Thoughts on Nascent stage?

[Demoulius]

Hi guuys,

I figured id give the new Nascent stage trait a shot and see how it is to deal with it. And oh man....In my opinion this trait should be more then -2 points. Maybe -3 or even -4.

Your new pops cant work jobs for 5 years. In also fairly sure theyre also not contributing to pop growth during this time either. It is by far one of the most cripplingtrait you can give yourself for -2 points that ive ever seen in the game, its impact on your empire is insane.

Its also very annoying to deal with. Because it keeps putting a group of the pre-sapients in the 'civilain' group giving off the impression you got some pops who you can shift to job only to find out that theyre actually pre-sapients as well..,.

How is every one else experiencing them?

 

[LameFox]

The UI for this is heavily defective.

I'll look at my pops, see I have some presapients and some civilians. Go to migrate them, and sometimes there are no civilians here at all. Go back to check: they're still there. They just don't show up when I want to move them, so I have to move some workers instead and let the civilians promote to fill the jobs.

Or I do find them, but when I try to migrate them, it tells me some of the groups marked as civilians are actually presapients.



Other than that, it's definitely a sluggish start. I wouldn't be opposed to it being -3 or else reducing the years spent as presapients. Though I still take it for flavour reasons tbh, just like I did with nonadaptive before. I think this one actually hits harder than nonadaptive.

 

[Demoulius]

Non adaptive and slowe breeder you can quite easily counter act with research that completly negates the penalty. And often at the end game you have like dozens of bonuses that even if you still have the drawback, its barely noticable.

This one? Unless you remove it youre stuck with it. It just beeing -2 is kind of insane imho.

 

[TSBasilisk]

At least you can put an Alien Zoo on all of your research planets for the extra boost it provides. It's just a Daycare center, honest.

 

[Gundabadguy]

The trait is probably better if you add it later on for the points if you go genetic ascension and it makes sense thematically as you could say that the modified version of your species needs extra time to grow to their full potential

 

[Edorath]

i like throwing my babies to the gladiator pits

 

[Adahn42069]

Hi guuys,

I figured id give the new Nascent stage trait a shot and see how it is to deal with it. And oh man....In my opinion this trait should be more then -2 points. Maybe -3 or even -4.

Your new pops cant work jobs for 5 years. In also fairly sure theyre also not contributing to pop growth during this time either. It is by far one of the most cripplingtrait you can give yourself for -2 points that ive ever seen in the game, its impact on your empire is insane.

Its also very annoying to deal with. Because it keeps putting a group of the pre-sapients in the 'civilain' group giving off the impression you got some pops who you can shift to job only to find out that theyre actually pre-sapients as well..,.

How is every one else experiencing them?

Have it on to one of your smaller groups of slaves sub-species and use it to build Alien Zoos everywhere for the research boost. It is bad for main species.

 

[Calvax]

At least you can put an Alien Zoo on all of your research planets for the extra boost it provides. It's just a Daycare center, honest.

i like throwing my babies to the gladiator pits

I love the role play potential. I used it in an empire based on a species from John Scalzi's Forever War series. In their child stage they're non-sentient and hyper violent. Offspring are left to fight in the wild until eventually they can join society.

The UI for it is annoying though.

 

[Adaman5280]

Its probably one of the most impactful negative traits, most other negative traits are entirely negligible. Its probably my favorite negative trait in the game actually. I wish we had more like it that forced you to adapt your playstyle around them not just negate them with techs. However these kind of traits should definitely give a greater reward, at least -3.

 

[aadf97799c]

5 year are to short for narrative sense yet mechanically pretty punishing

new pop being pre sapient also cause obvious jank

 

[Zarganthrax]

iirc, you can still set pre-sapients to be hunted, si depending on how it goes, your entire species can die out because you made infanticide legal.

 

[Falrinn]

I think the only real mistake was making them Pre Sapients instead of creating a new "Nacent Stage" trait that would avoid all the weird interactions.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

I don't think it's nearly as bad as this thread says it is.

Its growth tracks Slow Breeders fairly closely (at least compared to a control without either). The following charts are for a Control (no growth speed trait), Slow Breeders, Nascent Stage, and the diff (NS - SB) times ten for visibility.

For the starting world: ahead of Slow Breeders by year 30 (though this is a silly comparison, since it assumes you don't move anything offworld):

The weird spike is because you start with 200 pre-sapient pops that simultaneously convert on year 5.

For a colony with 1000 starting pops:

Trying to approximate a full empire (assuming you add a 7000 capacity colony every 15 years and evenly distribute pops between all planets):

Basically: it's just Slow Breeders, except more flavorful (and you get to use zoos).

It catches up with Slow Breeders and surpasses it when planets sit at the logistic growth cap instead of continuing to scale. So, I think it would actually perform better in a more realistic scenario (new colony fills up slowly, and old planets sit at the logistic growth cap more instead of all pops being distributed evenly between all colonies even though they're unemployed), but that sounds like too much effort to try to compute.

 

[Sweeze]

I tried it once and it seemed "fine", but I'd stay the hell away from it just because generating hundreds of new pops feels like the opposite of optimizing game performance.

 

[Demoulius]

I don't think it's nearly as bad as this thread says it is.

Its growth tracks Slow Breeders fairly closely (at least compared to a control without either). The following charts are for a Control (no growth speed trait), Slow Breeders, Nascent Stage, and the diff (SB-NS) times ten for visibility.

For the starting world: ahead of Slow Breeders by year 30 (though this is a silly comparison, since it assumes you don't move anything offworld):
View attachment 1312075
The weird spike is because you start with 200 pre-sapient pops that simultaneously convert on year 5.

For a colony with 1000 starting pops:
View attachment 1312074

Trying to approximate a full empire (assuming you add a 7000 capacity colony every 15 years and evenly distribute pops between all planets):
View attachment 1312072

Basically: it's just Slow Breeders, except more flavorful (and you get to use zoos).

It catches up with Slow Breeders and surpasses it when planets sit at the logistic growth cap instead of continuing to scale. So, I think it would actually perform better in a more realistic scenario (new colony fills up slowly, and old planets sit at the logistic growth cap more instead of all pops being distributed evenly between all colonies even though they're unemployed), but that sounds like too much effort to try to compute.

You can literally negate slow breeders by beeing researchign 1 tech or beeing xenophobe. Things like geneclinics counteract it and some planets might have modifiers for growth speed that partially or completly negate it.

Not so with nascent stage. Unless you remove it with genemodding, youre stuck with it. -2 points is the same as slow breeders and the impact of this trait are far, far higher.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

You can literally negate slow breeders by beeing researchign 1 tech or beeing xenophobe. Things like geneclinics counteract it and some planets might have modifiers for growth speed that partially or completly negate it.

Not so with nascent stage. Unless you remove it with genemodding, youre stuck with it. -2 points is the same as slow breeders and the impact of this trait are far, far higher.

The math says no, the impacts are not far, far higher.

Genome Sequencing, Gene Clinics, and Xenophobe do not "completely negate" Slow Breeders, they offset it. An empire with Slow Breeders will always have -10% growth compared to an identical empire without it.

• Slow Breeders vs. normal empire: 90% vs. 100%
• Slow Breeders with Genome Sequencing vs. normal empire with Genome Sequencing: 100% vs. 110%
• Slow Breeder Fanatic Xenophobes with Genome Sequencing, Gene Clinics, and Expansion traditions vs. a normal empire with the same: 140% vs. 150%

Nascent Stage is slightly more punishing in those scenarios, since it's effectively multiplicative: 0.9*1.0=1.0*0.9, whereas 1.3*1.0 > 1.4*0.9. But:

• The difference is very small (it essentially turns +10% growth bonuses into only +9%).
• It goes the other way in the early game, when growth compounds most aggressively and is most crucial: -10% growth when you're already reduced -20% by habitability is much more punishing than an (effective) 0.9x multiplier.
• Except for Fanatic Xenophobe, by the time you have enough bonuses for it to matter, you can just remove it.
• By the time it matters "Zoos on every research planet" is a substantial bonus: you can generate CG efficiently enough and reduce research upkeep by enough that +1 research/+3 amenities is well worth it.
  • You keep the "Zoos everywhere" bonus, even if you gene mod 90% of your empire away from Nascent Stage: a tiny minority of Nascent pops are sufficient. You can do the same if you find someone else's Nascent Stage species, but only starting with it (or taking Purity/Mutation ascension) guarantees access.

If you think it's "far, far higher" than -10%, you're overestimating its effects. Again, the math says no.

Look at the graphs. The blue line is the Control (no traits). The red line is Slow Breeders. The yellow line is Nascent Stage. The difference between red/yellow is a fraction of the difference between blue/red, except for the initial 200 pop deficit (and yellow even catches up to/surpasses red, eventually).

And even those graphs are overly pessimistic for NS: they assume there's no growth on the colony, when in a real game the pops you resettled would have their growth still maturing on your homeworld.

 

[Wolfgang I]

It is my favourite new trait RP wise. I pick the fungal infected mammals and pretend the new hosts get a nice childhood and get to "ascend" once they leave kindergarten. I hope the add a fungal infected human portrait at some point.

I feel it seems really bad gameplay wise for the early snowball though. More than just pop growth wise. Civilians can produce stuff and the nascansts can't.

I did not switch out of it in my current game and I got 12 % nascant pops in 2278 that produce nothing except a tiny bit of unity.
Edit: So it is probably the worst trait possible except maybe rooted.

 

[BookHermit]

It's not bad, just... Weird. It adds a strange drag early on to growth, basically don't have pop growth until year 5 when all your starting presapients grow up at once,

The bigger issue is all the oddity around how your nascent main species seems to be affected by empire policy towards presapient species, but it's unclear how much is actually being applied (except not being able to resettle them) as you are blocked from some behaviors (no automatically purging of your presapient children, regardless of how annoying "todays youth" may be).

Do agree and wish they'd differentiated the nascent young of your species from random presapient alien animals.

Plus, playing a Genesis Ark species, I keep seeing presapient and thinking I got someone left to uplift before realizing they are just toddlers.

 

[Echo Candor One]

It's a flavorful Slow Breeders with some really weird implications about presapient life.

 

[Thiend]

The UI getting even worse was enough to make me restart relatively early into using it. Still, it's basically reskinned Slow Breeders.

It has some funny and mildly useful presapient interactions. It makes changes in your growth rate lag in actual effect by 5 years, but I can't think of a way to take advantage of that.

The only way it's in any way noteworthy is if it actually applies to newly assembled pops too, in which case it is extremely bad due to being Slow Breeders + delayed assembly. I have no idea whether it does, having not used it long enough to actually HAVE assembly simultaneously. I suppose it should be as easy as starting with Permanent Employment too and seeing if you get any presapient zombies.