What traita are good for Wilderness species?

[TranscendentalDragon]

Obviusly leader boosting traits work, but what else?

 

[SirBlackAxe]

• You're locked into bioships, so traits boosting food (Agrarian) and society research (Natural Sociologists) are good.
• Repugnant is free trait points since you don't use amenities jobs.
• Solitary and Unruly are also better than normal negative traits, as long as you don't store up too much unused biomass.
• Terraforming is more expensive since it costs biomass, so habitability boosting can be useful.
  • You can only get 100% habitability on Gaia worlds and can't take the Hive Worlds AP, so habitability may be relevant for more of the game. You do have higher weight to draw the Terraforming tech though.
• Pop growth speed applies to biomass growth, so Incubators might be worth trying as long as you spend your biomass before the penalty kicks in.
• Biomass is free to resettle and you generally won't have open jobs, so I think the Rooted negative trait is worth trying out.
• Take Traditional/Chromalogs if you want to unity rush your ascension path in order to be able to steal pops and assimilate them into biomass.

 

[HFY]

If you're locked into a single species and single planet type, then Aquatic may be a good choice -- it solves Habitability and gives +% on basics.

EDIT: The +% on basic production doesn't seem to be applied. Hmm, maybe Invasive Species is the best pick, if Weak also isn't applied.

EDIT to the EDIT: the +% is now a bonus to Workforce, and I do get extra Workforce for menial drone jobs, but it's not labeled as coming from anywhere in specific so it's possible that some other +10% is helping me out. But I'm leaning towards yes, Aquatic works great for +% and for habitability.

 

[BookHermit]

I've been going Aquatic / Agrarian / Budding and Unruly / Nonadaptive

Aquatic as the bonuses are good and get even better with Hydrocentric, given you won't be building Ecu's or wanting Relic worlds (0% habitablity) being locked into just Oceans isn't a big deal. Plus, with Hydrocentric you'll be able to push all your planets eventually to size 33, 30 from the Wilderness planetary decision to grow planet size and then 3 more with ice mining after that. It really is just flat out the best trait for Wilderness.

Agrarian because you just need soooo much food for meat ships & space industry and all of your pops. (Though if I plan to go Void Hive and ignore space mining costs I might drop this for something else and pick it back up, sorta, with Vocational Genomics post-Ascension species mods as space industry is the most annoying - for me - early game food crunch.)

I prefer Budding to Incubators Rapid Breeders as I tend to have more issues with running out of Biomass the longer the game goes so the stacking of growth as I grow more works better for me, Incubators Rapid Breeders might be better for early game though if you want to swap to Budding after you get planets settled and jobs being worked (Biomass locked into jobs and not being spent as a resource).

Unruly is kind of a wash early (compared to the Planet and District size hits) and I'll drop it when I Purity ascend and pick up new traits as it will be hurting some by then, and Nonadaptive is a wash as I'm gonna make everything an Ocean anyways for the Aquatic / Hydrocentric bonuses.

Edit: Oh yeah, Wilderness can't take Incubators. That was the other reason I go Plant/Fungoid and take Budding instead, so the choice is Budding or Rapid Breeders and for some reason I can't recall right now I tend to prefer Budding.

 

[henriqueb1]

I've been going Aquatic / Agrarian / Budding and Unruly / Nonadaptive

Aquatic as the bonuses are good and get even better with Hydrocentric, given you won't be building Ecu's or wanting Relic worlds (0% habitablity) being locked into just Oceans isn't a big deal. Plus, with Hydrocentric you'll be able to push all your planets eventually to size 33, 30 from the Wilderness planetary decision to grow planet size and then 3 more with ice mining after that. It really is just flat out the best trait for Wilderness.

Agrarian because you just need soooo much food for meat ships & space industry and all of your pops. (Though if I plan to go Void Hive and ignore space mining costs I might drop this for something else and pick it back up, sorta, with Vocational Genomics post-Ascension species mods as space industry is the most annoying - for me - early game food crunch.)

I prefer Budding to Incubators Rapid Breeders as I tend to have more issues with running out of Biomass the longer the game goes so the stacking of growth as I grow more works better for me, Incubators Rapid Breeders might be better for early game though if you want to swap to Budding after you get planets settled and jobs being worked (Biomass locked into jobs and not being spent as a resource).

Unruly is kind of a wash early (compared to the Planet and District size hits) and I'll drop it when I Purity ascend and pick up new traits as it will be hurting some by then, and Nonadaptive is a wash as I'm gonna make everything an Ocean anyways for the Aquatic / Hydrocentric bonuses.

Edit: Oh yeah, Wilderness can't take Incubators. That was the other reason I go Plant/Fungoid and take Budding instead, so the choice is Budding or Rapid Breeders and for some reason I can't recall right now I tend to prefer Budding.

I would say budding is really bad. I also thought it was good and tried to make it work, but since you don't need population numbers for jobs and you will want to be spending your biomass constantly, budding will never be good.

When you finally have more biomass than you know what to do with, budding will finally give a nice bonus, but then you don't need it anymore.

 

[captainbeastfeast]

Anyone thing that wilderness having a base species is kinda weird? it would be better if you just commanded lumps of biomass imo, that morph into different bio forms/ pops over time according to fit their immediate environment.

 

[Sweeze]

As far as I can tell growth speed bonuses aren't useful because they apply to natural biomass growth. But if you're playing properly around ~99% of your biomass growth comes from the growth buildings which don't benefit from growth bonuses. If you have more than like 100 biomass sitting around per planet then you should be spending it on something. And growth rates with 100 biomass are awful. You do need some amount of biomass per planet or the jobs aren't worked (it's seems... buggy, you literally just need 1 to provide max workforce but if you use literally all you can get it back by building something and canceling the build), but excess biomass is wasted potential.

Habitability bonuses can be useful if you plan to conquer a lot of enemy planets since you can't terraform them until you get the tech for it and the tech for terraforming inhabited planets (which is...weird, shouldn't terraforming be basically the same whether inhabited or not by wilderness? But you can abandon and terraform/colonize). But if you are playing fairly passively to start with then you don't need it. Conquering new planets doesn't even improve your growth rate early game, your growth is 100% determined by how quickly you can stack -construction cost bonuses and build growth buildings. There's zero reason to acquire new colonies before all your existing colonies are maxed on growth.

Pop penalties like Unruly do practically nothing because Wilderness counts as far fewer pops than other empires for the same amount of jobs worked. So +10% empire size from pops is meaningless. My lategame Wilderness ended up with 3600 empire size and had 4.5k pops that were responsible for 42.2 empire size.

My build for Wilderness ended up being:

Aquatic (everything's gonna end up being ocean either before I colonize it or shortly after, +3 districts baby, and unlike other empires you can actually fill and work all those jobs easily even if you're huge)
Quick Learners (more XP, see below)
Intelligent (flexible slot, can also do something like spare organs or enduring)
Unruly (meaningless penalty)
Nonadaptive (mostly meaningless with aquatic). Though I guess Repugnant would have been better if it actually has literally no effect on wilderness, I wasn't sure.

!!!!!IMPORTANT!!!!!!
This is where the actual magic to Wilderness lies. Traits are practically irrelevant compared to this.

You *NEED* to stack -construction cost as hard as possible. -construction cost is effectively how you boost growth, and as a subtractive modifier it gets exponentially more powerful the more you stack it. To do this:

1. Initial ruler as Official
2. Neural Vaults and Empath Civics for +2 starting official levels
3. Take prosperity for -10% and then get as much leader XP boosts as you can from wherever you can. Architecture focus 3 is -15% cost per official. Statecraft should probably be your 2nd tradition (though I also kinda like unyielding for station resources and turtling)

The sooner you make those cradles cheap the faster your biomass snowball will be. Getting their cost down to 160 food/160 biomass isn't too hard by midgame.

Once you've got your construction cost bonuses down you probably want to switch to Natural Neural Network/Divided Attention/Elevational Desires.