Stellaris - Necrophage Origin Mechanics

origins were released back with federations and they are definitely one of the more interesting mechanics within the game because it really sets up everything that was only a question of time until we got more of these and with the story pack of necroids we've got one and oh boy is it a doozy the necroids specifically the necrophages have themselves their own unique origins and it is very very good in terms of goods well it is incredibly flexible and that's what we're going to be talking about today because well necrophages can be played in multiple ways in multiple ethics civics etc so let's dive right in and see what we have here now i set up this particular empire already it is of course the origin that we want it is the necrophage just to quickly put things into perspective here a necrophage means that the leader lifespan will have 80 years plus which means that your pops will live significantly longer up to 150 160 years which you can max with other particular attacks as well as civics and traditions to get even more lifetime to the point that you can get maybe two or three generations of leaders within your game until they die this means that well the leaders don't really need to be able to do much more than lead on top of that ruler pop resources are increased by five percent specialists also by five percent however the ruler pops do not work well within resource gathering they will have a reduction of 10 in their workers and as we go over towards the necrophage that is listed down at the bottom what this basically translates to is is that you will want to get a lot of workers that are specialized on bill using their abilities to resource your way up to the top whether or not it's minerals energy or trade value food is of course another thing speaking of which food is not really needed for necrophages they have a reduction of of 75 percent because they really don't use any food at all uh on top of that uh pop growth speed has been reduced by 75 percent not that it really matters because the necrophages add a special building that uplifts species other species at least your workers to your own type and that can be incredibly powerful you will never need to grow your basic species your necrophages as a species the whole pop growth speed modifier does not really matter because you can just uplift pops and get them that way of course mineral upkeep is also reduced and why is the why are these so important well it means you can min max your species quite well first of all necrophages don't really need the ability of being able to experience their leadership particularly quickly because they will live forever which basically means that you can negate that with slow learners that basically means that even though your leaders may not skill up as fast as some of the other empires they will last a lot longer which basically is a turtle at turtle versus the hair scenario where you may be slow but you will be better in the long run weak is also a great trait for the necrophages because they are they are never really in worker pop resource output so it's a minus one free bonus that you can spend on something else unruly same thing there empire sprawl from pops is kind of a default for me because you know honestly empire sprawl is about a number what does this translate to well intelligent of course one of the the one of the standard traits that you apply to a species mainly because of the research bonus and finally extremely adaptive now that may seem a little bit counter-intuitive but it's very important for your pups to be able to live wherever they can because they are the leaders of your empire just because you start on a continental world does not mean that you'll do very well on desert worlds or arid worlds for that matter uh being extremely adaptive make sure that you can continuously invade other empires take their planets and then move your leaders over there whilst not being hit by any malices due to not being able to live there and that's really important in addition similar to how the symbiotic species or syncretic evolution works we have ourselves a secondary species this is also the same for say assimilators now species and all that stuff is is all fine appearance etc but what is really important about these is that they are in fact rapid breeders having as many of these as possible is incredibly good and being able to crank out more pups to get more resources is always nice and also offsets the growth into uplifting them to your main species very strong pop is mainly for pop resource output army damage doesn't really matter to me because well army damage plus 40 percent is not all that great fleeting doesn't matter because well these are never going to be leaders these pups will never be leaders and adding fleeting to them means that it's a free point because again even though leader lifespan is minus 40 years it doesn't matter because they're never going to have any issues with that because they're never going to be leaders and that's pretty much what that boils down to quarrelsome unity workers don't generate unity slow learners again it's a leader trait but yeah very strong and rapid breeders are incredibly good for this if you want to you can max these around and maybe remove very strong and add say industrious for mining etc even though you can get robots and use the robot traits to get industrious instead by you know getting the mining drills etc ingenious is maybe a good idea as well as agrarian just so that you can get that food and this kind of puts you onto the track of getting genetic engineering relatively early which means that you're going to need to go down the uh society path relatively quickly now on top of that we've got our governing the governance and ethics er there's a couple of really interesting things you can do here for instance let's say you're an authoritarianist empire it means you can have yourself some slaves together with some xenophobes which is incredibly useful you can min max this as much as you want diplo core is incredibly useful because other empires will hate you byzantine the bureaucracy is always nice for unity but when it comes to this you really have the pick of the pack you can pick whatever you want and that is incredibly useful but it doesn't really stop there let's say we disable this and we go for fnatic xenophobe and a little dash of militarism we can totally be barbaric the spoilers barbaric the spoilers actually work reasonably well with necrophages because of their ability to do bombardment and raiding we'll go into that a little bit more later on in addition to that you could also play as fanatic purifiers yes you can play as fanatic purifiers as necrophages what does that translate to well it translates to the ability of getting a special purge option now what does that mean well that means that the special purge option basically says hey all the pups on this planet are going to be turned into necrophages yes and there is a special purifier option that will turn all the pups into your pops on the planet it's very similar to assimilation except in cern instead of a a species being assimilated into their own subspecies of assimilation they will be all turned into you that is incredibly interesting because it does mean that you're going to need to focus quite a lot on robots to make things happen that's kind of interesting i like that it's it's it's very very cool that this is a possibility in addition there is a very special type of necrophage we're going to take a look at these now this is the lithic domain i've set them up earlier now the thing is is that necrophages can essentially synergize with any particular species that has traits attached to them there is only one type of that within the game and that is lithoids lithoids have their own traits based on their portrait pack so if your for instance go into the portrait pack here and go to appearance as long as we select any of these we will get special trace or access to special traits for lithoid necrophages what does that translate into once again well it translates to the fact that we can have a giant list of stuff two of which are required ones that are essentially free we get necrophages with plus 80 years and on top of that we get lithoids which have an additional 50 years on top of that a plus 40 habitability bonus which completely offset any sort of extreme adaptability which means you can do completely different things let's say we want to add unruly because of the empire sprawl from pops remove that completely add weak because once again they're never going to be working as workers or in armies add volatile excretions on top of that you will have yourself a nice little um basket of resources that you can sell on the market where necessary in addition being nomadic means that you can move your pops towards new planets in case you need to conquer them and of course intelligent is pretty straightforward i do think that this is probably the largest list of traits you can have at the start of the game and it does get quite ridiculous i do highly recommend if you also have the lithoids to try out lithoid necrophages because it is quite something now just to quickly loop back on the problem of having worlds that are invaded by our necrophages if we go to this planet here you will see that we have got stellar culture shock that means if we want to resettle pops over towards this planet we are unable to to stellar culture shock we can still move pops back and forth on that planet but it's still a major problem what does this mean well it means that we have a lot of slaves on this planet as you can see they are all slaves but none of the specialists and none of the ruler pops are actually being used and that is a problem because as soon as we come in all of their buildings will be automatically destroyed we will have a massive amount of worker unemployment a massive reduction in amenities and we will have zero stability instead however it may be an idea to do the following get the um uh the rating bombardment stands which like i said before you can get as barbaric to spoilers or as nihilistic acquisition and just start raiding the planet we should be able to get more and more pops slowly but steadily as we bomb the planet and take pops away now it is also important to know that just because you're gonna start out with primitive worlds nearby it doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be good for instance this world that i have over here only spawned with 10 pups this world that i'm currently in trying to invade only has three pops on it initially they had four but now they have only three and that's because i already did a little bit of their orbital bombardment but still it is it's very interesting to see that this is a thing that is in the game because once again we got rising unemployment because we decided to invade this planet rather than to just steal pops away from it and once again if you are playing this with as a necrophages it's a good idea to start capturing pups and moving them back to your capital world and then build up your base economy upgrade them to your other props then invade the planet and then move stuff over it's very useful to actually have that um and it's it's it's one of the things you want to keep in mind necrophages are very much a mechanically focused origin and it is a lot of fun you're not going to get a lot of rp out of it unless you really try but in terms of mechanical it is incredibly strong incredibly fun and very very flexible thank you so much for watching this has been an overview of the necroid necrophage origin i hope you enjoyed it we're gonna go and have a deeper dive into whether or not this game is going to be worth your while soon or at least this expansion and be sure to go and check that out in the meantime though thank you so much for watching and thank you to my patrons for making this video possible and until next time remember what is dead may never die because we are in fact well parasites and not actually dead

Channel: ASpec

Views: 161,040

Keywords: Stellaris, Origin, Necrophage, Necroids, ASpec, A_Spec, Parasite, Undead, Halloween, DLC, Expansion, Species Pack

Id: hhPfunGedo0

Length: 13min 5sec (785 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/klimuk777]

Thing that caught me completly off-guard is the fact you can combine necrophages and fanatical purifiers to have pseudo-assimilators.

[u/Zermelane]

Idle thoughts about how I see these guys working out:

• The pop micro doesn't look to be too bad. You need enough necrophage pops on each planet to work the ruler jobs, and you want enough pops of other species to have them take all of the worker jobs; your room to maneuver consists of the specialist jobs.

• Someone in the Youtube comments mentioned that the Chamber of Elevation has an upgrade, I believe on a midgame tech, so you probably don't need to worry about not having enough pops of the necrophage species, or about lacking amenities on mid-sized planets. Whether the upgraded building adds more Stability, I don't know.

• Making the necrophage species a Lithoid seems like a pretty obvious choice, given that you mostly want to ascend them, not grow them naturally; in fact, non-purifier builds probably specifically don't want their necrophages to ever reproduce naturally. And at the same time, you do want a few of them on every planet, so Lithoid habitability is great for them.

• There's not that many traits that you really really want on the necrophage species other than that. You don't need Charismatic, you don't need growth, you don't need any worker-stratum traits. If you go Lithoid, you can't even spend points on habitability. Intelligent and a science specialty trait are always good though, of course. I think this might be the first time I end up playing with traits like Quick Learners or Traditional.

• (And on the topic of necrophage traits, based on the dev diary, the prebuilt species is going to have Very Strong... yeah, Paradox deliberately makes prebuilt species with poor synergy, but wow, it's just rude to waste trait points like that)

All in all: Seems nice, not bustedly powerful, fine design overall. Well, I say it's not bustedly powerful, but you can perfectly well just add Necrophage on top of the slaver technocracy build, or maybe swap in Xenophobe instead of Authoritarian. You'll lose 15% of your slaves' output, but you can enslave entire species instead of only 40% of them.

[u/cyrusol]

So, we will see whether pop growth mechanics were slightly changed but as of now I would strongly disagree with Extremely Adaptive or Lithoids.

If a species has below 60% habitability the game does reduce its "growth weight", meaning will grow it less often. You don't want a species with -75% growth to ever grow naturally but only with their special mechanics. For this reason you want to keep Necrophage's habitability low. Since you're going to only have ruler pops be Necrophage the higher consumption of food, CG, lower production etc. doesn't change much anyway since most of what ruler pops do is "produce" Amenities. But Amenities is technically not production but a modifier to which production bonuses/maluses don't apply. So having 0% habitability on Necrophages mostly means paying double the upkeep for like 2-4 pops per planet. Which is like irrelevant.

You could of course select other species to force-grow them but that comes with -20% pop growth. You could enact population controls for your Necrophages but that means -10% happiness for your ruler pops.

But again, we will see whether mechanics/numbers were changed.

I take it that (Extremely) Adaptive or Lithoids would make more sense for the Fanatic Purifier variant as you won't have xeno slaves for everything.

[u/Lazorbolt]

it seems a shame to me that all necros have bonus leader and specialist output with reduced worker output, I guess if I wanna play as a horde of zombies I gotta be a hivemind devouring swarm :/

[u/tobascodagama]

So how are we feeling about Leader Cap on these guys? I guess not great because people don't particularly love Leader Cap on Gestalts with their functionally immortal leaders, but I am eyeballing Philosopher-King a bit anyway.

[u/TheCrimsonChariot]

Can’f wait for it to be thursday already!!!! I want to play as a hive mind and assimilate them into my collective. We Will Endure.

[u/CupofLiberTea]

I just started a Necrophage game and my strong docile "Subservient" pops start with the specialist jobs and all of my immortal wise weak necrophage pops are stuck as workers. This is not what I expected and seems like it shouldn't happen.

I have some mods but none that do anything with jobs or pops.

Anyone else have this issue?