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[Telgin]

What consequences are there for ethics drift if you do that?  I don't recall really ever having tangible issues with faction happiness though, so if it causes a spiritualist faction to spawn it probably wouldn't really cause any problems.

[Dunamisdeos]

I'd gotten psychic on materialist before, and I don't remember having serious problems. Can't be all THAT much ethics drift.

Besides, mid-late game there are plenty of ways to counter it.

[forsaken1111]

Yeah that is how I got psionics in my empire.

Racket Caravaneers visited and had a party, resulting in a human/racket hybrid pop who was psychic. I encouraged them to breed and eventually got a scientist from them.

[MorleyDev]

Yay, a fallen empire awakened to fight The Unbidden! And they're one of the nice ones! And they joined my Federation! And...they just declared war on a nearby pathetic-level Hive Mind for subjugation? And my other federation members voted for it? And...The Unbidden just ate half their territory whilst they were busy conquering the Hive Mind?

...well, there was a moments hope at least. I rushed in to try and take them out quickly and got an L-Gate out of it at least, since my empire didn't spawn near any.

*sigh* Time to focus on building all the Gigastructures whilst the galaxy burns, I guess. Wonder if I can get my Alloy output high enough to build the Behemoth Planetcraft before they make it to me...

What, that Psychic Hypersiphon I built? Look, I'm sure it has nothing to do with the invading creatures from the Warp. I mean Wroud. I mean Shwarp. Shroud. Absolutely nothing at all.

[forsaken1111]

So I have discovered that Thrall worlds are awesome. My xenophobe empire now conquers enemy planets, bulldozes all of their accomplishments, converts it into a thrall world and enslaves them for eternity.

[Ivefan]

So I have discovered that Thrall worlds are awesome. My xenophobe empire now conquers enemy planets, bulldozes all of their accomplishments, converts it into a thrall world and enslaves them for eternity.

that sounds just like what i wanted to do last round before this DLC

[forsaken1111]

Fair warning, slave revolts are painful. Although that may be one of my mods. Hard to tell.

Either way I have stepped up my military presence on thrall worlds to at minimum 6 soldier jobs so that I have plenty of defense armies in case of revolt.

[acidia]

What's production output from the thrall world vs size?  I've never gone out of my way to make one because taking it for my main pop species always seemed more efficient.

[E. Albright]

How bad of an idea is opening L-Gates? Asking for a friend. Is it something my friend will regret doing before hitting a particular tech level/fleet strength? How much would my friend regret opening one when they have three in their territory and their biggest fleet is ~4k?

[Telgin]

There is a not insignificant chance your friend will regret it.  However, good things can happen too, so your friend may want to roll the dice.

Spoiler: Want to play safe? (click to show/hide)

I haven't yet seen the bad outcome, but my understanding is that you want a fleet roughly powerful enough to survive the Khan knocking on your door if you want to be completely safe.  If the Khan spawned inside of your borders.

Unfortunately, it's kind of hard to get those levels by mid game in 2.2.x.

[BurnedToast]

So it turns out the economy is broken and exploitable.

I assumed when you ran out of minerals, your alloy forges couldn't produce any alloy. That makes sense, right? You put minerals in, you get alloys out. But that's wrong - alloy forges magically produce alloy from nothing, and the minerals are just upkeep for the building.

See it turns out if you run out of minerals - the penalty is just 50% reduction in alloy (and consumer good) output. So, you can see where this is going - just build tons of alloy forges and they will run at 50% with no input, magically generating high price alloys for you from nothing. But it gets better, because the 50% penalty is additive - so let's say you manage to get +50% production, it would only effectively be a 33% penalty. The higher your production bonus, the lower the penalty.

But wait - it gets better! All you have to do is buy 100 minerals on the market at the end of every month, and the game won't realize you've run out, and your alloy foundries will run at 100% capacity off those 100 minerals no matter how many you have. Which means minerals and mines are optional. You never, ever need to build a single mine - or anything except alloy foundries. Carpet every planet with them, dump the high price alloys on the market and buy all the food you need. If you need to make buildings, pause - buy minerals - spend minerals.

I can't actually take credit for this idea - I actually considered it, but I thought there's no way the system could possibly be that stupid so I never tested it. But I read about it on a forum somewhere and sure enough, it really is that stupid.  I'm not even 100% sure this is an exploit, since every part of the system is working as intended. It's just really poorly designed.

[Telgin]

I saw that too, and while I haven't tested it personally... yeah, I can see how that happened from a design perspective.  I guess they didn't want alloy foundries and civilian industries to produce nothing during a mineral shortage, and probably didn't want to have the game guess which ones to shut down since it would have to be random.  Running at an output deficit proportional to your monthly deficit might work.

Not sure how to fix the exploit of only buying up just enough minerals to have more than 0 per month though.  You'd almost have to have it do the upkeep calculations per day instead of per month or something, which would only make it more annoying to exploit.  Or have production penalties if your balance would turn negative at the end of the month, but that's kind of overly punitive.

The funny thing about it is that it makes me wonder even more how the AI messes up so badly.  Supposedly the AI even cheats energy credits now if it runs out and has negative energy income, independent of difficulty levels.

[E. Albright]

There is a not insignificant chance your friend will regret it.  However, good things can happen too, so your friend may want to roll the dice.

Can you tell if the dice roll turned up something bad immediately? My friend plays on Ironman, but is a slimy savescummer, and random-outcome projects and other things where you can precisely predict when the outcome will happen are the sort of thing you can savescum on Ironman. Uh, or so I'm told.

[Telgin]

I'm pretty sure you know right away if you're going to have a bad time.  The bad time isn't subtle.

[Il Palazzo]

Carpet every planet with them, dump the high price alloys on the market and buy all the food you need.

I suspect you can do the same thing with food - buy 100 each month and never care for farms any more.