Home » Primary Racial Traits » HE » The Shofixti - a monster race
| The Shofixti - a monster race |
Wed, 15 June 2016 00:42  |
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 magic9mushroom |
 | Commander |
Messages: 1361
Registered: May 2008 | |
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Now that Lowtek's dead, I can post the full design of the Shofixti race.
HE
ISB, NRSE, OBRM, NAS, RS
Gravity immune, Temperature -120 - 120 (60 wide, centred), Radiation 25-89 (64 wide, right-shifted) - total "1 in 2", 44% initially habitable
13% (26% with HE bonus)
1/1000
15/9/10/4g
10/3/16
All expensive, start at 3
3 points left over to mineral concentrations
I took this race into Lowtek (a slow-tech, non-AccBBS game with Weapons required expensive) to prove a point. I was irritated that everyone persisted in describing what I call "supergrowth HE" - HE using their doubled growth to grow at over 20%, rather than trading it in for points - as "-f HE", and moreover had fixated on bi-immunity as the hab scheme. So I brought out what I believed to be in fact the superior version for a PBEM (particularly without AccBBS) - a +f with 1-immune 2-wide hab. This race maintains superb growth thanks to its 26% effective growth rate and great hab, but actually gets decent capacity as well (a 100% world produces 1375 resources, compared to a -f HE's 550, and the race can eventually inhabit 88% of planets with 1i planet values; the capacity per space isn't far off most 1-immune 2-narrow non-HE HGs) and thus isn't doomed to fade away the way a -f HE is by running out of space. My intention was to steamroller everyone with this race and thus prove the point. I ended up having to drop out, but I think the point was made nonetheless (it was a 2-winner game; the Shofixti and their ally did indeed triumph).
The factories look like a QS, but the race plays closer to a sped-up HG. The defining difference, to me, between a QS and an HG is the ratio between "factory time" and "population time" - a QS's "factory time" is shorter than an HG's while the "population time" remains similar, allowing the QS to greenline queues faster and have a larger proportion of its resources "free" at any given time (for early techs and warships). However, while the Shofixti's "factory time" approaches that of a QS, the "population time" is also significantly faster than that of a non-HE HG, and so the ratio is close to an HG's. Figuring out that I needed to reduce the "factory time" to near-QS levels to make them work at all was the major breakthrough that allowed me to make the +f supergrowth HE work properly - attempting it with orthodox HG factory settings (10/9/13 or so) tends not to work because the factory lag compared to population is unacceptably long (you'll end up only building a fraction of them until you run out of space and stop colonising, because they don't pay back quick enough to be done by the time the colony needs to throw up its own dock and start contributing freighters to keep the pop moving - they become a chore rather than a help).
I did make a slight mistake with the hab - I could have slid the temperature bar one click left or right and the radiation one click left and gotten 0 points. That would have let me keep 1 click more of high-rad -11% yellows, while only losing a fractional click worth of temp yellows. Not a huge deal, but I'd fix that if I were taking it into another game.
I'll be blunt, the race is broken in non-AccBBS games. In Lowtek it got over 30k @ 2450. That's in a real non-AccBBS game, at war for 30 years, and with a couple of turns missed. In a (non-AccBBS) testbed I imagine it'd hit 70k or more, which you'd have a hard time equalling with even a TT CA. Of course, the requirement for Weapons to be expensive did let me squeeze a bit more out of the race than if I'd had to have it normal/cheap, and with AccBBS on it's obviously not nearly as powerful (your homeworld starts over 25% but still only has 10 factories, which slows you down somewhat relative to the pure -f, and supergrowth HE in general dislike AccBBS because they get less effective turns of growth from it than ordinary races), but I think it'd still be decently competitive (I'd actually think about running LSP in that setup, since you'll be overcrowded for a few years if you don't take it and hence you feel it less).
In any case, something to add to the monster pantheon (and, in all likelihood, the banlist for non-AccBBS games; I cringe every time someone specifies it as "no -f HE" and leaves a giant Shofixti-shaped loophole). 
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