Cracking Open the Alien Box (2024)

Yaskaleh said:

I found this great anomaly and to my big surprise they've changed the three possible rewards. Red gives 5% less housing used, blue gives 10% army damage and +10 years to your leaders and the green gives 5% habitability. In your opinion based upon your preferred play style, which one of these unique features would you prefer?

Click to expand...

Hmm, Probably the increased leader lifespan, that means your leaders are going to be at maximum level for 10 years longer, increasing the time you get their benefits, as well as reducing the energy you need to spend on hiring new ones.
Second best is the housing cost, as that means that you can fit just that many more pops on any given planet, allowing you to use maybe 1-2 districts as one of the rural kinds while still holding just as many pops.
Army damage is not that useful in my opinion in SP, you just make a larger army and be done with it.

The army damage is attached to the lifespan buff, so it’s just icing on the cake.

There are three main approaches when making a decision like this:

Min/Max - whether countering a weakness like non-adapatable or fleeting or further promoting a strength like communal, what’s best is a matter of what traits you already have and long term planning. If this approach is taken, Habitability or Housing usage is going to have the best overall effect in most situations as this can translate to hundreds if not thousands of monthly income in the late game through lesser upkeeps and what have you.

Situational - a brief extension of the above as min/max all depends on the species traits, but this is more referring to your current position. If you have a bunch of small planets in your starting area including a 16/17 home world, red may be your man. If there is a lack of your preferred world type, in particular if you play like myself and turn off guaranteed planets, green is the way to go.

Theme - the overall trump......if you feel your species should have one of these like a bug race with social pheromones or a reptile race with regen, that’s always the “best” choice!!

Edit: noticed an unfinished sentence

5% habitability never matters. It can save you some amenities / CG if your race is non-adaptive, however (except for very few planets with modifiers) it will never allow you to colonize something you couldn't before. And later in the game, with habitability tech, gene modding and more pops (species) you can have 100% habitability anywhere anyway.

+10 leader life sounds nice, but in reality you already get more than enough lifespan from tech and policy. There is even a repeatable tech for it. It's at best 'meh' in the mid-game and useless in the late-game.

So I'd say unless you are roleplaying it's a no-brainer to take 5% housing. It stays relevant no matter how far you progress in the game and housing is a rather rare modifier to get otherwise.

I'd argue outside of rp, there really isn't a choice here. There are few options to decrease housing needs and 5% adds up to be a ton in the late game, which can mean less districts spend on housing and more spent on something like minerals or being able to fully load up a specialized would with specialize buildings. Also goo for dealing with resort planets or habitats since that's freeing up buildings to hold jobs, rather than provide housing.

Habitability is largely a non-issue and I'd say that's less to do with terraforming and gene modding. It's mostly that the penalties for low habitability are easy to ignore. There is also an argument that it's probably a bit too cheap to use terraforming and gene modding later on, but to be honest 5% is pretty worthless. I'd argue that this anomaly would need to provide at least 10% or more to make it a worthwhile choice, to the point where it is the difference between needing to use another option or being at a point where the planet is good enough, even if habitability penalties can no longer be ignored. Honestly, 15% would probably be good enough; especially, if they manage to make habitability something people need to be mindful of, while also making resettlement far less powerful or outright removing it (I kind of figure there is a certain range where pops will grow, so a hefty chunk on main species habitability will be noticeable or save time & resources by not having to resort to gene modding or terraforming).

10 year leader life span is never worth it. It's repeatable tech & for some empires it's not hard to stack it. Plus, unless someone is going for a really long game, there is little point in choosing this since a player will hit a point where it's meaningless add more years on to leader life spans. Army damage is a joke because armies really are worthless, outside of being used to boost naval capacity.

If I were the devs, I'd probably consider ditching leader lifespan and adding two more options to the least. One could be efficient being, pops require less upkeep (so use less food, consumer goods and whatever goods they use for their jobs), this should be relevant to both hive minds & non-hive mind bio empires. The other one could be role model, where the pops help to improve stability (I'll admit this might not be good enough to compete, but probably better than the life span option, since outside of cheese options, intended builds don't have a ton of options for stability without having to make other trade offs).

consumer goods / amenities / stability are much, much more valuable than habitability and leader lifespan. It would make those REAL choices.

Given options of:

10% Housing
10% Consumer Goods (Amenities if Hive)
10% Happiness (or maybe just +5 Stability)

I'd have to think about it.

tobias.mb said:

5% habitability never matters. It can save you some amenities / CG if your race is non-adaptive, however (except for very few planets with modifiers) it will never allow you to colonize something you couldn't before. And later in the game, with habitability tech, gene modding and more pops (species) you can have 100% habitability anywhere anyway.

+10 leader life sounds nice, but in reality you already get more than enough lifespan from tech and policy. There is even a repeatable tech for it. It's at best 'meh' in the mid-game and useless in the late-game.

So I'd say unless you are roleplaying it's a no-brainer to take 5% housing. It stays relevant no matter how far you progress in the game and housing is a rather rare modifier to get otherwise.

Click to expand...

Remember you can get this anomaly very early on, and early to mid game those two other alternatives can prove to be very usefull indeed, and that would be at a point of the game where 5% extra housing perhaps is the less usefull of the options.

I always do one of two things:

1. The RP choice. What would the empire care about? May or may not be most useful.

2. Roll a die to pick randomly. Like the whole point is supposed to be that you don't know in advance. So to simulate that I make it random.

2&1/2. RP RANDOM. What would be my empire's favorite color, or which color feels like a representation of who they are? They'd probably pick that color, so I should too.

y1kdcb5au9rqw said:

I had a case for the habitability in a recent game. Was going for synthetic ascension from the start of the game so had built my species with enduring meaning leader lifespan was not an issue. The housing option would not matter either because it would disappear before housing becomes an issue. However the habitability actually came early enough to matter as I only had two planets of my climate preference by the time we became cyborgs so it actually stayed relevant all the way to the synthetic ascension.

Click to expand...

Keep the box until after ascension and apply it then. Housing reduction applies to synthetics just fine, much like the Int bonus from the Worm.

sillyrobot said:

Keep the box until after ascension and apply it then. Housing reduction applies to synthetics just fine, much like the Int bonus from the Worm.

Click to expand...

Now I feel stupid... assumed that it wouldn't apply to machines because the description implies a biological nature.

Clearly the housing bonus is the stronger option in all scenarios then.

I don't see the appeal of the housing-reducing option.
Assuming you're at 95% habitability or less, then the extra +5% will effectively

• reduce amenity usage by 5%
• reduce housing usage by 5%
• increase pop growth speed by 2.5%
• increase job resource output by 2.5%

(I haven't actually checked any of these whether they're additive or multiplicative, which will have a small effect)
If you've already eliminated the third option as a choice, then your only question should be WHEN you hit >95% habitability. Assuming the race in question doesn't have other habitability traits like (extremely) adaptive, then it'd require a perfect match of climate preference and having researched at least 3 of the 4 habitability technologies. I find that I don't hit 95% habitability unless I complete synthetic ascension or start rampant terraforming to gaia worlds, either of which typically marks the point of no return, where there is nothing left to threaten me.

So tell me, which you would rather have; a small but permanent bonus, or a larger bonus that disappears after you've become the dominant power.

Is that what was in the box?

Blurb said:

I don't see the appeal of the housing-reducing option.
Assuming you're at 95% habitability or less, then the extra +5% will effectively

• reduce amenity usage by 5%
• reduce housing usage by 5%
• increase pop growth speed by 2.5%
• increase job resource output by 2.5%

(I haven't actually checked any of these whether they're additive or multiplicative, which will have a small effect)
If you've already eliminated the third option as a choice, then your only question should be WHEN you hit >95% habitability. Assuming the race in question doesn't have other habitability traits like (extremely) adaptive, then it'd require a perfect match of climate preference and having researched at least 3 of the 4 habitability technologies. I find that I don't hit 95% habitability unless I complete synthetic ascension or start rampant terraforming to gaia worlds, either of which typically marks the point of no return, where there is nothing left to threaten me.

So tell me, which you would rather have; a small but permanent bonus, or a larger bonus that disappears after you've become the dominant power.

Click to expand...

It's very easy to gene-mod it so your POPs fit the climate of their world. You also only have to do it once for a climate type since after that you can just colonize new worlds using a sub-species that's already fit the the target planet climate.

Since I very rarely end up colonizing one of each climate type, it's not like I have to do the modding process eight times either. Usually a few times is enough.

That's why I usually go with the housing trait option.

Karlington said:

It's very easy to gene-mod it so your POPs fit the climate of their world. You also only have to do it once for a climate type since after that you can just colonize new worlds using a sub-species that's already fit the the target planet climate.

Since I very rarely end up colonizing one of each climate type, it's not like I have to do the modding process eight times either. Usually a few times is enough.

That's why I usually go with the housing trait option.

Click to expand...

To be honest, even with a one species run, I'm usually happy enough with a wet, a dry, and a hot version of the species.
Going all out to have nine different climate preferences never seems worth it.