist Cyborg empire could very well run no amenity generation whatsoever, other than what they get from the monument + leaders. Even with just a Fan. Spiritualist, you can feed all amenities from a filled out Ring Segment with a single upgraded Gene Clinic and have enough leftover amenities to 100% the stability.
Imo it is probably the best trait , the driving matter for a hivemind. It completely get rid of the ineffective maintainer drone and improved global stability.
Also double jointed adds -10% housing Usage -25% resettlement cost and +15% Pop growth from resettlement at the cost of 1 pop point and pop pick +0.3 Energy Upkeep in my opinion the best overall trait not to mention cyborg traits and be combined with organic traits of the same use so you can get +20% research form jobs form 2 traits alone i say that cyborg and overturned gene routes are the best general builds people not looking to go through micro hell but you can design it that way if you want
New Psionic Ascension: "You cannot imagine the beautiful bounty of Chaos." Me, enjoying the bad Psionic without a Covenant: "Those things I'd never even wish to know!"
I really wish there was a point to being psionic without having to diddle around with covenants... I want my spiritualist elves to be the magical good guys of the setting and guardians of the galaxy from the endgame crises... But covenants always make me feel... Kinda gross, tbh.
@@Archris17 it would be great if there was a shroud benefactor from the ancient psychic precursors. Those were mostly heroic good guys and that should have left a strong covenant option. Imo paradox just went a bit too hard into the grim derp of 40k reference
“Our pizzas are hot and ready!” “How does it taste?” “Hot and ready.” “Wait, aren’t they made of warp dust and plague?” “I said it’s *hot* and *ready!*
I'd like it if there was a benefit path for not taking a Shroud Covenant. Doesn't have to be as strong as the Covenants, but just something that supports you for not making a deal with a demon.
Yeah, something like an event chain about researching the covenant beings would be nice; maybe it could result in a boost to your own psionics or maybe intel on other empires potential covenants (and a way to undermine them)
Roleplay-wise it's really weird to me that a presumably religious empire would immediately ditch whatever their religion is to literally form a demonic pact. There should at least be an option to reject the Shroud beings as demons and instead enhance your people's innate power. If it were up to me, I'd have a fifth proper Covenant called something like the Icon of Virtue that centers on strengthening your society (basically an order god, since we've already got fertility, knowledge, war, and prosperity gods), then an Abjure the Demonic option that rejects Shroud covenants entirely that would be less powerful but not have the costs either.
@@sirdrork8616 to be fair, most religions wouldn't feature the shroud in the first place since it's very clearly an extremely hard to reach place Also world religions are rare, so I don't think any empire has one specific religion in the first place Example, take earth's Christianity It's many many different sects, those would only grow more numerous when you spread over different worlds Also "literally a demonic pact" depends on the actual religion. Maybe they would consider it a divine pact, maybe they would misinterpret the creature on the other side as their own god, maybe the creature is just a minor fairy or angel that pales in comparison to the gods, or maybe it's not divine at all and is just quite literally a psionic being with an advantageous offer (and unexpected long term side effects in the form of brainwashing, at which point the ditching of the old religions wouldn't even be surprising) Not to mention that you don't need the general populace to agree Only your ruler and his staff need to sign the contract - farmer Jimmy's opinion on some backwater world won't matter, even in a democracy his representatives would potentially grasp for the power and disregard the happiness of his farm and family
Thanks very much, sir. I'm still in a lot of pain and drowsy because of the medication, but I think your video, thinking about returning to the game is helping me a lot. Again, thanks very much.
I'm so happy they're finally adding a Trade trait for Synthetics. Really awkward to go from a trade build and then ascend and have your entire economy crash.
Yeah, having your founder thrifty soecies turn into basic bots which needed mod-ing was awful. Another advantage of Bio with trade was using society points for tailoring. There'd be jobs creating soceity points as a byproduct of unity production so it was much easier, without delays for crucial engineering tech. Finally many empires have an opinion malus on synth/bots so it was a disadvantage for trade and the crucial diplo. I actually experimented with stopping at cybernetic and ignoring synthetic, but then also Ascension free strategy. From the look of it, you give up too much now it's Ascension perk + tradition, rather than 2 perks.
It should also be noted that taking a specific path in knights of the toxic god can also give a guaranteed psionic theory research option. This is another path to no rng ascension.
I'll say, I'm surprised the Knights are so great as an origin. I expected them to be a thing you do once and never again, but despite the hardships with their quest, the Origin is actually pretty solid.
Knights was my favourite thing until 3.6... that god just cannot be killed now, it's unbelievably resilient and it fucks off to the other side of the map making your ship useless because they can't fire
@@ceraphidlivefield2585 I was struggling a bit yesterday killing it in my multi-player game with my buddy. Wiped out a couple of my mercenary fleets of 300k before I got annoyed and slammed it with close to a million might at once and... it worked? With very few casualties at that. Really weird. Basically, it runs away from you when you enter the system instead of charging you now so it's beam weapon and small arms fire can pepper you well before you get into range. If you outnumber him by a metric ton, the fire is spread between all your fleets making it more manageable. That's what it seemed like to me at least
Genetic ascension is actually really, really good. Problem is that it's incredibly micromanagement heavy. Combine that with slavery builds and you can very easily make up for the resource output being low. But in return, you will have 50-70% more pops than ANY empire in the game if you do things right.
It's a build type that requires a lot of thought and deliberate management of pops, both settlement and pop production which annoys a lot of players. Which is why it always gets downgraded.
The problem is, the AI puts pops into jobs where they have no genetic bonus. I find my researchers mining, and my miners researching. The game takes long enough without burning 100k energy from time to time juggling pops between colonies.
@@ctrlaltdebug that's why you have to specialize you'r planet at all cost to mitigate this issue. It would be a good thing if they add some rules in the AI to make them try to give job related to their trait if possible. But i think it will make some issues and could make unemployement problem for empires who don't do those gen things. But they definitely should try to give us better ways to manually manage our filthy slaves, i mean rightfull and lovely pops... HEM
Genetic ascension would be good if they had a 'Sort by Job' function is the gene editor. You could make your Growth pops template and force every thing to produce those, make all your job templates, and then convert everything over to those in a few seconds. Then you can simply update each job with ideal pops every decade or so after that, taking advantage of the -50% project cost. It's still really fun on a hive mind.
I Had to micro my planets into specialisations For each sort of pops, like an only science Or only industry. It was incredibly micro heavy and slightly annoying as i had some mixed planets but in the end it was pretty brutal AND had to set up a forced growth on it so it wouldn't produce someone else there. (I was playing Overtuned) So it was a clusterfuck of traits and micro (I like micro but dear god) A QoL update for that would make my life a lot easier
@@federicofiordelli104 little late but if you would like a tip just restrict migration on all your pops save a "ruler" template let that one go anywhere but make all the others stay where you put them it lets you keep your immigration going but you only have to occasionally toss around a pop or two to seed the correct template Obviously if you play ethics that restrict this it doesn't work but it makes your life easier if you can use it
Some additional points worth mentioning: 1. Psionics still can use robot pop assembly, just outlaw the AI once you have researched synths and the best AI combat computers. 2. IMO, Nurgle is meh. Yes, you get a sweet pop growth bonus, but you loose trait picks for your pops, which means less efficient pops. 3. Knights of the Toxic God also get Psionics research as a reward from one of the quest events. 4. Synthetically ascending now converts all your pops to synths (since the cyborg trait is now for a different ascension), which means once you complete the project you will be left with 0 organics on your world, so synths will have to work a bit to get back their organic growth. 5. Wkth pisonics, Knights of the Toxic God knight policy, Charismatic leader trait (immortalize him as your god's chosen), some Galactic Community resolution, fanatic spiritualist bonus and Cutthroat Politics civic, you can lower your Edict Upkeep by -95%. On ALL edicts, including ambitions and strategic goods ones.
Been doing Psionic since forever. I always try and get my starting leader (me) to immortality before dying of old age and I love how you get the strongest ships in the end. It's nice that it's become better and better.
Agreed. The game even implies that their hive mind is based on a psionic connection, so idk why the hive wouldn’t eventually explore that and extrapolate, launching them down the psionic ascension pathway.
@@Notlordstark I guess innovation comes out of a need to innovate and an unified collective mind doesn't feel the need to research on psyonics since there's not really an "other" as much as a drone, and those drones are already under one singular and collective mind
@@miguelpadeiro762 why wouldn’t a hive mind feel the need to innovate? It’s population grows, uses up resources, it presumably has some level of curiosity about physics and biology, and it will always strive to make its own life (/lives) better.
I wish synthetic evolution could be done where instead of ascending into big clunky robot bodies, we make synth bodies like replicants in blade runner.
Yeah. The easy way to do it would be to just have a tradition that lets you pick organic portraits for your synths, similar to the tradition for genetically ascended empires. I would actually prefer to have stylized synth portraits for every species class, for example androids that look like "perfected" and idealized humans, but that probably requires too much time, effort and money for Paradox to do it. Although, to be honest, I would even pay for a cosmetic DLC along such lines if it was done well.
I think you forgot to mention the 'Damn the Consequences' edict that comes with Overtuned origin, which doubles the bonuses from the yellow traits. You can get +60% research output from Elevated Synapses + Augmented Intelligence. Pair that with Erudite for +80% research output even before you consider leader bonuses. Downside is immense unity upkeep for the edict along with food/goods upkeep penalties--making it an even later-game powerboost than Synthetics.
Psionics is still limited to a war-like or aggressive playstyle but the psionic admiral trait was also absolutely gutted - the reason psionic war rush was so powerful was that early evasion bonuses were absolutely brutal. 15% evasion is so, so much better than 10% shield hardening. Non-aggressive psionics did get buffed but non-aggressive psionics was never the meta way to play that ascension path. Rushing psionics by using 10(!) years of society research and no tradition picks also hurts your economy - missing out on hydroponic bays which allow you to minimize farmer jobs and early powerful tradition picks which immediately help your jump start your economy. Psionics may be a decent bit stronger coming out of a conquest but the tools given to them to perform that conquest in the first place got nerfed. Cybernetics also has the inverse problem of synthetic where they want to be building robots early for growth, but those robots will not be receiving any benefits from the ascension path.
I have been playing a cybernetic Megacorp Empire on the Beta Branch since last week and the numbers really got out of hand when I saw that trait pop up.
My current game is Shared Burden Xenophile Cyborgs with lots of Subjects. It's pretty fun, I don't have the strongest navy yet, but I can strongarm the whole galactic community with my ~2.5x diplomatic power, and I have a stupendously big economy
So far I've been playing the genetic ascension. I actually like that it allows me to have for each planet a specific species go get the maximum out of it. Even if it needs quite some micro management.
Overtuned psionic empire was probably one of the most fun playthroughs I've had. I was blessed by RNGesus with a ruined matter decompressor, and got the contingency relic. Ended up with 3 of these, and just made all my worlds into Ecumenopolis, one ring world for food, the rest of science, with industrialist civic... dear god... my science, alloy, and consumer goods output was absurd lmao also really good pop growth speed from incubators and pre-planned growth, ontop of the Ecumenopolis bonuses to growth. Then adding Damn the Consequences Edict, once I had a sufficient amount of lifespan increasing techs, to further boost the growth increase and science output to 60% total each, JUST FROM THE TRAITS! created one of the most broken long-game playthroughs I've ever had.
The fact that nor cybernetic nor synthetic ascension give you ane unique armies is a huge bummer. I know that ground combat is the least important and developed part of stellaris, but it really sucks from role play standpoint (
@@tartine2463 yeah, or old android army for synts and some kind of cyber ops. At least something to make them more destinct then a bunch of numerical bonuses.
Synthetics being very good spies would be cool. If that empire joins the contingency then the contingency doesn't have to learn how to infiltrate your empire.
Oh this game is awesome, the amount of choices! I think the reason you are the only stellaris CZcamsr that I watch is because of a few reasons, Well planned out videos filled with really useful information and genuine opinions while also clearly just enjoying a brilliant game. Keep up the good work Montu, everyone is watching!
Hello, I have 400h of Stellaris more or less and your video is exactly the type I'm looking for. Thank you for the very clear informations with a visual always in synergy with what you're saying. Very informative. Thanks you man.
With overtuned and teachers of the shroud being such powerful origins, mechanist needs a boost as well to maybe get a boost towards cybernetics and/or synthetics (or perhaps have one origin towards each?).
I think my favorite part about Cybernetics is that because you can go into it so early, you can finish the project and tradition tree before you get Gene Tailoring making half of your entire tradition tree functionally useless. The 10% finisher effect is cute, but Psionics gets twice that with a building and their pop growth isn't nerfed randomly (seriously, 2.25?)
You should do another series of military fleets test with the combat changes. Im curious how torpedo cruisers with screen destroyers will perform in general
27:00 I'm just visualizing a cyborg setting in a chair, eyes closed, doing algorithm trading of shares, currencies, or futures, using his Gordon 3.5 implant via wi-fi.
There is something I am curious about. Would Radiotrophic remove the energy upkeep from cybernetic traits? That's something that could be managable if you turn everything into a tomb world but then you lose tons of energy when you create ecumenopoli.
My favorite game I ever played was when my fanatic materialist empire rolled the psionic precursors, and got a free roll of the tech once finished. I didn’t know materialist/psionic was possible until then
I'd say that there's actually more benefit to disengagement chance now that you're not rolling it as often. With lots of rolls, even a low chance will happen reasonably often; when you only get a couple of chances, you have to make them count.
Purifier cyborgs can unlock organ harvesting which gives a good pop growth boost as long as you're purging somewhere in you empire. Which isn't something very hard to keep up as purifiers.
I've always liked going genetic ascension because pops of my species in other empires end up getting psionic and cybernetic traits (sometimes both!). I can then start cloning super pops.
Did you know it’s technically possible for a synthetic empire to become a machine intelligence. If your vassal synthetically ascends, and you integrate them and place them under AI servitude, then they will be placed into absolute servitude to their new organic masters. If you get unlucky (or in this case lucky) you can have a machine uprising: meaning that an empire that was once an organic empire is now a machine intelligence and possibly even determined exterminators if you have your cruelty points at the max and you have them with domestic protocols (for some reason machines with domestic protocols are more likely to become determined exterminators or driven assimilators)
May I interest anyone in the Overtuned Psionic option? Montu kinda mentioned it, in that Overtuned doesn't force you into Bio, and having rolled an Overtuned start into Zroni precursors was hilariously powerful. Anyway, I always considered Psi the best because their leaders were so clearly superior to the alternatives, IMHO. The governor and leader traits especially. While Psi looks even stronger now I'm not particularly happy that so much of the power has been tied into the covenents, that's not really how I envision Psi ascension going most of the time. Mah immersion and so on... :P I also can't help but wonder why Telepaths were a separate thing to begin with instead of upgrading Enforcers into something not terrible. Feels like a missed opportunity, and Enforcers already scales with planet development.
Overtuned Cyborgs are pretty cool as well. Let's you "triple dip" on focused traits you start with and you have an amazing amount of trait points (not hive, "regular" empire).
Hey Montu this is an awesome video. I'm a new player and have been binging these, now I'm super excited whenever I see a new upload. Do you have any plans to re-de the Psionic Democratic Crusaders meta build? If not, can you tell if it can still be done on 3.6, and if we should take Teachers of the Shroud or still take Aquatic? And how would the two versions fare against each other? Keep up the great work m8 :D
An underlooked differentiating aspect of the different paths is their relative ability to make good use of each other's pops/leaders. Psychic pops and leaders are great, but can occur "in the wild" and if a genetic ascension empire gets their hands on them they can incorporate them into their empire without issue. Cybernetics can't (usually) coexist with psionics, and synths can neither be psychic nor have presapient traits. In theory a psychic empire can nab the pops of a genetic empire and assimilate them just fine, but the fact that the genetic empire can theoretically have access to psychic pops within the first decade via contact with caravans and some other sources makes the balance of power solidly with the genetics in this way.
As an example, as a genetic empire I'll often make one-planet vassals out of psychic pops engineered for longevity and other leader traits, make them scholariums/prospectoriums/bulwarks, then farm them for leaders.
I feel that ascensions need to be expanded upon. They're such an integral part of every campaign but they all feel so... railroady? There should be more ways to ascend in the same general way. For example, on a small scale, genetic ascension needs to have significantly less need for micro and should have some basic automation options or large-scale template options. On a large scale, every ascension should get alternate paths, like genetic ascension but instead of adding relatively tame traits a species can start modifying themselves to dark extremes with both benefits and weaknesses(like overtuned but on lots of steroids). Psionic should have a path that focuses on inward perfectionism as individuals and empathy instead of telepathy, focusing on the rejection of the shroud while improving through their own prowess. Refusing to accept the shroud as gods and instead striving for divinity yourself, leads to a slower start but heavy gains towards the end. Ascension of the mind while keeping individuality and replacing psi corp style buildings with "improvement centers" of some kind where people from all over the planet come to undertake journeys of self discovery and find greater meaning and skill in their lives. There's a lot of flavour oppurtunities and interesting scenarios that can be made with this i feel. Maybe even some kind of direct conflict with the shroud. Though it can be argued spiritualism in general needs a major rework with multiple religions and maybe even multiple ideologies per religion with spiritualist empires having some advantages in their type of religion. Hell, I'd love an imperium of man-style situation where our leader(s) is an extremely powerful psionic(maybe something even beyond chosen one) who hates the shroud gods and there are plans where you can damage or destroy the shroud entirely while the shroud itself manifests and corrupts other empires to destroy our empire. This could be a corresponding origin to the second psi ascension, as opposed to teachers of the shroud, paralleling it as now the teacher is a leader who has come from the species itself instead of far away teachers communicating through dreams, and offers a path to become like him instead of slaves to them(and ofc there's all kinds of ways to rp this as both evil or good depending on other aspects of your empire). Synthetic where instead of turning into machines, we instead get to stay as entirely organic beings but are either run by an ai deity of sorts that grants efficiency bonuses but bans further research into ai and robots, or one where people stay organic but use machines extensively as tools or sorts(think a floating mass of nanobots for everything in day to day life which is controlled directly by their owners). These are just vague ideas that may or may not make any sense but my general gist is that this is one of those mechanics that's very underutilized despite the tools being already there to give it a massive boost and add a lot of choice value to the game.
I think one of the biggest missed opportunities is for the dark routes to be taken in most of these. All of them are pretty soft ball. That's not bad, per se, but does make them feel flat. For me I'd like to see some detail added to genetic ascension and cloning in particular. Cloning is one of the greyest areas of biological sciences as it lets you manufacture people en-masse. That is fertile ground for some terrifying options. Getting options for how we use them and why would be interesting. Maybe make a dichotomy between using the cloning vats for improvements vs using them for making new prisoners with jobs. I'd love to see both positive and negatives of tech be brought up.
Beware of bloating the same so much that it becomes unplayable. I had this issue with my board game designs. "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add but when there is nothing left to take away."
@@ryankilhenny3236 I mean, that's a good quote but the problem is one can apply it to the original pong game, when anyone would admit that it was not a perfect game. Bloat is a big issue of course, but I don't think it's a problem in terms of ascension. After all, its inevitably just going to fall down to one choice.
@@konee0 No? I know this is kind of a humourous statement but even for xeno compatibility you need to mod and implement characteristics on every single species and all immigrants repeatedly in those special projects. Not to mention xeno comp can ruin specific species builds unless you homogenize. Moreover, it basically kills any chances of an endgame on a midrange system.
My clone ascendant psionic playthrough is so much fun atm. Went tech heavy materialist, militarist with technocracy and meritocracy oligarchy. Swapped temporarily to spiritualist to pick up psionics and then back to materialist. My psionic clone admirals are devastating even at level one and I got cybrex as precursor and a neighbour empire had a shattered ring. Now my ringworlds are science printing machines and my ecumenopolis forgeworlds are effectively printing fleets. Conquering fallen empires and relocating their pops to my ring worlds and forgeworlds. Life is good.
I think it's worth keeping in mind that ascensions can intermingle to some degree and have a few other perks. Being able to integrate hivemind pops into your empire has value. Certain ascensions play really well with other ascensions. Bio can make the best use of Psionic traited pops and Borg can make the best use of Bio trained pops, you just have to actually get your hands on them. Also, Borg Overtuned is playable and quite good. I'm a bit of a Borg fan boy its very fun
Another way to get Psionic Theory is to roll the Zroni Precursor, though that's far from guaranteed. I got it in my first 3.6 playthrough, and I am absolutely digging the new changes to the Ascension path. Even rolled papa Nurgle off the bat. And I do like that the different patrons offer different playstyles. Khorne on top of Become the Crisis and Fanatic Purifiers sounds extremely dangerous.
Cybernetic used to be my least favorite ascension, but now I think it's really cool. You kind of get the best of both worlds, and I love the idea of picking custom biological and machine traits to pursue specializations.
I like Genetic Ascension because of the pop growth and because I like rolelaying cancer and aging being gone through biotechnology. Also because it allows me to make the perfect livestock species.
As a hive mind TRYING to be peaceful, and also win by vassalizing and integrating all empires, genetic ascension was a must have. One I didn’t realize would fix my unable to switch off livestock option
How does the new clone vats work? Is there no more building, and can a species both grow and assembly with the perk? And most importantly is it anyway compatible with the clone soldiers origins?
I have to agree with Psionic being the strongest at this stage. Part of this is also in overall build, with the Psionic origin requiring you to be Spiritualist, which in turn will drive your unity production and further hasten your ascension. However, I've also hit Psionic pretty well on a trade build. Basically, I use my trade to drive unity production, then Masterful Crafters to fund my researchers. In mid/late game, I switch my trade to producing Consumer Goods, drop Masterful Crafters for something more 'pew-pew' and swap my Consumer Goods factories to producing Alloys, thereby skyrocketing my Alloy production. Bit difficult to micro and certainly doesn't work all the time (like when I get stuck between Machine Empires, yay), but when it does work it can be quite powerful. Trade is very versatile because you can use it for pure credit generation, consumer goods or unity with minimal work to shift it back and forth. The idea of the trade build is to use Trade for Unity until you have the Ascensions that you want, then swap to Consumer Goods so that your factory worlds can turn into forge worlds, thereby funding the construction of a fleet. Once you have a massive fleet, you can switch your trade to pure credits if you feel the need to pay upkeeps.
I guess the Leviathan gene mod traits are worthless then, but I think the Brain Slugs should at least get some kind of mention, they're pretty rare but more accessible thanks to the Teachers, at least in single player games
Man, overtuned cyborgs are the most OP ascension ever, waaaaay superior than the other three. Not only you can make true monstrosity pops with +80% resource output by stacking traits, but you can also "assimilate" organic pops from other species, so they become cyborgs too and you can specialize and micro them to become unstoppable on their role. But the top tier-pinnacle civ will be a megacorp of overtuned cyborgs: they can stack 50% trade value from pop jobs, plus all the hiperspecialized planet resource galore from your overtuned worker-cyborg plus a ton of research speed-unity from your specialized leaders plus the overtuned edict and you'll be steamrolling all the other civs in your galaxy in no time... hell, I had to turn up crisis diff from 5x to 10x because by the time it happened it was a joke for my civ build. Cheesy AF. Just try it.
@Montu Thank you for your videos! May I request if you could make chapters for your videos? They are quite lengthy and the segmentation will definitely make it easier to digest.
Will say one thing that was missed with genetic ascension, is the damn the consequences edict which while it is unity heavy it also doubles the positive benefits of the overtuned traits giving you +90% research output.
Thank you for this video, It helps a lot. From my perspective is still a pity, that you can't fuse ascension paths like, lv 2 biologic and lv 1 psionic.
I have one major issue with this video. The other ones I have seen you put them in a tier list and as a visual learner it helps me keep track of what is good/bad. I realised halfway through this video that i didnt know remember where everything ranked./
I only show that tier list off at the end. The intention was to build "suspense". Sorry if that didn't work as intended, adding confusion was not the point
@@isuckatusernames4297 yeah, psionic shields are better than blackmatter shields And so damn expensive that even with blackmatter generators they're hard to afford
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe if you go psionic and want pop assembly from robots you can just use the parliamentary system to recoup unity loss of having robots.
Coming back to this. I have to wonder if the Cyborg additional trait slots (+2 total) is a mistake. I'd think it's difficult to have enough points (+2) for that extra choice to be useful. While Genetic is swimming in points (+7) and has only one additional slot. (Incl Tailoring +1 in both). It might have been purposeful, but they really feel like they didn't give any additional fuel to actually power an additional trait. Speaking of actually needing power for those traits.
did you include the 15% resource bonus for psionic pops from the holy covenenat federation's lvl 5 edict 'zro catalysis' into the resource output from psionic ascension?
Does anyone have any thoughts on what the best path for driven assimilators might be? They already have the cybernetic trait so is the path for that less valuable?
Does the energy upkeep increases for Cyborg traits mean Cyborg Metacorp traders would be a new meta? Usually my metacorp runs end up with energy in spades
I don't find the energy upkeep on borg traits as an inhibitor. Energy is pretty easy to boost, and once you have a Dyson up you can stack many of them on all your pops and still have heaps of surplus energy.
I do believe that Cybernetic ascension might be a bit better even than that, as there are a large number of Origins that prevent you from really benefitting from Bio Ascension or Synthetic Ascension. For example, Overtuned really won't want to be Synthetics but could easily take Cybernetic for the best of all worlds.
If you want to preserve powerful rulers the synth accession is best since machines don’t age. I imagine it would work great with the “under one rule” origin
Cybernetics is really great if you have multiple species to specialize. For example give the researcher species intelligent and logic engines for a real good research pop
Hi Montu. Big fan of your work. Just wondering what you think about vassalisation atm? I've started a thread in Steam where a bunch of players are frustrated with the current state of vassalisation. Single player games seem to degenerate quickly to one big massive blob against you (one Overlord and every other nation their vassal). What are your thoughts? Would you be open to doing a video on the current state of vassalisation in single player mode? Be great if you could use your influence to draw the developers attention to this aspect that some feel needs balance/adjustment.
Eater of world covenant seems bugged to me, every year I lose a pop+have an unmovable crater on my planets, then randomly my empire leader will get eaten (first one eaten was a double chosen) then randomly lose a planet. I've currently lost 2 planets :p. Eater of worlds kills your empire with a death by 1000 cuts. The negatives out weigh the positives by such a degree I may as well have just restarted when I accepted eater of worlds.
The youtuber Vain has a build for max pop growth using immigration attraction, xeno-compatibility, and synthetic ascension to "consolidate" the hybrids that occur. However, I don't know if that specific build can compete with genetic ascension given that you have to wait for pops to assimilate.
Sorry for bad english. Total organic pop asembly build (aka Lagbringer Corp.) now loks like knight of toxic god (+3 on planets, +0.25 per squre on keep) plus Permanent Employment civic (+2) plus Clone vats (+4.5) plus budding or Polymelic if lucky(+0.02 or 0.05 per pop)... with Vat-Grown +25% and +20% from medics... easy 14-15 pop asembly on small colonies.
What about Overtuned Cyborg Hivemind? I checked the traits and found a whopping -0.5 amenity usage for Cyborgs, which kicked my amenities on all planets into the stratosphere. I'm sure its possible to get amenity usage down to 0 as Hivemind by using Ascetic, the Cyborg Trait, Art Installation Megastructure and other bonuses. The reason I think Overtuned Cyborg is so good for Hiveminds is that Hivemind leaders are 20 years younger than normal leaders and you can use the +40 year leader livespan to "buy" additional Overtuned traits at the start of the game. I hope you will do a video on Cyborg Overtuned Hivemind one day. Will you do that? I'm interested if and how it can compete with Biological Ascended Hivemind.
Hey I went overtuned and I got the zroni so I was wondering is it better to go down psionic? the traits I have is preplanned growth, intelligent and augmented intelligence also mind over matter would be my second ascension perk.
Join Commander Sisko in Star Trek Fleet Command: wehy.pe/y/2/MontuPlays
Hey Montu, you didn't mention how Overturned allows you to start Incubators + Pre-Planned Growth, for up to +100% pop growth in the early game if you damn the consequences! (60% once the worlds start to fill up)
It's almost too many pops around!
But can you still make Psyborgs?
@@gabrieljoseozanan6989 Pretty sure with genetic ascension you can add Budding (+1 MPG/50pops), Vat-Grown (+25% pop growth speed) and/or Fertile (+30% pop growth speed) as well. Maybe not fertile though. So you can almost constantly have doubled pop growth compared to other empires
@@MorganSaph Psyborgs got removed.
Now Assimilation will remove one trait to add the other.
And indeed, Overturned Bio Ascension has very much outmatched pop growth, specially on hives.
Yo Montu i think you mathed wrong lol you wrote 15 instead of 25
The Flesh is Weak is the best for Megacorp, because you can increase Trade Value by 25% with "Trading Algorithms" to make your Space Cyberpunk fantasy real
But you lose on the 20% habitability trait :(.
@@momchilandonov void dweller
I love how my favorite ascension path, Psionic, went from the weakest to one of the best. By embracing the blessings of dark gods.
"Chaos claims the unwary or the incomplete. A true man may flinch away its embrace, if he is stalwart, and he girds his soul with the armour of contempt."
-from The Spheres of Longing
Inquisitor Gideon Ravenor
The Armour of Contempt by Dan Abnett, p. 3
@@BACbKa123 "and then the Inquisitor stubbed his toe, and said 'Ah damn it, that hurts' "
Fuck u. Now bio will sucks because wide empires have very large penalties. Nice, hardest for microcontrol ascencion will worse than fucking magic of whinning to devs, and sale race ass to shit from another dimension. Wp paradox.
P.s. overtuned I didn’t write because I won’t to buy a pack for this shit, I’m talking about starting from something like habitat/relic world.
Tzeentch: What can I say, except Just as planned.
@@sandygrungerson1177 good luck getting ravenor to stub his toe lmao
Psionics when it was first released: help me I’ve fallen and I can’t get up
Psionics post 3.6: bow mortals before my unlimited might for we are gods
Psionics 2016: Excuse me
Psionics 2022: Excuse
still kinda mid
You didn't mention the Durable trait for cyborgs, which halves your amenities requirements, thus freeing many pops and building slots on all your worlds. Best non-growth trait in the game imho. Also, base cyborg assembly is higher than robot assembly, and it is affected by gene clinics, which makes them quite decent in the midgame.
A spiritualist Cyborg empire could very well run no amenity generation whatsoever, other than what they get from the monument + leaders.
Even with just a Fan. Spiritualist, you can feed all amenities from a filled out Ring Segment with a single upgraded Gene Clinic and have enough leftover amenities to 100% the stability.
Imo it is probably the best trait , the driving matter for a hivemind. It completely get rid of the ineffective maintainer drone and improved global stability.
Also double jointed adds -10% housing Usage -25% resettlement cost and +15% Pop growth from resettlement at the cost of 1 pop point and pop pick +0.3 Energy Upkeep in my opinion the best overall trait not to mention cyborg traits and be combined with organic traits of the same use so you can get +20% research form jobs form 2 traits alone i say that cyborg and overturned gene routes are the best general builds people not looking to go through micro hell but you can design it that way if you want
@@gabrieljoseozanan6989 Spiritualist cyborgs just sound badass, I wanna run that now
It practically is a pop growth trait on the back of freeing up pops tbh
New Psionic Ascension: "You cannot imagine the beautiful bounty of Chaos."
Me, enjoying the bad Psionic without a Covenant: "Those things I'd never even wish to know!"
Based reference
Rylanor's Last Stand
Ahhhh the Ancient awakes
I really wish there was a point to being psionic without having to diddle around with covenants... I want my spiritualist elves to be the magical good guys of the setting and guardians of the galaxy from the endgame crises... But covenants always make me feel... Kinda gross, tbh.
@@Archris17 it would be great if there was a shroud benefactor from the ancient psychic precursors. Those were mostly heroic good guys and that should have left a strong covenant option. Imo paradox just went a bit too hard into the grim derp of 40k reference
Montu: Once you Breach the Shroud, you'll be able to Form a Covenant with...
CZcams: Little Ceasars Pizza and Breadsticks!
Oh no, the worst possible timeline...
@@MontuPlays The psionics are trying to out pizza the hut with that covenant
@@MontuPlays Sec to surgery he is turning her into Papa John's
Cant consent to be turned into a pizza
“Our pizzas are hot and ready!”
“How does it taste?”
“Hot and ready.”
“Wait, aren’t they made of warp dust and plague?”
“I said it’s *hot* and *ready!*
I'd like it if there was a benefit path for not taking a Shroud Covenant. Doesn't have to be as strong as the Covenants, but just something that supports you for not making a deal with a demon.
Yeah, something like an event chain about researching the covenant beings would be nice; maybe it could result in a boost to your own psionics or maybe intel on other empires potential covenants (and a way to undermine them)
Arguably, the benefit is that you get to roll again and again until you land The End of The Cycle.
Of course, why would you do such a thing?
The benefit is the lack of a crippling penalty and avoiding the bad events XD
Roleplay-wise it's really weird to me that a presumably religious empire would immediately ditch whatever their religion is to literally form a demonic pact. There should at least be an option to reject the Shroud beings as demons and instead enhance your people's innate power.
If it were up to me, I'd have a fifth proper Covenant called something like the Icon of Virtue that centers on strengthening your society (basically an order god, since we've already got fertility, knowledge, war, and prosperity gods), then an Abjure the Demonic option that rejects Shroud covenants entirely that would be less powerful but not have the costs either.
@@sirdrork8616 to be fair, most religions wouldn't feature the shroud in the first place since it's very clearly an extremely hard to reach place
Also world religions are rare, so I don't think any empire has one specific religion in the first place
Example, take earth's Christianity
It's many many different sects, those would only grow more numerous when you spread over different worlds
Also "literally a demonic pact" depends on the actual religion. Maybe they would consider it a divine pact, maybe they would misinterpret the creature on the other side as their own god, maybe the creature is just a minor fairy or angel that pales in comparison to the gods, or maybe it's not divine at all and is just quite literally a psionic being with an advantageous offer (and unexpected long term side effects in the form of brainwashing, at which point the ditching of the old religions wouldn't even be surprising)
Not to mention that you don't need the general populace to agree
Only your ruler and his staff need to sign the contract - farmer Jimmy's opinion on some backwater world won't matter, even in a democracy his representatives would potentially grasp for the power and disregard the happiness of his farm and family
Just woke up from a liver transplant this morning and Montu's video is like an absolutely awesome gift.
Thank you very much, sir.
I hope it went well and you recover fast.
Thanks very much for the kind word.
This will buy me 7-8 years, but I'm an old man anyway.
I hope you get well soon!
And that the video doesn't disappoint
Thanks very much, sir. I'm still in a lot of pain and drowsy because of the medication, but I think your video, thinking about returning to the game is helping me a lot.
Again, thanks very much.
Ayee nice dude rock on!
I'm so happy they're finally adding a Trade trait for Synthetics. Really awkward to go from a trade build and then ascend and have your entire economy crash.
The funny trading algorithms and thrifty combo
Yeah, having your founder thrifty soecies turn into basic bots which needed mod-ing was awful.
Another advantage of Bio with trade was using society points for tailoring. There'd be jobs creating soceity points as a byproduct of unity production so it was much easier, without delays for crucial engineering tech.
Finally many empires have an opinion malus on synth/bots so it was a disadvantage for trade and the crucial diplo.
I actually experimented with stopping at cybernetic and ignoring synthetic, but then also Ascension free strategy.
From the look of it, you give up too much now it's Ascension perk + tradition, rather than 2 perks.
It should also be noted that taking a specific path in knights of the toxic god can also give a guaranteed psionic theory research option. This is another path to no rng ascension.
I'll say, I'm surprised the Knights are so great as an origin.
I expected them to be a thing you do once and never again, but despite the hardships with their quest, the Origin is actually pretty solid.
@@gabrieljoseozanan6989 I'm close to despair. Getting their economy going is silly difficult!
Knights was my favourite thing until 3.6... that god just cannot be killed now, it's unbelievably resilient and it fucks off to the other side of the map making your ship useless because they can't fire
@@ceraphidlivefield2585 I was struggling a bit yesterday killing it in my multi-player game with my buddy. Wiped out a couple of my mercenary fleets of 300k before I got annoyed and slammed it with close to a million might at once and... it worked? With very few casualties at that. Really weird. Basically, it runs away from you when you enter the system instead of charging you now so it's beam weapon and small arms fire can pepper you well before you get into range. If you outnumber him by a metric ton, the fire is spread between all your fleets making it more manageable. That's what it seemed like to me at least
@@FiftyStates5 surround it from all sides
Genetic ascension is actually really, really good. Problem is that it's incredibly micromanagement heavy. Combine that with slavery builds and you can very easily make up for the resource output being low.
But in return, you will have 50-70% more pops than ANY empire in the game if you do things right.
In endgame, growth barely matter. Conquer is the best.
It's a build type that requires a lot of thought and deliberate management of pops, both settlement and pop production which annoys a lot of players. Which is why it always gets downgraded.
The problem is, the AI puts pops into jobs where they have no genetic bonus. I find my researchers mining, and my miners researching. The game takes long enough without burning 100k energy from time to time juggling pops between colonies.
@@ctrlaltdebug that's why you have to specialize you'r planet at all cost to mitigate this issue. It would be a good thing if they add some rules in the AI to make them try to give job related to their trait if possible. But i think it will make some issues and could make unemployement problem for empires who don't do those gen things. But they definitely should try to give us better ways to manually manage our filthy slaves, i mean rightfull and lovely pops... HEM
@@tungleson7066
More pops = Good economy
Good economy = Good fleets
Man psionic feels like its 5x more fleshed out than any other ascension path. I wish they would show even half this much love to the other 3.
I'm a genetic main and honestly psionic deserves the love they've been the galactic punching bag basically forever
Genetic ascension would be good if they had a 'Sort by Job' function is the gene editor. You could make your Growth pops template and force every thing to produce those, make all your job templates, and then convert everything over to those in a few seconds. Then you can simply update each job with ideal pops every decade or so after that, taking advantage of the -50% project cost.
It's still really fun on a hive mind.
I Had to micro my planets into specialisations For each sort of pops, like an only science Or only industry. It was incredibly micro heavy and slightly annoying as i had some mixed planets but in the end it was pretty brutal AND had to set up a forced growth on it so it wouldn't produce someone else there. (I was playing Overtuned) So it was a clusterfuck of traits and micro (I like micro but dear god)
A QoL update for that would make my life a lot easier
@@federicofiordelli104 little late but if you would like a tip just restrict migration on all your pops save a "ruler" template let that one go anywhere but make all the others stay where you put them it lets you keep your immigration going but you only have to occasionally toss around a pop or two to seed the correct template
Obviously if you play ethics that restrict this it doesn't work but it makes your life easier if you can use it
@@alexdraco9926 Thanks king, i tend to play materialist tech rushes or Xenophobe pop growth so it should work
@@UberFoX Amazing. I've wanted this for years. Love me some overtuned hives.
I'm so happy that Psionic is now one of the most powerfull ascension path. It has always been my favorite.
Some additional points worth mentioning:
1. Psionics still can use robot pop assembly, just outlaw the AI once you have researched synths and the best AI combat computers.
2. IMO, Nurgle is meh. Yes, you get a sweet pop growth bonus, but you loose trait picks for your pops, which means less efficient pops.
3. Knights of the Toxic God also get Psionics research as a reward from one of the quest events.
4. Synthetically ascending now converts all your pops to synths (since the cyborg trait is now for a different ascension), which means once you complete the project you will be left with 0 organics on your world, so synths will have to work a bit to get back their organic growth.
5. Wkth pisonics, Knights of the Toxic God knight policy, Charismatic leader trait (immortalize him as your god's chosen), some Galactic Community resolution, fanatic spiritualist bonus and Cutthroat Politics civic, you can lower your Edict Upkeep by -95%. On ALL edicts, including ambitions and strategic goods ones.
Been doing Psionic since forever. I always try and get my starting leader (me) to immortality before dying of old age and I love how you get the strongest ships in the end. It's nice that it's become better and better.
you get the strongest ships throughout the game due to admiral trait. thats why psionic has been the meta for a while
@@azzor4134 I wish it still gave the evasion bonus though. I will miss high evasion destroyers.
Im glad im not the only one who does this
gene ascension’s pretty cool
Gene is pretty cool yea
Let's create some Ubermensch and purge the Xenos
Hail der Übermensch
if only it gave all your pops a special trait on its leaders too.
@@isuckatusernames4297 i feel like the extra traits make up for it tho
Still wish hive minds could become psychic. But I guess I'll take what I can while my machines can finally properly ascend.
Agreed. The game even implies that their hive mind is based on a psionic connection, so idk why the hive wouldn’t eventually explore that and extrapolate, launching them down the psionic ascension pathway.
@@Notlordstark "We both hunger, Devourer. Let's feast on the galaxy together!" Pretty much what I hope for.
@@Notlordstark I guess innovation comes out of a need to innovate and an unified collective mind doesn't feel the need to research on psyonics since there's not really an "other" as much as a drone, and those drones are already under one singular and collective mind
@@miguelpadeiro762 why wouldn’t a hive mind feel the need to innovate? It’s population grows, uses up resources, it presumably has some level of curiosity about physics and biology, and it will always strive to make its own life (/lives) better.
@@Notlordstark I didn't mean it doesn't need to innovate, just not on the specific field of psyonics
I wish synthetic evolution could be done where instead of ascending into big clunky robot bodies, we make synth bodies like replicants in blade runner.
Yeah. The easy way to do it would be to just have a tradition that lets you pick organic portraits for your synths, similar to the tradition for genetically ascended empires.
I would actually prefer to have stylized synth portraits for every species class, for example androids that look like "perfected" and idealized humans, but that probably requires too much time, effort and money for Paradox to do it. Although, to be honest, I would even pay for a cosmetic DLC along such lines if it was done well.
I think you forgot to mention the 'Damn the Consequences' edict that comes with Overtuned origin, which doubles the bonuses from the yellow traits. You can get +60% research output from Elevated Synapses + Augmented Intelligence. Pair that with Erudite for +80% research output even before you consider leader bonuses. Downside is immense unity upkeep for the edict along with food/goods upkeep penalties--making it an even later-game powerboost than Synthetics.
laughs in gigastructures
Psionics is still limited to a war-like or aggressive playstyle but the psionic admiral trait was also absolutely gutted - the reason psionic war rush was so powerful was that early evasion bonuses were absolutely brutal. 15% evasion is so, so much better than 10% shield hardening. Non-aggressive psionics did get buffed but non-aggressive psionics was never the meta way to play that ascension path. Rushing psionics by using 10(!) years of society research and no tradition picks also hurts your economy - missing out on hydroponic bays which allow you to minimize farmer jobs and early powerful tradition picks which immediately help your jump start your economy. Psionics may be a decent bit stronger coming out of a conquest but the tools given to them to perform that conquest in the first place got nerfed. Cybernetics also has the inverse problem of synthetic where they want to be building robots early for growth, but those robots will not be receiving any benefits from the ascension path.
I have been playing a cybernetic Megacorp Empire on the Beta Branch since last week and the numbers really got out of hand when I saw that trait pop up.
My current game is Shared Burden Xenophile Cyborgs with lots of Subjects. It's pretty fun, I don't have the strongest navy yet, but I can strongarm the whole galactic community with my ~2.5x diplomatic power, and I have a stupendously big economy
After seeing what 5%(10%) output does, the Instrument of Desire is my goto. The downside is almost forgettable, especially compared to the other gods.
whats the downside ?
@@BasicLib more pop upkeep, meaning more food & consumer good upkeep, literally un-noticeable lategame
by far the least intimidating downside
So far I've been playing the genetic ascension. I actually like that it allows me to have for each planet a specific species go get the maximum out of it. Even if it needs quite some micro management.
Some QoL for that would be amazing.
Overtuned psionic empire was probably one of the most fun playthroughs I've had. I was blessed by RNGesus with a ruined matter decompressor, and got the contingency relic. Ended up with 3 of these, and just made all my worlds into Ecumenopolis, one ring world for food, the rest of science, with industrialist civic... dear god... my science, alloy, and consumer goods output was absurd lmao also really good pop growth speed from incubators and pre-planned growth, ontop of the Ecumenopolis bonuses to growth. Then adding Damn the Consequences Edict, once I had a sufficient amount of lifespan increasing techs, to further boost the growth increase and science output to 60% total each, JUST FROM THE TRAITS! created one of the most broken long-game playthroughs I've ever had.
I like how complex the like button bits have gotten
I don't want to repeat previous segments, so I've had to diversify!
Complex that like button!
The fact that nor cybernetic nor synthetic ascension give you ane unique armies is a huge bummer. I know that ground combat is the least important and developed part of stellaris, but it really sucks from role play standpoint (
They should have access to the mega warform
@@tartine2463 yeah, or old android army for synts and some kind of cyber ops. At least something to make them more destinct then a bunch of numerical bonuses.
Synthetics being very good spies would be cool.
If that empire joins the contingency then the contingency doesn't have to learn how to infiltrate your empire.
Oh this game is awesome, the amount of choices!
I think the reason you are the only stellaris CZcamsr that I watch is because of a few reasons, Well planned out videos filled with really useful information and genuine opinions while also clearly just enjoying a brilliant game.
Keep up the good work Montu, everyone is watching!
Hello, I have 400h of Stellaris more or less and your video is exactly the type I'm looking for. Thank you for the very clear informations with a visual always in synergy with what you're saying. Very informative. Thanks you man.
With overtuned and teachers of the shroud being such powerful origins, mechanist needs a boost as well to maybe get a boost towards cybernetics and/or synthetics (or perhaps have one origin towards each?).
Cyborgs robot perks give pops more energy cost.
MegaCorps Empires:
Oh no
Anyway
I think my favorite part about Cybernetics is that because you can go into it so early, you can finish the project and tradition tree before you get Gene Tailoring making half of your entire tradition tree functionally useless.
The 10% finisher effect is cute, but Psionics gets twice that with a building and their pop growth isn't nerfed randomly (seriously, 2.25?)
You should do another series of military fleets test with the combat changes. Im curious how torpedo cruisers with screen destroyers will perform
in general
That bonus anomaly research speed is certainly gonna be useful by the time you unlocked synthetics...
27:00 I'm just visualizing a cyborg setting in a chair, eyes closed, doing algorithm trading of shares, currencies, or futures, using his Gordon 3.5 implant via wi-fi.
"Let me just log in real quick. Zzzzzzzzz..."
There is something I am curious about. Would Radiotrophic remove the energy upkeep from cybernetic traits? That's something that could be managable if you turn everything into a tomb world but then you lose tons of energy when you create ecumenopoli.
My favorite game I ever played was when my fanatic materialist empire rolled the psionic precursors, and got a free roll of the tech once finished. I didn’t know materialist/psionic was possible until then
Congratulations on 90k subscribers, Montu!
Hey thanks, only 10k left till we get that play button!
The "like button" prompt getting more and more absurd continues to be a fantastic recurring gag
Yeah I played Lithoid Subterranean Terravore last night and went genetic. I like the way the new ascension perk works personally.
I'd say that there's actually more benefit to disengagement chance now that you're not rolling it as often. With lots of rolls, even a low chance will happen reasonably often; when you only get a couple of chances, you have to make them count.
Purifier cyborgs can unlock organ harvesting which gives a good pop growth boost as long as you're purging somewhere in you empire. Which isn't something very hard to keep up as purifiers.
I've always liked going genetic ascension because pops of my species in other empires end up getting psionic and cybernetic traits (sometimes both!). I can then start cloning super pops.
Did you know it’s technically possible for a synthetic empire to become a machine intelligence.
If your vassal synthetically ascends, and you integrate them and place them under AI servitude, then they will be placed into absolute servitude to their new organic masters. If you get unlucky (or in this case lucky) you can have a machine uprising: meaning that an empire that was once an organic empire is now a machine intelligence and possibly even determined exterminators if you have your cruelty points at the max and you have them with domestic protocols (for some reason machines with domestic protocols are more likely to become determined exterminators or driven assimilators)
Just played a Psionic Cyborgs game. Absolutely mad powerhouse species. Cleansed the galaxy of every other species by the end lol
May I interest anyone in the Overtuned Psionic option?
Montu kinda mentioned it, in that Overtuned doesn't force you into Bio, and having rolled an Overtuned start into Zroni precursors was hilariously powerful.
Anyway, I always considered Psi the best because their leaders were so clearly superior to the alternatives, IMHO. The governor and leader traits especially.
While Psi looks even stronger now I'm not particularly happy that so much of the power has been tied into the covenents, that's not really how I envision Psi ascension going most of the time. Mah immersion and so on... :P
I also can't help but wonder why Telepaths were a separate thing to begin with instead of upgrading Enforcers into something not terrible. Feels like a missed opportunity, and Enforcers already scales with planet development.
Overtuned Cyborgs are pretty cool as well. Let's you "triple dip" on focused traits you start with and you have an amazing amount of trait points (not hive, "regular" empire).
@@AsgeirAakre With Cyborgs, that might be the best option. But I'm sure it can be managed with some other Origin.
Hey Montu this is an awesome video. I'm a new player and have been binging these, now I'm super excited whenever I see a new upload. Do you have any plans to re-de the Psionic Democratic Crusaders meta build? If not, can you tell if it can still be done on 3.6, and if we should take Teachers of the Shroud or still take Aquatic? And how would the two versions fare against each other? Keep up the great work m8 :D
An underlooked differentiating aspect of the different paths is their relative ability to make good use of each other's pops/leaders. Psychic pops and leaders are great, but can occur "in the wild" and if a genetic ascension empire gets their hands on them they can incorporate them into their empire without issue. Cybernetics can't (usually) coexist with psionics, and synths can neither be psychic nor have presapient traits. In theory a psychic empire can nab the pops of a genetic empire and assimilate them just fine, but the fact that the genetic empire can theoretically have access to psychic pops within the first decade via contact with caravans and some other sources makes the balance of power solidly with the genetics in this way.
As an example, as a genetic empire I'll often make one-planet vassals out of psychic pops engineered for longevity and other leader traits, make them scholariums/prospectoriums/bulwarks, then farm them for leaders.
I like psionic because it offers something unique.
The shroud.
Every other accension path is just a number increase.
The shroud adds more game play.
I feel that ascensions need to be expanded upon. They're such an integral part of every campaign but they all feel so... railroady? There should be more ways to ascend in the same general way.
For example, on a small scale, genetic ascension needs to have significantly less need for micro and should have some basic automation options or large-scale template options.
On a large scale, every ascension should get alternate paths, like genetic ascension but instead of adding relatively tame traits a species can start modifying themselves to dark extremes with both benefits and weaknesses(like overtuned but on lots of steroids).
Psionic should have a path that focuses on inward perfectionism as individuals and empathy instead of telepathy, focusing on the rejection of the shroud while improving through their own prowess. Refusing to accept the shroud as gods and instead striving for divinity yourself, leads to a slower start but heavy gains towards the end. Ascension of the mind while keeping individuality and replacing psi corp style buildings with "improvement centers" of some kind where people from all over the planet come to undertake journeys of self discovery and find greater meaning and skill in their lives. There's a lot of flavour oppurtunities and interesting scenarios that can be made with this i feel.
Maybe even some kind of direct conflict with the shroud. Though it can be argued spiritualism in general needs a major rework with multiple religions and maybe even multiple ideologies per religion with spiritualist empires having some advantages in their type of religion. Hell, I'd love an imperium of man-style situation where our leader(s) is an extremely powerful psionic(maybe something even beyond chosen one) who hates the shroud gods and there are plans where you can damage or destroy the shroud entirely while the shroud itself manifests and corrupts other empires to destroy our empire. This could be a corresponding origin to the second psi ascension, as opposed to teachers of the shroud, paralleling it as now the teacher is a leader who has come from the species itself instead of far away teachers communicating through dreams, and offers a path to become like him instead of slaves to them(and ofc there's all kinds of ways to rp this as both evil or good depending on other aspects of your empire).
Synthetic where instead of turning into machines, we instead get to stay as entirely organic beings but are either run by an ai deity of sorts that grants efficiency bonuses but bans further research into ai and robots, or one where people stay organic but use machines extensively as tools or sorts(think a floating mass of nanobots for everything in day to day life which is controlled directly by their owners).
These are just vague ideas that may or may not make any sense but my general gist is that this is one of those mechanics that's very underutilized despite the tools being already there to give it a massive boost and add a lot of choice value to the game.
I think one of the biggest missed opportunities is for the dark routes to be taken in most of these. All of them are pretty soft ball. That's not bad, per se, but does make them feel flat.
For me I'd like to see some detail added to genetic ascension and cloning in particular. Cloning is one of the greyest areas of biological sciences as it lets you manufacture people en-masse. That is fertile ground for some terrifying options. Getting options for how we use them and why would be interesting. Maybe make a dichotomy between using the cloning vats for improvements vs using them for making new prisoners with jobs. I'd love to see both positive and negatives of tech be brought up.
Beware of bloating the same so much that it becomes unplayable. I had this issue with my board game designs.
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add but when there is nothing left to take away."
@@ryankilhenny3236 I mean, that's a good quote but the problem is one can apply it to the original pong game, when anyone would admit that it was not a perfect game.
Bloat is a big issue of course, but I don't think it's a problem in terms of ascension. After all, its inevitably just going to fall down to one choice.
There is already a tool for automating your genetically ascended pops, at least.
It's called Xeno-compatibility XD
@@konee0 No? I know this is kind of a humourous statement but even for xeno compatibility you need to mod and implement characteristics on every single species and all immigrants repeatedly in those special projects. Not to mention xeno comp can ruin specific species builds unless you homogenize.
Moreover, it basically kills any chances of an endgame on a midrange system.
My clone ascendant psionic playthrough is so much fun atm. Went tech heavy materialist, militarist with technocracy and meritocracy oligarchy. Swapped temporarily to spiritualist to pick up psionics and then back to materialist. My psionic clone admirals are devastating even at level one and I got cybrex as precursor and a neighbour empire had a shattered ring. Now my ringworlds are science printing machines and my ecumenopolis forgeworlds are effectively printing fleets. Conquering fallen empires and relocating their pops to my ring worlds and forgeworlds. Life is good.
I think it's worth keeping in mind that ascensions can intermingle to some degree and have a few other perks.
Being able to integrate hivemind pops into your empire has value.
Certain ascensions play really well with other ascensions. Bio can make the best use of Psionic traited pops and Borg can make the best use of Bio trained pops, you just have to actually get your hands on them.
Also, Borg Overtuned is playable and quite good.
I'm a bit of a Borg fan boy its very fun
Another way to get Psionic Theory is to roll the Zroni Precursor, though that's far from guaranteed.
I got it in my first 3.6 playthrough, and I am absolutely digging the new changes to the Ascension path. Even rolled papa Nurgle off the bat.
And I do like that the different patrons offer different playstyles. Khorne on top of Become the Crisis and Fanatic Purifiers sounds extremely dangerous.
Cybernetic used to be my least favorite ascension, but now I think it's really cool. You kind of get the best of both worlds, and I love the idea of picking custom biological and machine traits to pursue specializations.
I like Genetic Ascension because of the pop growth and because I like rolelaying cancer and aging being gone through biotechnology.
Also because it allows me to make the perfect livestock species.
As a hive mind TRYING to be peaceful, and also win by vassalizing and integrating all empires, genetic ascension was a must have. One I didn’t realize would fix my unable to switch off livestock option
How does the new clone vats work? Is there no more building, and can a species both grow and assembly with the perk? And most importantly is it anyway compatible with the clone soldiers origins?
I have to agree with Psionic being the strongest at this stage. Part of this is also in overall build, with the Psionic origin requiring you to be Spiritualist, which in turn will drive your unity production and further hasten your ascension.
However, I've also hit Psionic pretty well on a trade build. Basically, I use my trade to drive unity production, then Masterful Crafters to fund my researchers. In mid/late game, I switch my trade to producing Consumer Goods, drop Masterful Crafters for something more 'pew-pew' and swap my Consumer Goods factories to producing Alloys, thereby skyrocketing my Alloy production. Bit difficult to micro and certainly doesn't work all the time (like when I get stuck between Machine Empires, yay), but when it does work it can be quite powerful. Trade is very versatile because you can use it for pure credit generation, consumer goods or unity with minimal work to shift it back and forth. The idea of the trade build is to use Trade for Unity until you have the Ascensions that you want, then swap to Consumer Goods so that your factory worlds can turn into forge worlds, thereby funding the construction of a fleet. Once you have a massive fleet, you can switch your trade to pure credits if you feel the need to pay upkeeps.
I guess the Leviathan gene mod traits are worthless then, but I think the Brain Slugs should at least get some kind of mention, they're pretty rare but more accessible thanks to the Teachers, at least in single player games
Man, overtuned cyborgs are the most OP ascension ever, waaaaay superior than the other three. Not only you can make true monstrosity pops with +80% resource output by stacking traits, but you can also "assimilate" organic pops from other species, so they become cyborgs too and you can specialize and micro them to become unstoppable on their role. But the top tier-pinnacle civ will be a megacorp of overtuned cyborgs: they can stack 50% trade value from pop jobs, plus all the hiperspecialized planet resource galore from your overtuned worker-cyborg plus a ton of research speed-unity from your specialized leaders plus the overtuned edict and you'll be steamrolling all the other civs in your galaxy in no time... hell, I had to turn up crisis diff from 5x to 10x because by the time it happened it was a joke for my civ build. Cheesy AF. Just try it.
@Montu Thank you for your videos! May I request if you could make chapters for your videos? They are quite lengthy and the segmentation will definitely make it easier to digest.
RIP synths and cyborgs I guess. Psionics glow up has been INSANSE. From hardest to get to and kinda weak, to easiest to get and bonkers powerful.
Determined Exterminator robots can now take Synthetic ascension path ,which is awesome
Will say one thing that was missed with genetic ascension, is the damn the consequences edict which while it is unity heavy it also doubles the positive benefits of the overtuned traits giving you +90% research output.
Thank you for this video, It helps a lot. From my perspective is still a pity, that you can't fuse ascension paths like, lv 2 biologic and lv 1 psionic.
You didn’t mention the massive empire size reductions that hive minds get from Cybernetic
I have one major issue with this video. The other ones I have seen you put them in a tier list and as a visual learner it helps me keep track of what is good/bad. I realised halfway through this video that i didnt know remember where everything ranked./
I only show that tier list off at the end. The intention was to build "suspense". Sorry if that didn't work as intended, adding confusion was not the point
I really enjoy overtuned with cybernetics for some reason. It's just very fun to have all those different trait options.
Honestly I'm fairly happy for all the changes. I do wish genetic wasn't so painful and micro heavy.. a block on research etc etc
If you haven't already you should look at Overtuned + Cyber ascension
Fun thing to note, psionic theory option can be guaranteed through toxic god origin too.
One of the things that shouldnt be forgotten is that psionic is the only ascension that gets ship parts with psi shields and psi jump drives
And the covenant compoents. Let's not forget those.
aren't they bassically better than anything else/on the same level as fallen empire ?
aren't they bassically better than anything else/on the same level as fallen empire ?
@@isuckatusernames4297 yeah, psionic shields are better than blackmatter shields
And so damn expensive that even with blackmatter generators they're hard to afford
The psionics have three paths, the knights put the psionic ascension in your deck prematurely, but ready already to investigate it.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe if you go psionic and want pop assembly from robots you can just use the parliamentary system to recoup unity loss of having robots.
Cant wait to cordyceptic drone hive mind the space dragon, then geneticly ascend and gene mod myself with dragon dna.
Coming back to this. I have to wonder if the Cyborg additional trait slots (+2 total) is a mistake. I'd think it's difficult to have enough points (+2) for that extra choice to be useful. While Genetic is swimming in points (+7) and has only one additional slot. (Incl Tailoring +1 in both). It might have been purposeful, but they really feel like they didn't give any additional fuel to actually power an additional trait. Speaking of actually needing power for those traits.
If I'm not mistaken, psionic ascension can get pop-assembly through the permanent service civic
Does your ranking take into effect the Damn the consequences edict for overtuned genetic ascension? 2x ing the bonuses sounds very appealing.
did you include the 15% resource bonus for psionic pops from the holy covenenat federation's lvl 5 edict 'zro catalysis' into the resource output from psionic ascension?
Does anyone have any thoughts on what the best path for driven assimilators might be? They already have the cybernetic trait so is the path for that less valuable?
I think whisperers are good too if you are more peaceful empire and telepaths cover up the stability debuff.
Does the energy upkeep increases for Cyborg traits mean Cyborg Metacorp traders would be a new meta? Usually my metacorp runs end up with energy in spades
I don't find the energy upkeep on borg traits as an inhibitor. Energy is pretty easy to boost, and once you have a Dyson up you can stack many of them on all your pops and still have heaps of surplus energy.
I do believe that Cybernetic ascension might be a bit better even than that, as there are a large number of Origins that prevent you from really benefitting from Bio Ascension or Synthetic Ascension. For example, Overtuned really won't want to be Synthetics but could easily take Cybernetic for the best of all worlds.
Genetic one is by far my favourite as I like to make warrior versions of species n special types for certain environments n cirucmstances
If you want to preserve powerful rulers the synth accession is best since machines don’t age. I imagine it would work great with the “under one rule” origin
Cybernetics is really great if you have multiple species to specialize. For example give the researcher species intelligent and logic engines for a real good research pop
Psionic also automatically applies to all your pops without needing to assimilate or tailor, but you can only have your own species right?
Hi Montu. Big fan of your work.
Just wondering what you think about vassalisation atm? I've started a thread in Steam where a bunch of players are frustrated with the current state of vassalisation. Single player games seem to degenerate quickly to one big massive blob against you (one Overlord and every other nation their vassal).
What are your thoughts? Would you be open to doing a video on the current state of vassalisation in single player mode? Be great if you could use your influence to draw the developers attention to this aspect that some feel needs balance/adjustment.
Eater of world covenant seems bugged to me, every year I lose a pop+have an unmovable crater on my planets, then randomly my empire leader will get eaten (first one eaten was a double chosen) then randomly lose a planet. I've currently lost 2 planets :p. Eater of worlds kills your empire with a death by 1000 cuts. The negatives out weigh the positives by such a degree I may as well have just restarted when I accepted eater of worlds.
If that 5th covenant tosses in some front row seats for what comes after the 50 year preshow, I'm in!
The youtuber Vain has a build for max pop growth using immigration attraction, xeno-compatibility, and synthetic ascension to "consolidate" the hybrids that occur. However, I don't know if that specific build can compete with genetic ascension given that you have to wait for pops to assimilate.
I'm having the usual crashing issues I have when a new update comes out. Hopefully, I'll be able to enjoy the game next week.
Sorry for bad english.
Total organic pop asembly build (aka Lagbringer Corp.) now loks like knight of toxic god (+3 on planets, +0.25 per squre on keep) plus Permanent Employment civic (+2) plus Clone vats (+4.5) plus budding or Polymelic if lucky(+0.02 or 0.05 per pop)... with Vat-Grown +25% and +20% from medics... easy 14-15 pop asembly on small colonies.
What about Overtuned Cyborg Hivemind? I checked the traits and found a whopping -0.5 amenity usage for Cyborgs, which kicked my amenities on all planets into the stratosphere. I'm sure its possible to get amenity usage down to 0 as Hivemind by using Ascetic, the Cyborg Trait, Art Installation Megastructure and other bonuses. The reason I think Overtuned Cyborg is so good for Hiveminds is that Hivemind leaders are 20 years younger than normal leaders and you can use the +40 year leader livespan to "buy" additional Overtuned traits at the start of the game.
I hope you will do a video on Cyborg Overtuned Hivemind one day. Will you do that? I'm interested if and how it can compete with Biological Ascended Hivemind.
I see your Peter Hamilton reference on your Hive mind world :D
25:34 I knew it! Overtuned Genetic is the best! (I don't gonna mention combining these with ,,Damn the Consequences'' edict)
I play shroud with permenant employment megacorp - lots of pop assembly for me (and you can go death cult shroud for +1 pop assembly....)
Hey I went overtuned and I got the zroni so I was wondering is it better to go down psionic? the traits I have is preplanned growth, intelligent and augmented intelligence also mind over matter would be my second ascension perk.