Title. I figured it meant that those in the lathe essentially had population controls on (being in the matrix and all) and couldn't procreate until they come out again. Is that the lore reason?
Just curious because as far as I understand it can carry the same opinion penalty as an extermination purge. Little weird to me.
I'm looking for opinions on how to optimize a build and generally talk about the three items on the title.
I'm running a Fan Spiritualist/Auth/Imperial Chosen/Genetic Sequencing + Teachers of the Shroud empire, aiming to unity rush extremely hard to early ascension and eventually replace the cradle with the whisperers. The play would be to take One Vision, then Nihilistic Acquisition, then arcology project (as TOTS lets you skip Mind Over Matter) to fill up the ecumenopoli with CG and researcher jobs, and use the telepath job scaling and all four sanctums to make a super tech world, and the covenant power to make more ecumenopoli to eventually steal every pop in the galaxy and return them to my core worlds. Eventually I would replace pop stealing with conquest and vassalization -> integration and depopulate all former vassal worlds.
The hangup I have here is figuring out how to go for Cosmogenesis with this build. The lathe is the key to a ridiculous tech build, but costs enormous energy, while not benefitting much from Psionic job efficiency if at all. I'm also not sure if neural chips count as researcher jobs, and so I don't know if research subsidies, and the energy upkeep is painful as psionics with Transcendant Imperium receive a worker efficiency malus. Should I build it at all? Maybe build it and only reach 100% efficiency?
Also, I'm not sure if it's better to get a whisperer covenant to get more ecumenopoli, or if I should go shroudshaper to also benefit from other covenant powers. I'm afraid I'll get stuck in the Eater's domain if I do that, because the build relies on endless warfare.
Wondering if anyone else has had this happen.
I played cosmogenesis, took the Gray Tempest L cluster and terraformed every world, put megastructures into it, etc, moved my capital there and setup 2 deep space citadels and a bastion at terminal egress. Then I stacked my fleet there (~1M) and began crisis tier 5.
All four FEs remaining declare on me - no problem, I turned the lathe's resonators on and maxed research until the needle was done, then emptied it out, at which point my resource production in the L cluster could sustain me comfortably, so I didn't need to defend my original capital sector any longer. Then the Unbidden spawn and BEELINE for the L cluster. I figured they would kill the empires near their spawn first... but no.
They send 2M (10x crisis) into Terminal Egress and wipe out my defense, and slowly purge all my worlds. I send out the sole remaining fleet (a Juggernaut) and a construction ship to several empty systems over the next decades, which slowly get targeted down, until I am left with one planet and one habitat in a single system defended, again, by two DSCs and a bastion. The FEs destroy the weakened Unbidden and ignore me, and the Unbidden slowly lose their gains over decades. I stabilize by utilizing the FE building tech to quickly recover my economy...
And the awakened Xenophobe AE decalres total war on me, and move to purge the planet.
At this point I find an isolated colonizable world hidden behind the Xenophile FE, and I send at this point my one remaining con ship and science ship to survey it, claim it, upgrade the station and build a colony ship, doing so moments before my previous last colony was conquered.
In the short calm afterward I built a class 3 singularity, quantum drilling plant and auto forge on that world, and status quo'd the war with the caretakers. I traded the remainder of my dark matter and living metal for 50k alloys, built the horizon needle and immediately threw it in the closest black hole. I won by the skin on my teeth.
At one point I had exactly 1 pop... down from 220k...
I don't think I can ever top this run. Sorry if this is incoherent I was up until 4:30 playing this out. Also there's no flair for "haha cool thing happened".
Some spoilers below, I think.
Had an idea today. It would be cool if you could ask your cover-capable ships to enable cover and perform an action, with the caveat that they cannot be interacted with or seen (essentially, they aren't yours) while following their command.
Combine this with all YAK ships also getting cover by default, and you could technically have a run built around supplying materials to the YAK pirate base with ever-increasing fleets of moreyas and kuraokamis buying (or looting) the wares that YAK needs and returning to them.
Also, maybe missions offered at +10 rep by their station to source ice and/or water as well as food in line with their... situation.
And maybe a connecting quest for players who never started the TER stuff but arrived there in an envoy... ;).
If you can't tell, I love YAK.
Just some shower thoughts. Loving the game, can't put it down even to the detriment of those excel sheets collecting dust... thank you u/Tomonor and X4 dev team.