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Stellaris Dev Diary #63: Synthetic and Biological Ascension

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris dev diary. This week we'll be talking about Ascension again, specifically the Synthetic and Biological Ascension Paths. In dev diary #60 we talked about the Psionic Ascension Path and the associated Shroud. The Shroud was a fairly major mechanical addition to the game, which we felt was needed as Psionics lacked any such mechanic associated with them, unlike the other two. For this reason, the Biological and Synthetic Ascension Paths do not have the same degree of new mechanics associated with them, but rather focus on enhancing the existing mechanics (Genemodding and Robots) that they are tied to.

The Synthetic Ascension Path focuses on abandoning your frail biological forms for that of a perfect machine. The first step, the Flesh is Weak, requires the Droids technology and allows you to modify your entire population through a special project, turning them into cyborgs. This gives them an immediate +20% boost to habitability, as well as bonuses to mineral production and army damage, and also makes any leaders generated from those species have the Cyborg trait granting an additional +40 years of lifespan.
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The next step, Synthetic Evolution, requires the ability to build Synths, and allows you to upgrade your cyborg population into fully mechanical forms, finally abandoning the frailty of flesh for the surety of synthetics. When it is complete, you will become a fully robotic empire, with a robotic primary species. Your population will benefit from all the advantages normally conferred to Synths in production and research, and all your leaders will be immortal, able to be killed only in battle or through events. You will also naturally no longer require Food for your synthetic population, instead being replaced by an Energy maintenance similar to regular Synths. You will also be able to name your new, gloriously post-biological people.
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The Biological Ascension Path focuses on mastery of DNA and evolution. The first step, Engineered Evolution, requires the Gene Tailoring technology and grants a major reduction to the cost and time required to genetically modify species, gives you +2 trait points, and also unlocks the ability to research the Gene Seed Purification technology which is otherwise unavailable (it can still be researched as normal for those who do not have the Utopia expansion), allowing recruitment of Gene Warriors.
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The next step, Evolutionary Mastery requires the Targeted Gene Expressions technology. It grants an additional +3 trait points, a further reduction in time and cost of genemodding, and unlocks the ability to research the Genetic Resequencing technology, which once researched unlocks Advanced Genemodding. With Advanced Genemodding you will be able to add negative traits and remove positive traits, allowing you to completely reshape species at your whim. It also unlocks five new traits that are exclusively available to the Biological Ascension Path:
Robust: Upgrades from Extremely Adaptable, adds +30% habitability and an extra +30 years of lifespan.
Fertile: Upgrades from Rapid Breeders, gives -30% growth time and +5% happiness
Erudite: Upgrades from Intelligent, gives +20% science production and +1 leader skill levels.
Delicious: Makes the species delicious and nutritious, granting +100% food yield from Processing and Livestock.
Nerve Stapled: Removes the ability of the species to feel happiness or sadness. Happiness is disabled and Food/Mineral production increased, but adds major penalties to other resource production.
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Additionally, Advanced Genemodding allows for the ability for non-Hive Mind empires to remove the Hive-Minded trait from Pops and for Hive Minds to add it to Pops, as mentioned in dev diary #62.

That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking a variety of smaller features coming in the Banks update, including the ability to terraform Mars.
 
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Looks good. The mechanical ascension is (as advertised) not super exciting, rather a simpler way to play an all synth empire. The biological at least seems to be normal gene modding on steroids.

Would be cool to see more techs related to these though. At this stage it is mostly limited to pop bonuses.
 
Disclaimer: I know Numbers are not final, these are all assumptions based on the Numbers I saw and I know probably everything will change, please don't kill me Wiz.

Soo... If you took the Synthetic Ascension Path:

Are you still able to grow your pops naturally?
It would be a shame if you had to build every single pop manually.

Changeing your Energy needs in one step also seems more than harmful....
Getting -300 (a SMALL estimate about the Pop-count ~ 360 fan.mat.) Energy over night might kill you until you rebuilt all farms into energy. A period of weakness no other path offers.
(Except maybe bad shroud things, but thats one owns fault for gambling)

Did Robots get an Upgrade?
The boni you get from the Shroud are stupidly high, an instant 10% on top of other boni AND the Shroud as Gamble to get even better Tech (Psi shields usw.)
The Genetic Path allows you to hyperspecialise your pops and gives them the option to exceed synths in any way. (See Industrious + Very Strong)
Even the best two army types (Psi and Gene Warriors) are now locked to those.

What do synths get except beeing synths?
Psi has armies, tech, better FTL, better leaders (having immortal leaders might be useful, but nobody really cares when you can have awesome leaders)

Gene modding has armies, better pops, no weakness the abillity to outperform other pops and grow like rabbits.

Synths get android and robotic armies (I prefered the basic assault armies every time), 100% habitabillity (achievable by preference modding 1 pop once and colonizing, even with psi + some habitabillity tech), 20% every science ( 25%Intelligent + natural x), 20% on minerals (Industrious + Very Strong gives 25%) and 20% on energy (thrifty seems a good alternative)


Synths are the same as before. So why should anyone want to take them?
 
An American Pyro said:
I really can't wait to create a robot species.
But...I really can't resist playing an evil empire, removing emotions from slaves and livestock, and making livestock be delicious.
Wiz, will the Synthetic Ascension change how the rebellion thinks of you?
Click to expand...

Yes, the Delicious trait is wonderful!!

Also we definitely need some more Synth and Cyber portraits.
Even in a companion DLC if cannot fit into Utopia .
 
Small idea: allow the player to change the species portrait and name with higher levels of biological ascension too. This would help the feel of creating and mastering evolution and the mechanics are already set up for the name and portrait change with the mechanical ascension.
 
So with bio-path you can create really strong species and capable leaders, but with forgone chances of immortality of your leaders (who still may be long-living anyway). You can also make horrible frankenstein species well fiting to be opressed. Basicaly, you posses more flexibility at expence of cybernetic advantages.
 
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It'd be super cool if you can associate a synth portrait with a particular portrait (with the current one as default), and then you could have it so that ones built by that species have that appearance too. Would add some variation to it.
 
Wiz said:
Delicious: Makes the species delicious and nutritious, granting +100% food yield from Processing and Livestock.
Click to expand...
Hahaha, they really went ahead and did it. Hilarious.
Wiz said:
Nerve Stapled: Removes the ability of the species to feel happiness or sadness. Happiness is disabled and Food/Mineral production increased, but adds major penalties to other resource production.
Click to expand...
Interesting concept to boost slaves for lategame empires.

BUT
I'm honestly disappointed that species modification is still limited to planetwide and that seemingly no other change was done to fix climate adaptation costing no trait point, yet becoming locked out when trait points reach 0.

Thus, you cannot make colony ships with genetically designed colonist (which is both a reasonable and a useful feature) and latter remains as what I perceive as a bug/design oversight.
 
I was looking forward to doing a synthetic playthrough but it honestly seems so boring and underwhelming that I might just get annoyed playing that option. Weaker bonuses, lack of active strategic mechanisms (like interacting with the shroud or creating an array of specialized species for your empire) it just seems pointless especially if others can still build synths anyway.
 
Really great and promising stuff, a definite first day buy for me. I really hope we see the option for some variety of appearances for the cyborgs/synthetic/robots, perhaps as part of the expansion? Might we be able to choose how they look?
 
I'd be satisfied with a hook in the portraits file that let you specify what file is used for robots for your species. A flag something like 'has trait_robotic', then all robots you build - and consequently, your upgraded species - can look how you specify. If you don't have something specified, it'd use the default robot. Off the top of my head, that's the easiest and fastest way to implement something like this.
 
Interesting. Has this solved the problem that when you modify your entire current population, any population which grows/is born after the modification is started are still the original species and is unmodded?
 
So, will we be able to rename gene-modded species as well? That would be a big quality of life improvement, I think, because otherwise the species screen might have a dozen kinds of "Cevanti" or whatever, and being able to tell apart "Post-Cevanti" and "Super-Cevanti" by name alone would be helpful.

As excited as I am to name my synth pops "Gleisners," I would also love to name my gene modded pops "Transhumans." :D

But, in any case, this all looks great!
 
I'd like to echo all the portraits questions. I understand if there was no time, budget or need to add new robot art in this expansion, but please, PLEASE could the same window that allows renaming of species at least have some framework in place to bring up portrait selection? Even if no robotic portraits ship with Utopia, even if you're not planning on adding any in the foreseeable future, that would at least give modders (I'm interested in this personally) a convenient and conflict-free way to add more portrait options.

The only other alternatives I can think of are very messy and likely to result in conflicts...
 
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Birnenpappe said:
So, in an ultra-micromanaged playstyle, would it be viable to genemod only part of your species to be Erudites and put that part on research, gene-modify another part to be thrifty and put those on energy and so forth?
Click to expand...
You can already do this in the game right now. The gene modification techs allow you to add traits to specific species on one or multiple planets. If you specialize each planet to either produce energy, minerals or research it can be relatively easy to add the respective traits thrifty, industrious, intelligent to the right planets.

If you however want to each planet to produce a balance of all resources it becomes really micro management intensive to resettle and move each individual pop.

It doesn't look like they have changed how the species gene modification mechanic works. So I do not see how this will change in Utopia.

The stellaris-dev-diary-57-species-rights which talks about the new species right system adds some interesting possibilities however. Specifically the Caste-System:
  • Caste System: Species with a caste system have a mix of full citizenship and slavery, with pops working in the farms and mines being enslaved and the rest being free to enjoy the fruits of the serfs' labor.
If they added a way specifically modify the traits of those with full citizenship separate from those who are slaves it would make gene modding so much more useful.
 
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