labgnome wrote: ↑Fri Aug 09, 2019 12:12 pm
Oberlus wrote: ↑Thu Aug 08, 2019 10:59 pmBTW, the game is full of techs that are not useful for one species or the other, lots of cool assimetries.
Currently, outside of exobots, every technology benefits every species because they get applied in addition to existing species bonuses. Those benefits may differ, but only in degree and ultimately everyone gets them. Exobots are literally the only technology that does not benefit certain species.
I dissagree:
- Planetary stealth techs are not useful for bad planetary stealth species because it would be suicidal to go for those techs when enemies only need to be 1 tier behind you on detection.
- Usually, it is not useful nor wise to go for several hull lines at the same time. We have different options not to always pick all of them (BTW, the same way we have different options to populate hostile environments).
I bet there are more cases.
It never made any sense to me that there would be a tech option that would only benefit species with certain environmental preferences, as species from any environmental preference would want to be able to take advantage of hostile environments
The thing is they can. Not using exobots but other means, like the growth line of habitability improvement or acquiring another species. And that's why it is interesting to me to have this kind of assymetries: it forces the player to play differently depending on the circumstances.
Some could say this discussion is a matter of opinions, instead of facts, and that it's an unfruitful discussion. But I really believe one way (assymetries) does do interesting things in the game, while the other (perfect symetry) does not, and that hence it is actually and objectively better to keep Exobots assymetrical.
I think that having them in separate themes means that different players will begetting them or not at different points.
Not really. At game start you see if you're gonna need this or that exobot type, and you go for it. And this rule applies to every empire no matter the starting species and seldom affected by environment availability (only in the case where you start with plenty of planets for your starting species will you not get the best suited exobot). If instead exobots are good only for some species and some starting settings, we know that rule won't be applied so systematically, and hence we get more gameplay diversity.
I mean if we are going to do this we should probably have a lithic species for Crystal with desert preference, that way you can go for whatever environment you are bad at.
Maybe with previous explanation you can now envision why this would be "bad" for gameplay diversity.
The idea of getting income from outposts has come up before.
I know, it was me. You may want to look for the thread and refresh your mind.
I think such an idea would be too hard to balance
Proofs or reasoning about why you think so?
I personally do not think that outposts should be able to provide income, as they are too much easier to get tan colonies.
Do you realise that that's exactly what would cause the introduction of alternative exobots variants to cover all possible hostile environments for all playable species?
If you don't like the outposts idea, you definitively should dislike the symmetrical exobot idea, for the sake of coherence.
Plus this idea is really off topic.
Absolutely not. It's related to OP's in that it pursues the same: access to hostile environments through artificial beings (robots). And it's relevant here in that OP's proposal has been contested, so it's a good time to bring in and weight it against OP's proposal.
Something that's an alternative suggestion, is instead of getting production from all of these, exobots stay the production species, and the others get research and influence.
Your orthogonal way of thinking sometimes surprise me
Research exobots... maybe a good idea. They would be selfreplicating machines that only care for research. Let's see what others think.
An influence exobot species... I don't know. How would be such machines, what are they doing to produce influence?