Stellaris Dev Diary #272 - The Pact is Signed and Spoken

[-Marauder-]

Don't forget the other sorts can honestly get their benefits quicker than ever before, at least if the videos I've seen from Montu are correct! So even the rush aspect of Psionics isn't as much an advantage as before.

Which is honestly why I don't understand the whole "wait and see approach". We can do the math. So why aren't we supposed to point out these issues during the betaw when they're so blatantly obvious?

- We know that all other Ascensions absolutely leave Psionic in the dust when it comes to pop generation. So Psionics would need to be actually BETTER in terms of benefits to compensate for this.
- We know the numbers, and Synths and co OUTPERFORM Psionics in almost all areas, and not by a small margin either when it comes to production and efficiency bonuses.
- The bonuses Psionics have either come with massive downsides, are really, really, really pointless like +10 intel which won't have much impact on anything that measures, or are too small such as Instrument of Desire. 10% sounds neat, until you remember that Synths have 10% inbuilt and can go up to 30% easily.


Also, unconfirmed. But someone claimed that the -15 Stability doesn't just lower your stability, but hard caps it at 85. If true, then this would mean that Whisperers is even worse than anyone here assumed. As you'd end up losing 9% production. (1 Stability roughly translates into 0.6% production). And all Stability above 85% would be wasted. So the amenities bonus and co would be self defeating.

 

[Bankipriel]

This looks pretty cool.

That being said, just as there are multiple Ascension paths exploring various facets of mechanical existence, I really wish there was an Ascension path for Spiritualists that didn't involve the Shroud, which as stated here, is eldritch, chaotic, and . . . shall we say, "not moral and/or good."

Where are the primal forces of order, justice, and mercy?

I think it would be a great addition to have an alternative Spiritualist path that rejects the Shroud as an "outer darkness" kind of spiritual chaos to be contained and avoided, rather than embraced, where psionics are considered heresy/evil.

Ideally, it would be nice to have a whole system of religious development, but even a binary choice between pro- or anti- shroud would be a great improvement.

 

[TheFunMachine]

Go forth and keep providing feedback!

​

These additions are sick! Any chance this means the AI might pick the end of cycle for the memes?

 

[Lorenerd11]

Slightly nerfed Efficient Cloning to give +1.5 assembly instead of +3

I think this is a bad change. Clones vats will now produce 4.5 pop assembly at most. That's only a little more than the 4 pop assembly from Roboticist jobs, and less than the 4.6 with the Mass-Produced trait.

And that's not even accounting for any of the other bonuses to mechanical pop assembly.

 

[Dayknight]

I think other than Whisperer it seems ok.

Like, other three's penality is understandable.
Eater - What do you expect from choosing war god? You have choice before if you don't want to be aggresive.
Composer - You are psionic anway, you can't do many genemodding already.
Desire - no severe penality

It's clear to see the playstyle they want to play;
Eater - aggresive gameplay
Composer - passive play(similiar effect of pacifist)
Desire - all-rounder(though slave recommended)

Telepath bonus makes psi building has more value than police office and support playstyle.
Eater - Allow more ship
Composer - +Hospital
Desire - +Entertainer

Whisperer seems nothing.
Technology is already everyone's playstyle.
+10% research speed is not that impactful than Desire's 10% job output.
+15% influence is also not that good. (I think this kind of bonus really should be flat bonus like +1, +2)
Telepath bonus is +lab, which is spammable.
Penality is waaay too severe. Like why?

I think Whisperer should be:
Espionage Expert OR Research Expert, not AND.
And Make penality and Telepath to correspond Expert.
e.g)Research Expert - -pop growth, +science production(+also research speed too)

By the way, why Rank 1 bonus is written as +xx from psi?
If this is actually bonus from psionic pop, why Whisperer isn't research from psi?
If not, Rank 0 and Rank 1 bonus is same effect, but better number. Why tooltip changed?

 

[Oculument]

Penality is waaay too severe. Like why?

Yeah that -15% stability is way too scary, it takes away everything given. Forget having low pop resource worlds or colonies that grow pops for migration. Every world would have to have a maxed capitol building and psi corps.

 

[MHC]

Which is honestly why I don't understand the whole "wait and see approach". We can do the math. So why aren't we supposed to point out these issues during the betaw when they're so blatantly obvious?

- We know that all other Ascensions absolutely leave Psionic in the dust when it comes to pop generation. So Psionics would need to be actually BETTER in terms of benefits to compensate for this.
- We know the numbers, and Synths and co OUTPERFORM Psionics in almost all areas, and not by a small margin either when it comes to production and efficiency bonuses.
- The bonuses Psionics have either come with massive downsides, are really, really, really pointless like +10 intel which won't have much impact on anything that measures, or are too small such as Instrument of Desire. 10% sounds neat, until you remember that Synths have 10% inbuilt and can go up to 30% easily.


Also, unconfirmed. But someone claimed that the -15 Stability doesn't just lower your stability, but hard caps it at 85. If true, then this would mean that Whisperers is even worse than anyone here assumed. As you'd end up losing 9% production. (1 Stability roughly translates into 0.6% production). And all Stability above 85% would be wasted. So the amenities bonus and co would be self defeating.

Synths had their growth pretty massively nerfed in the first version of the beta. And bio got a growth nerf in this one.

I also don't know the overall development plan for what psionic is "meant" to be starting in 3.6, but historically, the idea was that you could get it earlier than the others. So while it had smaller bonuses, those had much more game time to compound. That early lead could be used to grow your empire quickly via conquest. For example, an early conquest is basically a 100% boost to your economy in the short term and a huge lead that synths could only overcome via sheer numbers.

If the 4 paths are always equally valuable and valid, then they aren't interesting. I do think that the net impact of all the changes for psionics has not been great, but I haven't had enough time to actually play it and see rather than just speculate.

 

[Daryam]

The extra depth of the covenants looks like a really nice addition to the psy ascension. I was wondering if you were thinking about giving other ascensions also some/more unique buildings and game mechanics? Not necessarily for next patch or one after that just in general do you have more ideas about making the ascension paths more unique. The ascension paths in the beta are already a welcome change though, thank you for that

 

[-Marauder-]

Yeah that -15% stability is way too scary, it takes away everything given. Forget having low pop resource worlds or colonies that grow pops for migration. Every world would have to have a maxed capitol building and psi corps.

Bonus points. The random events, where you get slapped hard at times? Those still exists. Some of them have been outright buffed.

New Shroud Patron Random Events Overview

Hello fellow psionics! With the covenant rework just revealed I decided to go through the shroud events file and compile what the new random adverse events are. There is a price to pay after all, and it's better to know that price before signing...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Enjoy suddenly losing hundreds or thousands of alloys/unity for 2~ years.

Synths had their growth pretty massively nerfed in the first version of the beta. And bio got a growth nerf in this one.

I also don't know the overall development plan for what psionic is "meant" to be starting in 3.6, but historically, the idea was that you could get it earlier than the others. So while it had smaller bonuses, those had much more game time to compound. That early lead could be used to grow your empire quickly via conquest. For example, an early conquest is basically a 100% boost to your economy in the short term and a huge lead that synths could only overcome via sheer numbers.

If the 4 paths are always equally valuable and valid, then they aren't interesting. I do think that the net impact of all the changes for psionics has not been great, but I haven't had enough time to actually play it and see rather than just speculate.

Synths and Bio got buffs, which were then scaled back. The "nerf" here is TO A BUFF. The baseline growth for pop assembly was +3. With the buff it was +6. Now they scaled it down to +4.5. You can't proclaim them scaling back a buff as "nerf". It's still vastly stronger than it is on live.

You could get it "earlier" only recently, via teachers of the shroud and co. Before that, they were fairly even. So where do you get your "historically" from. All of that? It's gone. And early conquest is a viable strategy for all three paths.

Further, the downsides mentioned in this thread are only the peak of the iceberg. The old random events? Those still exist. https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...random-events-overview.1549295/#post-28552185
I hope you enjoy -20 to 40% happiness. Suddenly having to pay hundreds if not thousands in alloys or unity, and various other fun downsides, which are in no way justified by the rather small bonuses Psionics offers.

And I disagree, the 4 paths need to be similarly valuable so they remain viable. Stuff can be "super interesting" and it wouldn't matter if you couldn't actually use it because it's similarly to shooting yourself in both feet before taking part in a marathon.

 

[Draelian]

I keep reading that psi is the only ascent without penalties and people taking out the calculator are the whisperers without adding.

Honestly, it's time to make some clarifications:

All ascensions have penalties, robotics loses organic traits and biological is limited by the number of traits, not counting the time and headache that it is to modify each species, on top of that, some of its new traits require killing leviathans, entities unique and that if they were generated far from your empire you will probably never be able to see, rng on rng with a crazy race.

On the other hand, can anyone add up the total science a whispering smart empire can have, 10% smart + 10% psi, +10 science for their pact, which puts at least 30% who You can add more with some events.

That said, the psi who specialize to earn more thanks to their employer take more away, we can argue if they have gone overboard or not, but psi is not focused on population but on your empire, special buildings that improve it, ship components best and exclusive because, the other ascensions do not have this, our exclusive army is considered worse, but the warrior deity makes it the best, notice that too.

Yes, psi grows worse and our penalties for improving our empire are also penalties to it, the only exception being the xenophile deity, who has now gone from mutator to lover of naturalness (with that thing about taking away as many trait slots as the ones you normal technologies give), but even that deity is dedicated to empowering your empire.

In summary, improving psi is not about giving us new modification traits, although it could give us new perks for professions, as they did to basallos, but about improving our infrastructure and ships, so the best thing would be to give us more buildings or more components of psi ship, they could even give us access to a psi portals that work like wormholes in exchange for risking mutations and random events, a psi beacon where we can build the entrance and exit, to give an example of a plausible psi megastructure .

 

[Thiend]

Bonus points. The random events, where you get slapped hard at times? Those still exists. Some of them have been outright buffed.

New Shroud Patron Random Events Overview

Hello fellow psionics! With the covenant rework just revealed I decided to go through the shroud events file and compile what the new random adverse events are. There is a price to pay after all, and it's better to know that price before signing...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Enjoy suddenly losing hundreds or thousands of alloys/unity for 2~ years.

Synths and Bio got buffs, which were then scaled back. The "nerf" here is TO A BUFF. The baseline growth for pop assembly was +3. With the buff it was +6. Now they scaled it down to +4.5. You can't proclaim them scaling back a buff as "nerf". It's still vastly stronger than it is on live.

You could get it "earlier" only recently, via teachers of the shroud and co. Before that, they were fairly even. So where do you get your "historically" from. All of that? It's gone. And early conquest is a viable strategy for all three paths.

Further, the downsides mentioned in this thread are only the peak of the iceberg. The old random events? Those still exist. https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...random-events-overview.1549295/#post-28552185
I hope you enjoy -20 to 40% happiness. Suddenly having to pay hundreds if not thousands in alloys or unity, and various other fun downsides, which are in no way justified by the rather small bonuses Psionics offers.

And I disagree, the 4 paths need to be similarly valuable so they remain viable. Stuff can be "super interesting" and it wouldn't matter if you couldn't actually use it because it's similarly to shooting yourself in both feet before taking part in a marathon.

I think you're overstating the problem currently, but that's because 1. I think we need a day or two of testing to accurately assess how good it is now, because psionics isn't as easy to read as the other ascensions due to ship parts it unlocks and 2. I think this patch was a design change, and I think broadly speaking it's a good design now.

All that said, I agree, psionics should be superior to the other ascensions, not just tied. It's actually much harder to get than other ascensions, because even disregarding that it's a rare tech of similar tier to the other ascensions it's also made even worse if you aren't spiritualist. Spiritualist has an opportunity cost that no other ethic does - xenophobes aren't incapable of using aliens for anything, materialists don't lose anything in unity, and militarists aren't incapable of peaceful diplomacy. Spiritualist stops you from using robots effectively, and before anyone claims "you can just conquer! Pop assembly is nothing!" 1. With your playstyle 2. Tell me where any other ascension can't do that too. In fact, synthetic ascension is THE ascension for conquest because it has assimilation that, like necrophages, effectively makes what something started as irrelevant.

That's disregarding the fact that every bonus you get is RNG dependent, there are downsides, and the tradition tree itself just isn't that great. But again, I'm more concerned with design than balance. This design is good, and the day of the patch is way too soon to be making definitive sweeping statements about the balance. Give it a day or two, play with it, if it seems bad we can say so. They're certainly listening to feedback considering how much they added and adjusted in this patch, if it's not good enough we say "psionics is now better designed but it needs numbers-buffs." Probably the next patch it'll have them.

 

[Snow Crystal]

Any plans to add new Covenants? I know there are the four Warhammer inspired patrons, but if your looking at a Shroud re-work, perhaps there can also be a surprise? For example, considering how machine empires have been given some interaction with the Shroud, we could have a Machine God of sorts. Robots have been around in the Fallen Empires and longer for the precursors (i.e. Cybrex), eons of machine development/sapience/interactions might have some effect on the Shroud.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/y9kpby

 

[MHC]

Bonus points. The random events, where you get slapped hard at times? Those still exists. Some of them have been outright buffed.

New Shroud Patron Random Events Overview

Hello fellow psionics! With the covenant rework just revealed I decided to go through the shroud events file and compile what the new random adverse events are. There is a price to pay after all, and it's better to know that price before signing...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Enjoy suddenly losing hundreds or thousands of alloys/unity for 2~ years.

Synths and Bio got buffs, which were then scaled back. The "nerf" here is TO A BUFF. The baseline growth for pop assembly was +3. With the buff it was +6. Now they scaled it down to +4.5. You can't proclaim them scaling back a buff as "nerf". It's still vastly stronger than it is on live.

You could get it "earlier" only recently, via teachers of the shroud and co. Before that, they were fairly even. So where do you get your "historically" from. All of that? It's gone. And early conquest is a viable strategy for all three paths.

Further, the downsides mentioned in this thread are only the peak of the iceberg. The old random events? Those still exist. https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...random-events-overview.1549295/#post-28552185
I hope you enjoy -20 to 40% happiness. Suddenly having to pay hundreds if not thousands in alloys or unity, and various other fun downsides, which are in no way justified by the rather small bonuses Psionics offers.

And I disagree, the 4 paths need to be similarly valuable so they remain viable. Stuff can be "super interesting" and it wouldn't matter if you couldn't actually use it because it's similarly to shooting yourself in both feet before taking part in a marathon.

Unlike the other paths which require up front payment, psionic gives you power now to be paid for later. If you are in a game situation where you can make good on the loan, then it's well worth it. Is the bargain still worth it with these numbers given everything else that changed? I don't know. Testing is needed.

But I think you underestimate how strong psionic was to start with. In 3.5, I played on grand admiral, advanced starts, no scaling, and the new late game AI bonus. I wasn't *planning* on going psionic, but I rolled the tech for it early, fully ascended by 2234, and went ham. Conquered 2 empires, vassalized a few more. I was into repeatables before 2300. The fallen empires were pathetic, all 3 crisis were trivial, and my population was consistently the largest in the galaxy. By diplo weight alone, I could force whatever I wanted through the galactic community.

Imagine if going psionic just said, "you double the number of pops and your overall economy right now, but you have to take the penalties from one of the new covenants". It'd still be a good deal. This is why executive vigor is powerful. Being able to run more edicts early boosts your economy in a way that heavily compounds to your benefit even though the perk is useless by the mid to late game.

Going psionic is basically free if you roll the tech. And e.g., getting the smaller amount of pop growth from the covenant even 20 years before any of the other paths got theirs is still going to give you a huge leg up because pops are much more valuable early when they have a proportionally bigger impact on your economy. And by the late game, even if my per planet pop growth is lower, if I've boxed any potential synthetic empires into a small number of planets, I'll still grow faster overall as an empire.

So, if there wasn't *some* randomness and some downside, then you'd always want to go psionic because the other paths don't matter if everyone is so far behind by the time they get them that they'll never catch up.

Conversely, it takes a lot of tech and a lot of engineering research to go synth. In that time, you aren't researching valuable military tech. So if you don't come out the other side with the ability to scale and get a lot more out of your pops, the cost isn't worth it.

This beta changed a lot of different systems that interact with lots of things. We aren't going to truly know without lots of testing, which is exactly what we are doing. I don't think you can do this with pure math on the pure numbers of the paths in isolation like you are trying to do.

 

[Pyzayt]

As a side note, the End of the Cycle has not been touched by the rework, but still has a chance to show up at any point where you try to contact an entity.

This is a little disappointing, honestly. It'd be neat if I could build myself warships with the Mark of the End on them, and have it get both more absurdly OP, and more absurdly "I am about to regret this, aren't I?" as we close in on the 50 year bill, and turn my empire into a true end-of-the-galaxy-cult without having to play around with that whole "building a superweapon of absurd proportions" thing, or just dealing with the Become the Crisis perk in general.

I do like that Mender of Clay that got mentioned up above though!

 

[MHC]

This is a little disappointing, honestly. It'd be neat if I could build myself warships with the Mark of the End on them, and have it get both more absurdly OP, and more absurdly "I am about to regret this, aren't I?" as we close in on the 50 year bill, and turn my empire into a true end-of-the-galaxy-cult without having to play around with that whole "building a superweapon of absurd proportions" thing, or just dealing with the Become the Crisis perk in general.

I do like that Mender of Clay that got mentioned up above though!

I wish the AI would take End of the Cycle more often. It's interesting and fun when it goes off. But I always seem to get it when I'm not interested in using the buff to go on a galactic conquest or when I don't feel like ending the game within 50 years.

 

[Ikael]

I freaking LOVE all those changes to psionic <3 like, damn, son. This is precisely what the ascension paths need:

- More transitional stages (good job on making latent psionic a thing again, rather than disappearing on a whim)
- Ending the path as a new beginning for your species, rather than as a done deal. Psionic is now the most long-lived, present ascension, and I love it for that, even if its power levels are not on par with the others. I love how finishing the tree is not all there is. Other ascensions could certainly learn from it.
- Making you able to choose between different patrons with different development levels is a freaking great idea, for it allows you to "concrete" your favorite, personal interpretation of what this particular ascension means for your empire. That's why I miss having some kind of benevolent covenant or the choice to go in alone without relying on monstrous deities, but the devs definitely "get it"
- I also love the fact that psionic ascension will be "the one with few but powerful pops". It will need bigger buffs in order to compensate for its meager numbers, but I love that it has found its identity and doubling down on it
- While numbers are all borked and in need of balance, I must say that I quite like things like the new Eater of worlds covenant: It is not that you are forced to stay in a constant state of war, genocidal style, buuuuuut if you know what's best for you, you will nudge your gameplay towards that particular style to please your patron. A perfect blend of roleplay + game mechanics supporting said roleplay. It would be nice to see other covenants follow that route too
- In short, I can't wait to try it! There is a lot left to be done (and buff), yes, but there is also tons of creative power in this rework which feels like a labor of love. You guys have outdone yourselves

 

[Ferrus Animus]

First I want to repeat my demand/desire for covenentant effects and events to be attached to the subversive shrine corporate branch office building (And maybe in a lesser way to the Temple of Trosperity branch office building and the Sacrifical Shrine overlord holding.)

For all of the people wanting good guy covenant options, is there some literary template for noble-bright psionic stuff they could draw on? Most of the science fiction I'm aware of that has psionics leans more on the grim-dark side of things because that's just thematically more in line with a universe where fate is a thing etc.

40K has benevolent and neutral warp entities (though rarely and they keep getting de-emphatized). The Fade from Dragon Age 81) had demons of neutral/positive values. The force has benelovent force spirits. The Stellaris Shroud had good and bad Zroni moving into it.

There are things to add, but that really depends a bit on perspective. And well, what exactly the shroud is...

The fundamental problem with covenants, lore wise, is a religious society (which again, religious mechanics are lacking but that is a topic for another day) is just selling their souls en masse to often the first demon lord/eldritch entity they meet. This is just, exceedingly weird (particularly given certain Toxic God events). Societies should be looking for their own honored dead/gods in the shroud, and either find them, or reject the pretenders when they don't find them.

The shroud entities can be these gods.

Don't have to be and Stellaris events that refer to a cultures previous beliefs, don't always reference entities that match up, so it's not the only option.
but the Weaver can be an easy match for most fertility deities, the Whisperer for most gods of knowledge, and the Eater for many war gods.

1. Why would you ever pick the Governor, which only affects a single sector, over the Ruler. +10% Happiness/+15% Trade Value will almost always beat that, unless you're playing a 'tall' slaver Empire. And if you do, most of your income will likely come from subjects.

Because the game randomly choses three leaders to become chosen. And the other two might be generals.

Or you can have a normal chosen emporor and a covenant chose heir.

 

[MonzUn]

I am again, pleasantly surprised by the latest additions to this game. I just sent a message to a heavily dyslexic/hyperactive friend of mine who had Stellaris for months but wasn't able to appreciate it without external help, this is going to be really helpful to have TTS directly integrated in game.

Thank you! A dyslexic friend of mine was actually one of my inspirations for pushing to integrate TTS into the game more =)

I only hope it will be available in other languages than english, because he only speaks french. Many thanks!

The voice used is decided by your operating system and the text being read is decided by your language setting, so you should be able to make it read any language your OS and the game supports.

 

[MonzUn]

I see you've been watching Lathrix's playthroughs as well.

I actually haven't, but maybe I should!

 

[-Marauder-]

All ascensions have penalties, robotics loses organic traits and biological is limited by the number of traits, not counting the time and headache that it is to modify each species, on top of that, some of its new traits require killing leviathans, entities unique and that if they were generated far from your empire you will probably never be able to see, rng on rng with a crazy race.

On the other hand, can anyone add up the total science a whispering smart empire can have, 10% smart + 10% psi, +10 science for their pact, which puts at least 30% who You can add more with some events.

That said, the psi who specialize to earn more thanks to their employer take more away, we can argue if they have gone overboard or not, but psi is not focused on population but on your empire, special buildings that improve it, ship components best and exclusive because, the other ascensions do not have this, our exclusive army is considered worse, but the warrior deity makes it the best, notice that too.

Yes, psi grows worse and our penalties for improving our empire are also penalties to it, the only exception being the xenophile deity, who has now gone from mutator to lover of naturalness (with that thing about taking away as many trait slots as the ones you normal technologies give), but even that deity is dedicated to empowering your empire.

In summary, improving psi is not about giving us new modification traits, although it could give us new perks for professions, as they did to basallos, but about improving our infrastructure and ships, so the best thing would be to give us more buildings or more components of psi ship, they could even give us access to a psi portals that work like wormholes in exchange for risking mutations and random events, a psi beacon where we can build the entrance and exit, to give an example of a plausible psi megastructure .

Wat. You clearly didn't actually do the math behind this, at all. I'm not trying to be mean, but it feels a lot of people who are defending the current Psi Ascension seem to be rather new to the game/inexperienced.

Also, the other Ascensions have trade offs. So does Psionic. What they don't have is ACTUAL PENALTIES, Empire wide ones at that. Psionics doesn't improve things "Empire Wide", at all. It actually hurts you.

I think you're overstating the problem currently, but that's because 1. I think we need a day or two of testing to accurately assess how good it is now, because psionics isn't as easy to read as the other ascensions due to ship parts it unlocks and 2. I think this patch was a design change, and I think broadly speaking it's a good design now.

All that said, I agree, psionics should be superior to the other ascensions, not just tied. It's actually much harder to get than other ascensions, because even disregarding that it's a rare tech of similar tier to the other ascensions it's also made even worse if you aren't spiritualist. Spiritualist has an opportunity cost that no other ethic does - xenophobes aren't incapable of using aliens for anything, materialists don't lose anything in unity, and militarists aren't incapable of peaceful diplomacy. Spiritualist stops you from using robots effectively, and before anyone claims "you can just conquer! Pop assembly is nothing!" 1. With your playstyle 2. Tell me where any other ascension can't do that too. In fact, synthetic ascension is THE ascension for conquest because it has assimilation that, like necrophages, effectively makes what something started as irrelevant.

That's disregarding the fact that every bonus you get is RNG dependent, there are downsides, and the tradition tree itself just isn't that great. But again, I'm more concerned with design than balance. This design is good, and the day of the patch is way too soon to be making definitive sweeping statements about the balance. Give it a day or two, play with it, if it seems bad we can say so. They're certainly listening to feedback considering how much they added and adjusted in this patch, if it's not good enough we say "psionics is now better designed but it needs numbers-buffs." Probably the next patch it'll have them.

I couldn't disagree more. We do have the numbers. The ship parts are Aux slot items, they compete for highly contested slots and most of them aren't that great. They're not going to compensate for Psionics getting hammered in every aspect across the board.

I don't want psionics to be superior, I just want it to not be blatantly much, much, much worse. Which it is right now. The Adoption penalty for the covenants is over the top. Then slapping random event penalties on top of that is just taking it to the extreme. There's no reason for this whatsoever. Especially given Psionics are already worse in terms of pop quality and pop generation.

Unlike the other paths which require up front payment, psionic gives you power now to be paid for later. If you are in a game situation where you can make good on the loan, then it's well worth it. Is the bargain still worth it with these numbers given everything else that changed? I don't know. Testing is needed.

But I think you underestimate how strong psionic was to start with. In 3.5, I played on grand admiral, advanced starts, no scaling, and the new late game AI bonus. I wasn't *planning* on going psionic, but I rolled the tech for it early, fully ascended by 2234, and went ham. Conquered 2 empires, vassalized a few more. I was into repeatables before 2300. The fallen empires were pathetic, all 3 crisis were trivial, and my population was consistently the largest in the galaxy. By diplo weight alone, I could force whatever I wanted through the galactic community.

Imagine if going psionic just said, "you double the number of pops and your overall economy right now, but you have to take the penalties from one of the new covenants". It'd still be a good deal. This is why executive vigor is powerful. Being able to run more edicts early boosts your economy in a way that heavily compounds to your benefit even though the perk is useless by the mid to late game.

Going psionic is basically free if you roll the tech. And e.g., getting the smaller amount of pop growth from the covenant even 20 years before any of the other paths got theirs is still going to give you a huge leg up because pops are much more valuable early when they have a proportionally bigger impact on your economy. And by the late game, even if my per planet pop growth is lower, if I've boxed any potential synthetic empires into a small number of planets, I'll still grow faster overall as an empire.

So, if there wasn't *some* randomness and some downside, then you'd always want to go psionic because the other paths don't matter if everyone is so far behind by the time they get them that they'll never catch up.

Conversely, it takes a lot of tech and a lot of engineering research to go synth. In that time, you aren't researching valuable military tech. So if you don't come out the other side with the ability to scale and get a lot more out of your pops, the cost isn't worth it.

This beta changed a lot of different systems that interact with lots of things. We aren't going to truly know without lots of testing, which is exactly what we are doing. I don't think you can do this with pure math on the pure numbers of the paths in isolation like you are trying to do.

1. That's not even true FFS. You don't get a "bonus now", you get one when picking teachers of the Shroud. Because you start with an Ascension Perk. That's the origin more than Psionics causing this. In the new iterration, this isn't the case anymore at all. You get all the downsides you currently have, and some. Without any real improvements.

2. Subjective one time stuff against the Ai doesn't really challenge hard numbers.

3. Executive Vigor is good early on, bad later on. Also unrelated to Psyonics. You're jumping into the Chewbacca defense here.

4. There are already massive downsides to Psyonics, now there are even more. With hardly any upsides. What's your point?