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

[-Marauder-]

That's simply not true... point it out where exactly does it say that whisperers caps max stability from a source that isn't hearsay

EDIT:

Spoiler: literal proof that it doesnt cap stability

View attachment 892984

Just declare war then... if the penalty can be removed by a simple action then it's mostly a non factor. If your build didn't support lots of war, then either adapt or dont pick eater of worlds... pick instrument of desire for your minmaxing purposes


Synths were ALWAYS a problem but that's not Psi's fault. it is Synth's fault. Maybe you should ask for synth to be nerfed rightfully. It's not like cybernetic and biological have more efficient pops than Psi, in fact they have less. mathematical proof:
bio researcher has 20% output bonus, psi pop has 20% BASE and another 10% from the psionic trait
bio pop has 15% alloys, psi pop has 20% BASE from telepath

You can't maths out stellaris because there are so many variables (in maths called degrees of freedom) but if you want to try:

Psi pop growth= 4.6 assembly (robot assembly complex) (+30% growth from composer)
Psi output: +20% from telepaths, (+20% from instrument OR 5% from composer)
Psi military: (15% fire rate and 10% weapons range!!! with eater of worlds OR 15% evasion from whisperer), psi admiral (more damage than Synt

Psi extra bonus:
20% unity output iirc and also 10% science output on all psionic pops
random shroud bonus
ship components that are the strongest in the game

now compare that with synth (available way later than psi, probably in 2230 at the least while I got psi in 2210 fully completed with teachers of shroud)
Synth pop growth: 8.05 pop growth
Synth output: +20% from the synth tech and tradition (the leader trait was changed)
Synth military: none to speak of

Synth extra bonus:
+33% base technicians output

So all in all, with the most mediocre covenant (whisperer), you still have near-equal output, and greater in the 2most important resource, unity and science. though you are outcompeted in pop growth you can still get it way earlier than synth (though Bio can be rushed almost as fast with overtuned).


Now you argue 'oh no, -5% happiness on an easy to please faction is definitely gonna completely exclude me from using robots!' but really, it isn't particularly worth it to gimp yourself for that reason alone. as long as a faction is above 50 happiness you have almost no downsides, and the -5% is easily outweighed just by being psionic. Besides, you could easily set robots to servitude so they could work as trader, then you won't have to worry about the ai rebellion (literally just complete special project and it goes away at the cost of a few years science in the late game where it matters least).

a bit of research for 10 years late in the game) and the robots not being buffed by telepath.


Leaders randomly die, so really, that point is effectively the same as taking overtuned, where your leaders die every few years. And noone is saying overtuned is weak because of the leaders dying fast, and they die way faster than once every 20 years (eater of worlds event frequency).


note that these are for the most powerful covenant by far i.e. instrument of desire, so it's sort of a fair trade. all the other covenants got off better in the new random events (eater no longer eats a whole planet, whisperer no longer spawns an almost guaranteed rebellion, composer almost unchanged)

1. Misunderstanding based on other people's reports on the Discord and co. You're way too late for your 'correction' though. Eladrin already responded to it.

2. "Just declare war then." What an asinine comment. Rather than addressing that this change can easily put you in the 45k+ range for energy and 15k range for alloys. Your response is to be "perpetually at war". Which depending on the stage of the game simply isn't even a possibility.

3. I on several points said that Synth is simply too strong, and remains too strong? That's no reason for Psionics to get hammered though.

4. Your math is faulty here. You keep bringing up the different covenants in different situations. Ignoring that you can specifically pick ONE, a single one. So you can somewhat even the playing field in one area, but will be suboptimal in other areas. You also ignore the massive downsides all the covenants come with.

4. You seem to have forgotten efficient processors. That puts them at 25% output to everything. And 30% to workers. Tho to be fair, nobody really cares about worker output. Also Synth Empires can absolutely still grow bio pops unless this was changed.

5. Leaders don't randomly die, several of them literally target your highest level/best leaders. And now you're comparing it to overtuned, which offers massive benefits and can absolutely be fixed as the game goes on.

 

[MHC]

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 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.

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?

[Edit re "discord misunderstandings", this is why I say that I'm withholding judgement until I have a chance to play with the patch this weekend. Numbers look off. But looks can be deceiving. Like I said above, the best thing you can do is to actually play the beta and give constructive feedback about actual problems. Back to my original comment:]

I wasn't playing teachers of the shroud. They make getting it reliable. But the path is still very good situationally as long as you get the tech early enough. There's a reason it's been popular in competitive multiplayer recently: that situational benefit is a lot more common in a free-for-all total war scenario. (And before the combat changes, max evasion destroyers were *very* powerful given how much cheaper they were than battleships.)

And my recent game isn't a one-off subjective thing. It was an example of how psionics work. I raised executive vigor as a parallel example to show why you are underestimating psionics. They both give you early bonuses that can create a snowball effect.

I don't know how you can claim that you don't get benefits from being fully ascended in the 2230s with a random bio empire. The leaders alone give you an edge. Add in the telepaths and you have a powerful concoction. If you invest the windfall wisely, it will pay off in a big enough way that you can manage the rng and the long-term downsides. I can't even remember the last time the random events truly screwed me.

But that's the whole mechanical concept of psionic ascension. You made a bargain with some shroud entity for power now at your civilization's long-term expense. It makes no sense to complain that it's a bad ascension because it isn't as good late game without considering that smaller bonuses earlier in the game are a *much* bigger deal because of when you get them.

And if you aren't willing to acknowledge that this is the core idea behind these mechanics, then I don't think we are going to have a productive conversation, because that's the lens through which any conversation about balance has to take place.

Let's back of the book this with some notional values. I think that will at least underline why this is hard to balance properly, especially when you consider the wide variation in player skill level and goals.

Naively, a 10% boost to your economy compounded over 20 years is a 6.7x (1.1^20) lead on someone without that bonus. In just 10 years, you'd already have a 2.6x lead. Let's say that another player won't get synth ascension until 20 years after I've gotten psionics. They now need to get a *much* bigger boost to have any chance of catching up. If the bonus is a 30% boost to their economy, that will compound over the next 10 years to 13.8x. Meanwhile, I've had 30 years of 10%, so I'm at 17.4x.

And this is just looking at compounding to our economies keeping all else equal. However, things aren't going to be equal. A psionic empire will use that early economic bonus to fuel a bigger military and conquer / subjugate more empires, creating an even wider economic gap that the synth empire will have to overcome. And the psionics can parlay that power into a host of strategic advantages that let them "pay the interest" the loan they got from their shroud patron with only nominal disruption from the rng.

Moreover, the math I used understates the impact. A 10% bonus is a lot more valuable early in the game when other bonuses are scarce and where tech upgrades and extra traditions have a qualitative impact on gameplay. There are diminishing returns. Getting a few levels of repeatables faster in the late game isn't nearly as potent as getting battleships and neutral launchers a decade early. Once I've got enough pops to field a 500k fleet, the pops for an extra 100k are a lot less valuable than the pops that got me my first 100k that snowballed into my conquest of a fallen empire and all their tech, buildings, and pops.

Synths are very good when the gameplay situation allows you to afford the investment. But it is an investment with a very long-term payoff. Psionics is taking out a loan. If you can use the bonuses to grow your empire fast enough to pay the interest fees, then it's a good deal. (I'm unclear on exactly what role the other two paths are supposed to play. You get them cheaper and earlier than synths, but you get less out of them. The math checks out on paper. But I'm not sure that they are *strategically* distinct.)

With enough testing, they can get the numbers about right. But if you are expecting late-game parity, you are going to be disappointed no matter what they do. And expecting them to drop the downsides entirely is asking for them to make it virtually impossible for a synth empire to stage a comeback and eventually break the galactic emperor's iron grip on power.

I *do* think there are still some conceptual problems with the overall design that are outside the scope of this patch. Being psionic encourages you to play aggressively early. But that's often paired with being spiritualist which encourages you to play tall. Similarly, if you roll the tech too late, then it's just not helpful. You can't take psionics as a spiritualist empire who is behind on tech hoping to use it to overthrow your synthetic overlords. Once you are behind, you will stay behind due to the same math that makes it so powerful when you get it early. Also, just in terms of flavor, I like the idea of playing a psionic hivemind like the zerg. But the two wouldn't play well together mechanically in the game as it stands.

I don't know how to fix these issues. But these are very different than the complaints you are raising. (E.g., naively, "bad to take when you are too far behind" could be fixed by having an option with a bigger immediate power boost in return for even harsher interest payments. And taking a bad deal out of desparation is very thematic. But I don't know how you'd enable that without letting someone who gets it early use the same option to create a truly insurmountable grip on power.)

NB for others:

Balance is only *one* consideration when making a game. In the past, I've argued that they shouldn't nerf *some* OP stuff because people doing competitive multiplayer can use mods or just ban things. But having some OP things in the game is extremely useful for introducing a friend to the game or just enjoying a multiplayer game with players of different skill levels. (Yes I could cheat some stuff in for them using the console, but that doesn't feel good for anyone involved even if it is mathematically the same as having them play with busted stuff.) And for single player, a power fantasy can be fun and most players can just crank the difficulty to offset it.

Conversely, people love a challenge. And it's fun to play with off-meta stuff that deliberately sets you up for tough decisions and complex situations. So you also need to have a few things that suck lying around.

I don't think the main ascension paths should be unbalanced in themselves, but you do have to consider how they interact with these considerations.

Also, lots of the "stupid bugs" that the custodians have spent time fixing never struck me as a big deal. It always strikes me as weird whenever I read threads with people complaining about that stuff with the same passsion that they'd complain about a bug that corrupted their save files.

Sure you *could* use the new culture worker stuff to make 0 upkeep pops. But that's fun exactly once and probably not all that "good" beyond entertainment value given all the sacrifices you'd have to make to get to that point. With all the complex, non-linear interactions the game has, you are never going to cover everything. Trying to adjust balance to avoid corner cases while also making those bonuses meaningful under normal situations is difficult.

So I pretty emphatically don't care if those corner cases stick around for a few patches until they address them in some kind of comprehensive way like they did with negative economy strategies and situations.

 

[Thiend]

1. Misunderstanding based on other people's reports on the Discord and co. You're way too late for your 'correction' though. Eladrin already responded to it.

2. "Just declare war then." What an asinine comment. Rather than addressing that this change can easily put you in the 45k+ range for energy and 15k range for alloys. Your response is to be "perpetually at war". Which depending on the stage of the game simply isn't even a possibility.

3. I on several points said that Synth is simply too strong, and remains too strong? That's no reason for Psionics to get hammered though.

4. Your math is faulty here. You keep bringing up the different covenants in different situations. Ignoring that you can specifically pick ONE, a single one. So you can somewhat even the playing field in one area, but will be suboptimal in other areas. You also ignore the massive downsides all the covenants come with.

4. You seem to have forgotten efficient processors. That puts them at 25% output to everything. And 30% to workers. Tho to be fair, nobody really cares about worker output. Also Synth Empires can absolutely still grow bio pops unless this was changed.

5. Leaders don't randomly die, several of them literally target your highest level/best leaders. And now you're comparing it to overtuned, which offers massive benefits and can absolutely be fixed as the game goes on.

To be honest the very easiest way to fix psionics outside of some still-needed tweaking/reducing of the penalties and increases/adjustments to the bonuses would be to just actually give psionics pop assembly too. Or growth. Add a building or tech "atemporal orphanage" letting you pay a zro upkeep for +100% growth speed as pop assembly. The only fundamental problem with psionics is that every other build is designed to produce pop assembly, which is as strong as if not stronger than job output (and especially because ~30% pop output is achievable by robots too, but I think it's fairly obvious robots are the outlier there), and psionics is designed (I know you can circumvent it, I also don't care) to work with spiritualist, which is designed specifically to NOT use robots, the only major source of pop assembly for non-ascended empires. Adding pop assembly on par with robots (has to be biological, the psionic bonuses no longer apply to non-psionic pops) isn't even giving it too much like other ascensions, first of all every single other one has it so uniqueness is out, secondly giving psionics something equivalent to base robots is... Actually just un-nerfing spiritualists, the ethic with the worst downside in the game for no equivalent upside.

If I had an idea that gave this directly to spiritualists I'd go for it, spiritualist should not be focusing on the less important resource with an additional severe penalty while the main downside of being materialist is it compelling you to use the best pops in the game. At best enslaved robots are still worse than regular robots, at worst there's also a forced crisis for just you in the form of the AI rebellion that means if you weren't already winning hard you're disrupted enough to die to other empires. This is putting aside that theoretically that's the "spiritualist psionic and pop assembly" build but unless you win very very fast the rebellion empire is purging your species the entire time, there are years between you and catching up to where you started let alone getting an increase.

 

[Knotz]

I always go for the Whisperers because it just fits my sneaky space elves really well, and this iteration even more so. HOWEVER I also like to play tall but with painfully high stability and that stability penalty stacked with separate events that can also lower stability stemming from the Whisperer stings a bit. Considering a lot of its boons are kinda meh (influence? I can't remember if that's still helpful it's been a while since I played. Espionage? The only worth it operation is if you have ganked a Stellarite Devourer and you can only do that once per empire. Anomaly and archaeology? By the time I get this I've already exhausted them) compared to the others I think the drawbacks should be scaled down.

 

[FleetingRain]

Would it be ok if the Outlawed Robots Policy gave some wack Pop Growth modifier, like +40%?

 

[Thiend]

Would it be ok if the Outlawed Robots Policy gave some wack Pop Growth modifier, like +40%?

Honestly, I think you could go even higher, but only if it's contingent on adopting psionics - that's a buff biological ascension doesn't need at all. That would leave it still worse at pop growth than every other ascension, but not by nearly as much, and once the current penalties/bonuses are adjusted a bit psionics will be better in other areas.

 

[Ferrus Animus]

Not trying to be mean, but while this tunes down Whisperers downside. It's actually straight up worse in terms of Influence. And the "infiltration speed" should go entirely. Same for the bonuses to Encryption/Decryption and 10 Intel they offer.

As of right now, there's absolutely no benefit to anything concerning espionage. As espionage itself is fairly pointless and all this does is slightly speed something up in the background.

Half your complaints are about the ascension tradition itself, something I did not touch in this suggestion.
Infiltration speed is a fitting if not particularly useful bonus, so I kept it.
As for the influence the idea here was to make it more stable, so stronger in the earlier game when psionic can be gotten easier.
And well, one certainly can redesign the Whisperer to completely ignore espionage. I didn't, under the assumption that espionage will get eventually improved.

would personally buff these to have more research so that it leans in to the research theme, and remove some of the random spy stuff

Research is currently the strongest resource in the game, buffing it is not easily done well, and so I chose not to push it much further. You might notice however that I increased it in total, to make up for the anemic value of espionage.

This is much better than increased ship upkeep. Increased ship upkeep always forces you to downsize your navy, which is the opposite of what empires with the Eater of Worlds covenant should do.

That was my thinking. Stability is painful, but allows you to maintain your fleet and declaring war will give you an economic boost that helps replace losses.
Leading to a more even fleet power for an Eater empire.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean tho

Just a gag. All convenants in the dev diary double their downsides at this stage, but as I changed this to a blanket ban, there is no doubling.

Habitability is useless on any planet where the species already has ideal habitability, I'd replace it with pop growth.

+1 Trade Value is laughably low, a single clerk produces 4.

Also, not all Psionic empires are Spiritualist, and not all of them will use Priests.

The idea is to give a small bonus for the spiritualist psionic empire, and as priests are spammable not all bonuses are a good idea on them.
Habitablity is more meant to help a Weaver empire get a way to establish coloniers better. And yeah, trade value is probably low. These can all maybe be increased, but I don't want to make priests too good with these bonuses.

 

[Caeric]

The -15 stability hit from Whisperer in the Void is a bit concerning. Even at high base stability you lose -15x 0,6% resources and from jobs and 0,6% trade value up to 9% if you're still above 50% stability effectively (compared to being at 65% stability) reducing the 10% research bonus by -9% research output from jobs but also reducing all your other output as well. Even worse if the stability penalty brings you below the 50% treshold.

Might want to tone that down a bit or look at an alternative penalty as even for research you ironically get more of a research bonus from the 10% resources from jobs by Instrument of Desire in this case.

 

[DarkyVX]

I do think that it's a bit ironic that Psionic empires have to make robots in the second tray (or miss out on a pop growth track). It does make for a place where Servitude robots are useful as everyone else can just give them Citizen Rights and never risk a revolt, but yeah.

Growing Unbidden-like energy entities on that slot might be fun conceptually but it also overlaps in function with the other ascensions so I dunno.

 

[Thiend]

I do think that it's a bit ironic that Psionic empires have to make robots in the second tray (or miss out on a pop growth track). It does make for a place where Servitude robots are useful as everyone else can just give them Citizen Rights and never risk a revolt, but yeah.

Growing Unbidden-like energy entities on that slot might be fun conceptually but it also overlaps in function with the other ascensions so I dunno.

At some point it's not "overlap with other ascensions" it's "the feature every ascension except psionics gets that is extremely strong."

I'm fine with psionics having or not having pop assembly but if it doesn't I don't think half measures will do the trick - 5% more resources isn't enough to compensate for no assembly. 10% isn't either, even 20% isn't enough. Conquest can get you more pops but that only applies to certain playstyles (pacifists in particular essentially can't do it also) and other ascensions are equally capable of getting more pops via conquest. Much slower assembly of much better pops could be very interesting though - kind of an economic psionic avatar? That's interesting, I like it.

I'm quite happy with the improved detail psionics got this patch but in terms of balance there's obvious tweaking needed, I don't see that as a crisis. The assembly kind of is though... And to anyone saying "assembly isn't good" (likely because of conquest), you should have no problem giving it to psionics then right? ...right?

 

[Lorenerd11]

Growing Unbidden-like energy entities on that slot might be fun conceptually but it also overlaps in function with the other ascensions so I dunno.

And even if Paradox doesn't want to use the Unbidden portraits or spend time and resources on new assets, it'd be cool if we could assemble golems or something.

 

[Everstill]

Very nice work! The Shroud really need these reworks, and I hope you guys rework the End of the Cicle because it really needs.

And please, add the game setting to Disable Habitats. The Habitat spam is greater than ever and is causing late game lag nightmare for me and I like playing Ironman with achievements.

 

[Thiend]

And even if Paradox doesn't want to use the Unbidden portraits or spend time and resources on new assets, it'd be cool if we could assemble golems or something.

View attachment 893133

It seems like it couldn't be that much trouble to do something unbidden-like that just copies your main species' outline. That could probably be automated, actually.

 

[Idle America]

Instead of default Text-to-Speech, could we instead have it read by our VIR of choice?

 

[tanny]

I don't want to get ultra specific, but actually, there is a way to be a fanatic materialistic to be psionic in 50-55 years, play Knights of toxic god.

if you focus your efforts on progressing the quest to the 50th year of departure, you will get an event, one of the options will give you psionic theory regardless of your ethics; another way is to work a bit on the origin of shroud, so if we get down to numbers and meta-builds, there are ways.

If you’re going full meta…
Instrument of desire trade empire, now, you can max out your happiness easily. Trade league ensures that your increased consumption is a non-issue even with utopian abundance. amenity +20%, now EVEN EASIER with telepaths (as if it’s not easy enough), extra trade value and extra from jobs! Even if your amenity doesn’t max out on say… a mining world, +15% is still a HUGE modifier, and psychic pops (you will have anyway) will take care of residual crimes. On top of the massive stability you get (prosperity/etc) You are now the economic powerhouse.

 

[-Marauder-]

The -15 stability hit from Whisperer in the Void is a bit concerning. Even at high base stability you lose -15x 0,6% resources and from jobs and 0,6% trade value up to 9% if you're still above 50% stability effectively (compared to being at 65% stability) reducing the 10% research bonus by -9% research output from jobs but also reducing all your other output as well. Even worse if the stability penalty brings you below the 50% treshold.

Might want to tone that down a bit or look at an alternative penalty as even for research you ironically get more of a research bonus from the 10% resources from jobs by Instrument of Desire in this case.

Whisperers is one of the most obviously egregious offenders. Unless you're at 100% stability. Whisperers costs you 9%, perpetually, in all areas. That's IMHO way, way, way too steep for what it offers. Above 85% stability you're slowly recuperating those losses, but until you hit 100% i.e effectively 115% stability whisperers is incredibly punishing.

It isn't helped by whisperer specifically killing off your most valuable/best leaders via random events too. The downsides as of right now are simply way too steep, especially as they combine both the active running penalty, and random events. Instrument is arguably the best covenant, but it will randomly slap you with 0.75 alloy or unity cost upkeep, for every single pop. That is huge and can in a single moment wreck your entire economy unless you constantly keep a huge surplus of Number of Pops x 0.75 in both unity and alloys at all times.

 

[wiederwahl]

Very excited for the incoming changes! Out of curiosity though, are there any plans to expand auto-management to branch offices? It would be nice to automatically build the buildings I want without having to check every single planet to see if their capital has been upgraded.

 

[DeanTheDull]

Whisperers is one of the most obviously egregious offenders. Unless you're at 100% stability. Whisperers costs you 9%, perpetually, in all areas.

Except it's not. You don't get to take numbers out of context and treat relative losses at net losses when they remain not only net gains, but are actively part of substitution effects.

Whisperers is only a -9% to all things if you ignore that, by virtue of the psionic rework, the precondition of Whisperers is being psionic, which- with telepaths- is a +20% gain to direct output. This would- if we want to be honest- be an 11% gain, compared to a 20% gain of no covenant at all, not a 9% loss. This could at least be getting basic numbers right if we considered all other things equal.

But they aren't, because whisperers is also bringing in other things. It's adding +3/6 science to your telepaths, which you'll be having about 2 per planet. This would be- if we wanted to be cheeky- an infinite % increase from a job you spam everywehre you can, and Whispers also comes that comes with a 5/10% research speed bonus- a much, much stronger boon to the research economy than a 9% researcher job output, given how research speed buffs work multiplicatively vis-a-vis job modifiers. And this isn't factoring in the psionic researcher angles, including the whisperer's own 10% relative advantage over other researchers for that chosen vis-a-vis its others, or psionic ruler pop advantages against others.

And this doesn't go into the influence economy implications. Influence is, by far, one of the most restricted chokepoint resources in the game, and no other ascension can support generation as well as psionic, and no covenant supports that as much as Whisperers. 15% empire influence has substantial implications at the points of the game when influence is your most limiting factor in economic expansion, be it claims, habitats, planetary rings for the next tier of pop job base value boosters, special worlds, galactic community, vassal resolution, etc. And unlike planetary production, influence isn't affected by planetary stability, since it's a per-empire modifier.


If you're going to ground your complaint credibly, at least identify that mechanics for what they are- a lateral shift in favor of your psionic economy towards science, influence, and espionage. It's one thing to argue one of those is bad, but it's poor showing to pretend the other two aren't explicit beneficiaries in this setup.

 

[SeekingEtermity]

As I understand it you can not find anomalies in prviously owned(?) Systems. So usually by midgame beside a few outlieres there is nothing left to uncover, even if you destroy a Empire and have to sruvey their former systems.

You can't find anomalies on any object (it's tracked per object, not per system) that has been previously surveyed by any player still in the game. Which does actually mean that if you _wipe somebody out_, you have a decent chance of being able to find anomalies in their core systems, since presumably they and nobody else surveyed them. However, you can only find anomalies when surveying, and can only survey if the system is unowned, so you need to avoid claiming systems (and not move through them in total war) except those necessary to wipe out the enemy.

Or maybe you can abandon systems (demolish your starbases) to make them surveyable again? Never tried. It'd be Weird if demolishing an existing starbase meant you couldn't build it again until you surveyed, but hey, it's hardly the worst Weird edge case in the game.

Plausibly if you integrate a subject, this counts as eliminating them without transferring their "Surveyed by X" flags to you? You'd still need to make them un-own a bunch of space, though.

Crises - both mid- and end-game - destroy starbases rather than capture them, so if you can wipe out the former owner (or somebody does it for you) before anybody else surveys their systems, you might find anomalies there.

Systems nobody can safely survey, such as marauder and leviathan systems, can be a source of anomalies once cleared.

The L-cluster is a source of anomalies in the mid-game.

Pockets of space cut off from other players (e.g. because the only way to them is through the xenophobe FE or a marauder) are a source of anomalies, generally for whoever first gets experimental subspace travel on their science ships (or has a quantum catapult or rolls really lucky on getting psi jump drives).

... With all that said, yes, anomaly discovery chance loses most of its value after the very early game. It does depend on the map - how crowded it is and how connected the hyperlane network is and how close to others you start and whether there are systems cut off by space aliens you can kill or pacify early - but that it will lose value quickly is a decent expectation.

 

[Thiend]

Except it's not. You don't get to take numbers out of context and treat relative losses at net losses when they remain not only net gains, but are actively part of substitution effects.

Whisperers is only a -9% to all things if you ignore that, by virtue of the psionic rework, the precondition of Whisperers is being psionic, which- with telepaths- is a +20% gain to direct output. This would- if we want to be honest- be an 11% gain, compared to a 20% gain of no covenant at all, not a 9% loss. This could at least be getting basic numbers right if we considered all other things equal.

But they aren't, because whisperers is also bringing in other things. It's adding +3/6 science to your telepaths, which you'll be having about 2 per planet. This would be- if we wanted to be cheeky- an infinite % increase from a job you spam everywehre you can, and Whispers also comes that comes with a 5/10% research speed bonus- a much, much stronger boon to the research economy than a 9% researcher job output, given how research speed buffs work multiplicatively vis-a-vis job modifiers. And this isn't factoring in the psionic researcher angles, including the whisperer's own 10% relative advantage over other researchers for that chosen vis-a-vis its others, or psionic ruler pop advantages against others.

And this doesn't go into the influence economy implications. Influence is, by far, one of the most restricted chokepoint resources in the game, and no other ascension can support generation as well as psionic, and no covenant supports that as much as Whisperers. 15% empire influence has substantial implications at the points of the game when influence is your most limiting factor in economic expansion, be it claims, habitats, planetary rings for the next tier of pop job base value boosters, special worlds, galactic community, vassal resolution, etc. And unlike planetary production, influence isn't affected by planetary stability, since it's a per-empire modifier.


If you're going to ground your complaint credibly, at least identify that mechanics for what they are- a lateral shift in favor of your psionic economy towards science, influence, and espionage. It's one thing to argue one of those is bad, but it's poor showing to pretend the other two aren't explicit beneficiaries in this setup.

If we're talking about psionics overall we can talk about other ascensions, which are better because of pop assembly and psionics not having sufficiently higher bonuses.

If we're actually taking about Whisperers, the context is relative to nothing you get a 1% science boost and a 9% everything else including science inputs loss, which means you're actually trading all resources including science for the other Whisperers bonuses. This is not only noncompetitive with the other covenants, including with their currently insane downsides, it's actually not competitive with simply not taking a covenant at all. A complaint that a 9% loss is a 9% loss is only not credible if you pretend they're talking about psionics + Whisperer relative to no ascension at all, the complaint is that psionics + Whisperer is worse than just psionics. Which is true.

We know Whisperers involves having the other psionic bonuses, and the baseline actually is much better than before this beta. But the covenants are terrible, and nothing you've said changes that Whisperers is actually a loss over not having a covenant unless you can get at least mid-90s stability through it. If you're keeping a reasonable fleet influence has never been less bottlenecked than now so that really doesn't matter either.

Personally I think we need the covenants rebalanced to all be large positives in at least some major area, and if psionics is to remain the only ascension with a downside and RNG it needs far larger bonuses to compensate. I would suggest more permanent rewards from the shroud like buildings (ideally with pop assembly, ideally some kind of very slow growing but very strong pop type from it).