[Name already in use]

That sounds perfect actually.
Before you begin the transformation you destroy the food production and use propaganda to say it was a massive plague or disaster and so there is an empire wide famine. Despite the "best efforts" of the scientists, you can't figure out how to fix the food shortage. The only solution is to give up the flesh and upload yourself into a machine!
Then your species will be forced to do it so they don't starve and you look like a good guy

yeah, it makes for a great narrative... still, you get f*ck*d over like noone else does, for a Ascension Path that atm imho looks inferior to the other two.
The base concept of all Stellaris games I played,especially multiplayer, was always: Once they smell weakness you're dead.

 

[Cat Crusade]

There seems to be some horrible Communist propaganda in the first screenshot - the implants will not be "free of cost". There is no such thing as "free" government services - they will pay for them in their taxes.

Been on the internet so long that I can't tell if serious or not.

 

[Barcode187]

I guess one of the main gains is the ability to colonize... everywhere. You can grow at a much more exponential rate than organics can (or, at least with a lot less effort since for them it would take micromanaging multiple species or sub species (which could lead to other problems) and maybe robots have new traits too? we don't know.

EDIT: I guess when i think about it. Less micro is one of the main gains. Since you can micro organics to be good at specific things (even better than synths at some things with the new traits) but synths are just overall really good at whatever you ask them to do.

You can already colonize everywhere with the terra-forming techs, including Tomb worlds, so not even this is a perk unique to the synth path. It is by far the most lackluster so far with the information currently revealed. Hopefully they added more than they have shown us already.

 

[TheDungen]

Yes But isn't Robotic/Mechanical THE best species trait in the game tho? i mean...

It's GOOD
(along with immortality)

I never said it wasn't I said it was boring. And synth is one trait the genetics ones get multiple ones not to mention multiple options. And near immortality is fairly easy to achieve in the game anyway.

Uh. Venus has really weird orbital properties.

I assume you're talking about it's day night cycle? Well mars has really low gravity, fixing one is a lot easier than fixing the other. Guess which one is easier. Yup Venus.

 

[moglus]

A lot of your focus is on "This can be cancelled out by that", but what you are not taking into account is that all other species will be able to take that as well, so you are still overall weaker in that category than another same-tech species, and that a lot of your 'solutions' are mutually exclusive. You can only have one government, for example.

Not really that mutually exclusive.
Fanatic Spiritualist (ethos) gets negates Slow Breeders and gets rid of Deviants while still leaving you -15% ethics divergence
Theocratic Republic (gov) negates Solitary, and lowers food consumption = more food = faster growth rate
Sedentary doesn't need to be negated since it's a lame duck penalty
Collectivist (ethos) further decreases food consumption = faster growth


Fanatic Spiritualist/Collectivist
Theocratic Republic

-15% Ethics Divergence (empire modifier)
-10% Faction Suppression Cost (empire modifier)
+100% Slavery Tolerance (pop modifier)
-15% Food Consumption (pop modifier)
+4 Trait Points (for whatever high-tier trait you want)
Migration Speed: -50%
Resettlement Cost: +33%

It's not that bad, as for as starting bonuses go. i'd take it. And the argument that you'll be worse off than other empires is ALWAYS true when you take bad traits to cheese the points.

 

[TwiceAHuman]

Well... It's cool and all that... But still kilometers beneath the Psionic Ascendancy.

 

[smjjames]

I just wanted to second this. I rarely care much for 'immersion' but cybernetic and synthetic portraits really need to be included as well.

Agreed here, having distinct synth portraits would be nice.

I assume you're talking about it's day night cycle? Well mars has really low gravity, fixing one is a lot easier than fixing the other. Guess which one is easier. Yup Venus.

Depends on how you define 'easy'. Venus still has it's massively thick atmosphere.

 

[smjjames]

Well... It's cool and all that... But still kilometers beneath the Psionic Ascendancy.

Yeah, it's nowhere as cool as the Psionic Ascendancy. @Wiz

 

[Rip Off Productions]

Please don't use the word cyborg, it has such negative overtones. Use augmented being or cybernetically enhanced.

"Cyborg" has negative connotations? how? it has no stronger negativity attached to it then "augmented" would, as that 'negativity' is entirely based on the subjective opinion that cybernetics are "bad/immoral/unethical/dangerous".

I mean it's not like how "Robot" is based on a Czech word for forced labor.

 

[moglus]

You can already colonize everywhere with the terra-forming techs, including Tomb worlds, so not even this is a perk unique to the synth path. It is by far the most lackluster so far with the information currently revealed. Hopefully they added more than they have shown us already.

Yes but then you have to devote resources to it every time you want to terrafrom to achieve that. where as synths just build a colony ship and get to it. I'm not saying it's not lack luster, i think it is too. i'm just saying that doing it as organics takes more resources, which is a recurring cost you have to pay every time you do it.

 

[Milten]

It's not that bad, as for as starting bonuses go. i'd take it. And the argument that you'll be worse off than other empires is ALWAYS true when you take bad traits to cheese the points.

You are not "negating" anything this way, you just compensate it. Playing as Fanatic Purifiers negates "repugnant", playing as Fanatic Collectivist negates "deviant".

 

[Birdy123]

Not sure what the upside is to Synth Ascension over just staying normal and building Synths where needed. At least add in some kind of energy efficiency boost of 5%, anything really.

 

[moglus]

You are not "negating" anything this way, you just compensate it. Playing as Fanatic Purifiers negates "repugnant", playing as Fanatic Collectivist negates "deviant".

Well... as for as i'm aware (tho English is not my first language so i could be wrong) the meaning of "negating" is literally nullify or make ineffective. Which i'm pretty sure i'm doing by effectively removing the penalty. You're not wrong either, playing a fanatic purifier does also negate repugnant by making the penalty ineffective. But that's semantics. My point still stands. You are always gonna lose a little when you cheese the point system, that's just the way the system is made, You can't get the high tier traits at the start unless you sacrifice optimal performance in another area. That's just the rules of the system.

 

[Taritu]

I'm confused as to what the advantage of synthetic evolution is? I can build synths already, the gene path will give me modifiable races which can be better than synths, etc...

It seems like it needs something more.

 

[SS Boss]

I'm a little disappointed if all the Synth path allows is the content described in the DD.

I expected the synth path to includes things like becoming a cyber hive mind (since hive mind is a game concept now), or becoming a ascended synth empire being a factor to promove AI rebellions across the galaxy and stuff. Things to make the path somehow interesting like the Psi path.

But... Well, at least I expect some portraits and city appearences for ascended synths, because maintaining the same boring face as every robot in the galaxy after ascending is sad.

 

[moglus]

I'm confused as to what the advantage of synthetic evolution is? I can build synths already, the gene path will give me modifiable races which can be better than synths, etc...

It seems like it needs something more.

Tbh, at this point it seems that the only advantage in terms of mechanics is certain things require less effort and micro to do as synths. Other then that, there really isn't any bonus. For Paradox the bonus is obvious, it will finally make people stop asking "so when are you gonna let us play as robots"? which people have been asking since before release

 

[TheDungen]

Mechanical ascension seems ... lame.

Why do they still cling to chain their minds to the feeble humanoid form?

Yeah go big or go home.

Well, sure, but at that point we wouldn't really care about which one is better, because we could just rearrange all the planets and put Venus into an orbit around the (now much warmer) Neptune just because Neptune is pretty (it really is).

Because the wierd thign about Venus' orbit is not it's orbit aroudn the sun but it's orbit aroudn it's own axis, which gives it month long days and nights. Quite different from moving a planet to the other side of the solar system. Heck with shades and mirrors you could fix the issue without having to fix the orbit.

It also has a giant atmosphere we'd have to dump somehow (it's a lot easier to make an atmosphere more dense than it is to go the other way around).

No it's not, you create some aerosolic algae or bacteria that live in Venus' atmosphere and collect carbon and then falls to the ground to form carbon rich sediments when they die. Just like earth's sea algae collected our carbon and locked most of it away in limestone.

Neither is a super-awesome terraforming candidate, but Mars is clearly better (and has a much longer tradition of being terraformed in fiction, which is probably more important for a game as focused on scifi tropes as Stellaris).

Mars is clearly worse, there is no way to fix the fact that mars has only 38% of earth's gravity. You would need a planet wide artificial gravity field to make mars habitable. Meanwhile Venus has 90% of Earth's gravity meaning that while settlers would still probably have to due some high gravity training when going from Venus to earth they could still survive the process.
And of course it has since people keep rehashing the same stupid ideas because they are classics rather than looking at the evidence and coming up with new ideas.

"Cyborg" has negative connotations? how? it has no stronger negativity attached to it then "augmented" would, as that 'negativity' is entirely based on the subjective opinion that cybernetics are "bad/immoral/unethical/dangerous".

I mean it's not like how "Robot" is based on a Czech word for forced labor.

Yeah it does, cyborg invokes the picture of things like the borg or the frankenstein's monster like things in command and conquer.
Yeah I get that it originally was just an abbreviation for Cybernetic organism. Heck I wouldn't mind so much if people actually pronounced it Cyb-org rahter than cy-borg. Why not just use Cybernetic organism then?
But I am still going with Cyberetically enhanced.

 

[GiftGruen]

How does Synth ascension and an all-robot empire react to the synth endgame crisis?

 

[Zarpaulus]

On one of the screenshots Mars is shown as habitable and colonized planet - is this a new feature of this expansion? Sol system with 2 habitable planets?

Some barren worlds have the ability to be terraformed into habitable ones, Mars is one of them. This has been mentioned a few times already.

In one of my current games I found a barren world with an anomaly that allowed me to terraform it into an Arid world (I had Savannah preference) as a Science ship project.

 

[TheDungen]

Depends on how you define 'easy'. Venus still has it's massively thick atmosphere.

Easier than more than doublign the gravity of Mars' surface, especially since the AG field could not be allowed to affect the planet itself because more than doubling the gravity acting on mars could lead to serious consequences. You'd probably at the very least cause extreme internal stress on the structure of the planet itself.

Not to mention mars doesn't have a magnetic field which means that any atmosphere you add will be depleted by the solar wind. Let's face it Mars is not a good candidate for terraforming.

And Venus' atmosphere is in fact not a problem but a natural resource. I give you floating habitiats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus#Aerostat_habitats_and_floating_cities

And meanwhile as I said you could either let some nanobots or algae designed to self replicate and remove carbon from the atmosphere and deposit it as sediment loose in the atmosphere, or you could use the carbon rich atmosphere, the heat and the sunlight to grow energy crops than could the be turned into fuels.

TLDR: Talk to the NASA the Dungen isn't listening.