So I’ve tested the new features a bit. I still have some questions and some things I absolutely hate. First the things I don’t really understand.
First. I figured out how to gain experience and discover the other lifeforms. Now I’m just left with another question, what exactly is “lifeform tech bonus”? https://prnt.sc/oNDid58MO7sv I understand that I get 1% more for each level, but what does it do? Does “lifeform tech bonus” mean that your lifeform specific research is 1% better? Such that at 100% a resource production increase of 0.15 pr level will increase 100% to 0.3 pr level. Does “lifeform tech bonus” include lifeform specific buildings, such that it increases the efficiency of the buildings along with the efficiency of the lifeform specific technologies? Or does it mean that I research the lifeform specific researches and/or buildings 1% faster? Is there a max level?
Second thing I don’t understand is food, why does it even exist? The only thing food does is get eaten by your population. Under the population tab https://prnt.sc/FPRjKbnd6cvD there is a line called satisfied, as far as I can tell this is how many lifeforms you can feed with your current production. So even if you have capacity for a larger amount of lifeforms, you won’t be able to have that many lifeforms as you have too little food anyway. Since the only thing you use food for is feeding the population, why isn’t the satisfied line good enough? Why does food need to exist as a resource? If you produce more food than your population consumes, you will just have a ton of useless food build up and you will have nothing to do with the excess food. So what am I going to do if I end up suddenly having 5billion food? I can’t sell it to the merchant. I can’t purchase anything with it. There are no trade rates for food, and even if there was, who would want to buy it? So you are left with a very large amount of basically useless resources, am I supposed to fly it to someone else's moon to annoy them or will that count at pushing? I get that I can just keep the population hungry, but it still doesn’t make sense to have food as a resource.
Third problem is the population. Does the lifeforms do anything other than unlock lifeform research? So is there any point to getting a larger population after you reach the 18th lifeform research? If that’s true, then lifeforms are basically like laser technology, it’s good to a point, but then it becomes totally useless to expand, because it can do no more for you.
Fourth, What happens when you lose your population? Will researched lifeform research on the planet stop working until your population is large enough to unlock the research again? Will ongoing research be paused until the population grows back up to the size needed for the research? If the research is stopped, does that mean the resources for the research is put back on the planet, and is then possible to get for attackers? Can 1 small cargo kill a over billion lifeforms in 1 attack?
On to the things I don’t like.
First thing I don’t like is a minor annoyance. The resource cost isn’t shown very accurately https://prnt.sc/K0OqHuOqDnEt I don’t need an approximate when I start a mine or research, I need the exact amount, or the thing won’t start at all.
Last we end up with the absolute worst of the worst.
The clown fiesta casino
So every life form has different life form research. There are 3 tiers and 6 researches in each tier. When you get enough population to pick a research, you get this screen when picking number 6 for tier 1 as Rock’Tal https://prnt.sc/GdUM9SjENmYU . You can pick the research for your lifeform or you can gamble to get a research that suits you better from one of the other lifeforms. So in this case, I’d rather have the Mecha research, so I have to gamble a 25% chance to get the one I want. If I don’t get it, then I can always reset, but that’s where the problems really begin.
If you want to reset, you have 2 options. The first option is to do it for free, which is great, but takes a long time. The second option is to do it for DM, which can become expensive quite quickly if you aren’t very lucky. In a tier, you have the 6 researches, but you can’t skip and take number 6 first, you have to do number 1, then number 2, then number 3, then number 4, then number 5 and only then can you do number 6. But that presents a problem. If you want to reset it will cost you 10k DM for every research you have chosen in tier 1. In tier 2 it will cost you 20k DM for every research chosen. So you either have to wait a long ass time to try and get the research you want, or you have to pay a ton of DM, for every single planet you have. It will be especially bad if you want other lifeform researches in the 6th research slot, because that will be 60k pr reset or 120k in tier 2. https://prnt.sc/vb1twduvnU0Z . I haven’t even gotten to tier 3, but I expect it will be 30k pr research which is 210k for the 6th, on 1 planet. The worst part is, you can’t control it, it’s completely random. There is no option to pay a higher DM fee to get the research you want, you have to gamble or wait weeks. You also can’t choose to not discover a certain lifeform to get a better gambling chance, because life form discovery is random too and you can't undiscover.
I wanted to know which lifeform research was best for me at each slot for each tier, so I put it into google sheets to make it easier for me to find out which was the better. So I stick to mines, which is why Rock’Tal obviously is the better lifeform choice for me, especially because of their lifeform buildings. Here is the screenshot https://prnt.sc/9YPLGi1uyNxW , the X present the research I see as best for me. Now I don’t know if it’s planned or not, but I’m pessimistic so I think it is. If you look at slot 6 research for tier 1 and the slot 6 research for tier 2, both of them are conveniently better for miners, than the Rock’Tal research at the same slot. This means you will have to pay a max reset fine every time you want to reset, or you have to wait 2 days or 1 week and 1 day for every 25% reroll. For a fleeter, I’m not sure exactly what would be the better research to choose. If I had to guess, it looks like it would be a lot more mixed than it would for a miner. Which means fleeters get even more screwed over by this gambling than miners do. Not to mention that fleeters will lose out on this if they have mobile colonies.
If you are able to get other lifeform researches and pay for it, then I’d rather have a higher fixed DM fee, to choose the research I want from another lifeform. Instead of having to gamble and pay way more or far less depending on my luck.