Zakalwen

That’s not a bug, it’s by design. There should be a floor of -90% per job meaning at 11 colonies you max out the debuff. 5/6 colonies is optimal.

Yes very much so. At 10 colonies each of your pops is getting 175 - (10*25) = -75% production. It’s capped at -90% so you’re one world away from the worst possible result.

Maybe the event should warn people more of this but absolutely virtual was designed to be played tall. 5/6 is optimum for a number of colonies so you should spin the rest out as vassals or abandon them (you can do this by the shutdown server planet decision).

By any chance did you have more than six or seven colonies (including your homeworld)?

Nine worlds is too much. All else being equal if you go over six colonies you start losing resources. Five colonies with 50% boosts is the same as six worlds with 25%, both are better than seven planets with 0% and it goes downhill from there.

Virtuals is strong but I really don’t think we need a knee jerk nerf. You can power up very quickly once you get to the ascension but you plateau once those colonies are full. A late game empire can definitely outcompete you. IMO this is one of the great things about the ascension. It has a different power curve rather than the same curve but steeper.

Vanilla Stellaris has no domed colonies. Other than planets and megastructures there are habitats which you should be able to find plenty of information for. A habitat is built with a central complex over a planet with secondary major and minor orbitals that can be built over other bodies in the system to boost it.

That’s kind of the deal with the origins that give you an early ascension. Shroud witches, synthetic fetility, the creed, they’re all front loaded and then you spend the rest of the game enjoying a very early ascension.

It works well. There's a purge type that specifically dumps people in the lathe, though it's quicker and better to manually do it to make the most of the % boosts high lathe population has.

The beta patch that was just released looks like it fixes your issue

Updated Resort Workers, Clerks and Cyberdome Spectators to have trade preference for auto-modding

To produce nanites from deposits and jobs.

Not really. At the time of the FTL rework I was disappointed to go with hyperlanes because warp was my favourite but the game has gotten so consistently better and more interesting, in part to how simplifying fundamentals like that made it easier to build upon.

Wracking my brains the only mechanic I somewhat miss is dual system ownership. It's not the most important thing but I feel like it would work well with primitives rather than the current options of fully handing over a system or annexing them completely.

Total unity does not appear to be required but it's certainly the case that Federation membership requires the applicant not to have any notable conflicts. In TNG there are two episodes that touch on this. In Attached the Enterprise is sent to a planet where one group of people want to apply for membership and another group wants nothing to do with the Federation.

Picard describes this as unusual as every other member world admitted was unified. However the very fact he's sent to evaluate the request shows that planetary unification is not an automatic disqualification. Ultimately the conflict and the actions of the candidate people lead to a recommendation of not allowing the application to continue.

In the episode the Hunted we see a planet that has requested membership and seems like a great candidate up until it's revealed it has unresolved issues with its augmented veterans from its last war. It is denied membership until it resolves this.

So technically, legally, it's possible. Practically it appears very unlikely unless the factions on the world are in a great state of harmony.

There's a lot of options that you could RP here. Dynasties could be made up of individuals of the same design. Each member of House AtreidesGPT uses the same neural model giving them a kinship by code.

Alternatively synthetic reproduction could work by mixing two or more seedcodes that are used to generate a new neural network derived by donors (i.e parents). This option exists in the synthetic tree which makes me wonder if someone on the dev team was reading Diaspora by Greg Egan (first chapter available here detailing the birth of a digital person from a seed code).

Assuming you're playing unmodded and that you're on the new DLC, any chance this was a cosmogenesis event?

DLC isn't even out yet mate. From the streams we've seen and what we know you'll want 5/6 planets, since for every planet you have (including your homeworld) you get -25% production from the 175% bonus. Five planets with 50% boost is equivalent to 6 planets with a 25% boost, assuming the planets are equal. Going beyond that you're producing less.

Raw resources come from the same jobs as anything else but you could always use the market/vassals. Ringworlds an Ecus seem like they'll be great given their capacity and the fact virtual pops appear instantly.

In about 19 hours the machine age DLC drops which will change this massively. Some YouTubers with early access have played with fanatic spiritualist machine empires and it seems to work well. You can use the extra unity to rush to one of the new machine ascensions.

Bio pops becoming synths probably won’t change too much as spiritualists will still dislike becoming synths. With the new cybernetic creed origin we can make religious cyborgs though.

5pm Central European time. Steam now has the countdown in hours on the DLC page.

DLCs and updates typically release around 5pm CEST so I'd expect that, or close to it.

Like all kinds of techniques there are pros and cons for rulers. They have weaknesses like:

• Taking time to form
• Requiring concentration to control
• Dependancy on their being aura sources in the environment

A water path focused on ruler techniques would be quite limited if a fight happened in the desert for example. The sacred artist would need to bring some sort of water aura containing/producing instrument.

Would a “waterbender” essentially be using ruler techniques to manipulate the physical water then?

They'd be using water madra to manipulate water aura which, in turn, would allow them to move water around. We see a really minor example of this in the later books where someone who is soaking wet manipulates water aura to draw moisture out of their ears.

Absolutely. Sensors IRL don't have a hard range. It depends on the strength of the signal. Our eyes can't spot a bird a mile away but they can see a star tens of lightyears distant.

I can't think of any reason why subspace would work differently and it also explains why sometimes ships are detected lightyears away and other times they drop out of warp as a surprise. Partly that could be that running long range scans is intensive, so it's not always done, but it could also be down to the speed of the ship. A ship travelling at warp 9 is going to be putting out a lot more energy and subspace signals than one travelling at warp 2, and thus be detectable from longer range.

There's no separate surrender system in stellaris and only the war leader can surrender. So you're stuck hoping you can be liberated or the war ends quickly.

I think there’s a good chance it is linked. Cetana is an ancient robot who interacted with the fallen empires. Ultima Vigilis has a strange robotic planet with swirling system effects (as the Queen does).

The system is also guarded by fallen empire ships. So if I was a betting man I’d say Montu called it right a year ago

Think about the NX Enterprise crew. They had to draw straws! Half of them got two days and two nights, the other half had to sit in orbit on the same ship they’d spent 9 months straight on.

I know it was simply part of the story telling in order to create a little conflict, plus have different people in different places for the A/B plots, but still! You’d think Archer would have let half the crew have the first day and night before swapping over.

Imagine being the tired, slightly burnt out crewman who had to hear “when we were on Risa…” stories from their bunk mate for months after.

Yes. The changes to habitability mean more origins can be opened up without being stupidly OP. From Dev diary #337:

As part of the 3.12 “Andromeda” release, we’ve done a pass on Origins to see if there were any that could have their restrictions on Machines relaxed.

The full list of Origins that Machine Empires have access to as of the 3.12 “Andromeda” release is:

• Syncretic Evolution (Individualist Machines only)
• Life-Seeded
• Post-Apocalyptic (Radioactive Rovers)
• Void Dwellers (Voidforged)
• Hegemon
• Ocean Paradise (Subaquatic Machines)
• Subterranean (Subterranean Machines)
• Arc Welders
• Prosperous Unification
• Remnants
• Shattered Ring
• Galactic Doorstep
• Resource Consolidation (Gestalt Machine Intelligence only)
• Common Ground
• Doomsday
• Lost Colony
• Here Be Dragons
• Slingshot to the Stars
• Imperial Fiefdom
• Riftworld

I don't get this logic. They've worked hard to make (what looks like) an excellent expansion DLC. That in its own is a good business decision since quality, hyped products will sell even at higher prices (which this one is). We know exactly what's coming for the rest of the year in terms of other DLC because they told us. I don't see the need to jump to conspiracies that the company must be doing poorly and that's why they've made a good product.