Transcription
Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power. Roger that. It's right to pity them, wrong to value them over your own kind.
Stellaris: The Machine Age gave machine races access to powers never before seen in the game. We now have some crazy powerful traits and some traits that are still kind of dog poo. In this video, I'm going to go through all of the traits available to machines and attempt to rank them in a tier list from best to worst, S to F.
Before we do that, I should briefly explain how traits work. At the start of the game, and then later on, you can choose traits for your species that will give you some bonuses or negatives. You have a fixed number of trait points available and a fixed number of trait picks, so we can only choose some of the many traits in the game. And that means we really have to think about which traits we actually want on our species, or in this case, beautiful, unaging machines. And at the very end of this tier list, I'm going to put together all of the information to show off a few designs you might want to use in your games.
We're going to start in the F tier and work our way up. The traits down here in the F tier, honestly, they're quite awful. I wouldn't expect you to ever actively choose these in a playthrough.
First up, we have Harvesters. This trait is going to give you plus 15% food output from jobs. It also costs two points. Now, there are a number of reasons this is bad. First off, as a robot, you'll almost never actually need food unless you are running catalytic, in which case you'll need food for alloys. But even then, 15% additional food output from jobs is crap for two trait points. Not only that, as the game goes on, you're going to accrue many, many bonuses to your resource output from food from technologies, and some traditions give menial or worker resource output bonuses, so this 15% becomes less and less impactful as the game continues.
Double-jointed costs you one trait point and reduces your pop housing usage by 10%. The reason this is garbage is that most machine empires basically have no need for excess housing. If you have more pops requiring housing than your actual housing capacity, you will get a negative debuff to the stability of the planet, which is bad. That's going to reduce your resources from job output, which, as I said, is bad. But having excess housing capacity over your housing usage is not going to help you if you're a biological empire. That would be providing you with some additional bonuses to logistic pop growth, but you're not a biological empire, you are a blessed machine, so you don't need any of that crap.
Propaganda Machines increases your Unity output from jobs by 15% and decreases your Unity upkeep from jobs by 10%. It does only cost a single point, but honestly, I don't think you need this bonus. 15% additional Unity from jobs sounds like a lot, but when you start looking into how many other bonuses you can stack on your Unity output, that 15% very quickly gets washed out, and then it's really not much of a bonus whatsoever.
Learning Algorithms costs a single point and increases your leader experience gain by 10%. There are so many ways of getting increases to your leader experience gain that spending one of your precious trait points on this trait is definitely not a good idea.
Sociology Core increases your Society research from jobs by 15%. As a machine, society research is pretty useless for you outside of the technologies that allow you to increase the planetary capitals on your worlds, and also get more naval capacity and fleet capacity. It is also mutually exclusive with the other cores that favor the other research branches, which means that taking it is an opportunity cost for you.
Integrated Weaponry gives you plus 100% army damage and plus five enforcer crime reduction. However, you don't actually need to fight on planets in order to win wars. You can bombard their armies down to nothing and force them to surrender, or if they won't surrender, drop a single army there and take the victory like that. Therefore, spending two points on this integrated weaponry for plus 100% army damage is, outside of some meme builds, totally worthless to you.
When you design your species, you will get access to one of the design traits. These traits are entirely free and grant you a small boost throughout your entire game, but you can only pick one of them. Therefore, I have tried to rank them in our tier list so you can understand which ones I think suck and which ones are pretty good.
The design traits down here in the F tier are Art Generator, granting you plus 2% Unity from jobs, and also War Machines, granting plus 5% army damage. As mentioned before, you don't need that army damage generally, and the Unity from jobs bonus, 2%, will be washed out by other modifiers so quickly that this might as well not exist at all.
Last, but by absolutely no means least, we have the very worst trait in the game for machines in Stellaris. This is the Reawaken trait. If you get your hands on the Satan's Heart Relic from the Mom Nah, you can activate it to get yourself some free robot pops. Those pops will spawn with the Reawaken trait, which grants minor us 15% resources from jobs. Yes, it costs nothing, but you're losing 15% resources from jobs. Just get rid of it as soon as you can.
Now we're moving over to the second column. All of the traits in this column represent the modularity traits you can get access to either by choosing modularity after you've synthetically ascended from a puny flesh bag, or by choosing modularity after you have gone through the synthetic age as an already pretty good machine. All of these traits are hands down better, I mean, generally speaking, than other regular machine traits, and for that reason, I have ranked them separately. If I didn't do that, they'd mainly be up in the S and A tiers, basically.
First, we have Suppressed. This grants you plus 10% resources from jobs, but you lose minus 100% leader experience gain, and on top of that, the species cannot generate leaders, cannot be employed in ruler, specialist, or complex drone jobs. Yes, it's not affected by happiness, and that means it cannot join factions as well. Not joining factions means you don't get as much faction output from those pops. So if you're a regular empire or not a Gestalt Consciousness, that's bad. That's a reduction in resource output. Not being affected by happiness is generally bad as well, because most pops are happy. Yes, slaves can be unhappy, so if you suppress some slave species, that can be good. But preventing a pop from moving above a worker or menial job does give you a lot of micromanagement hell, and therefore this goes down here all the way in the F tier.
Biomimetic Assembly reduces your roboticist upkeep by 80%, but instead, you'll get some food upkeep and some exotic gases upkeep. Generally speaking, losing those few alloys for your robot output shouldn't be too bad, especially by the mid to late game when you're spending a lot of alloys on robot assistants. But you are making lots and lots of alloys, you've got a high pop efficiency, for every pop working, you're making, let's say, 10, 15, maybe even 20 alloys. Therefore, replacing that with food upkeep, forcing you to get some farmers, and also use more exotic gases, and spending a trait pick and a trait point on this is not a good idea.
Moth-Powered Tools reduces your industrial job upkeep by 20%. You'll also get plus one minerals upkeep and plus 0.01 volatile motes upkeep. That is going to be a population-wide minerals upkeep, as far as I'm aware, and that's not great. Reducing your industrial job upkeep by 20% and then having to spend lots of minerals on your pops, as well as volatile motes, is not something I'd recommend you do. Also, you can quite easily get to minus 90% industrial job upkeep, which is the maximum, without this trait. You simply need to ascend your industrial worlds, get them to level 10, and also make sure to take the tradition that's going to boost the effect of ascensions, as well, and you could even throw the civic in there too, if you really wanted.
In this right-hand column, we now have the negative traits. You'll want to add negative traits to your species at the start of the game because that will free up more trait points for you, allowing you to pick more traits overall and make your species better. If we can give our species negative traits that have little to no impact on our gameplay, that is fantastic because we're basically getting free additional trait points.
The traits down here in the F tier that are negative are negative traits that will impact your game more than others. Up in the S tier, we'll have some negative traits that you can basically ignore and then get rid of them when you finally get around to robot modding your species when you have enough trait points much later on.
Custom-Made refunds you a single trait point and gives you a crippling minus 15% pop assembly speed. In Stellaris, pops give you an economy. You'll need pops in order to produce anything pretty much in the game, so reducing the rate at which you acquire new pops is bad for your economy. Do not ever pick Custom-Made unless you're intentionally trying to hobble yourself.
Uncanny gives you minus 20% amenities from jobs and refunds just a single trait point. If you're a Gestalt Consciousness, you do not want to get a reduction in your amenity output from your jobs because that will drastically reduce your pop efficiency. You'll need many more pops working things like maintenance drones in order to create enough amenities to keep your stability stable. If you're not Gestalt, this is also bad because you'll actually need things like entertainers or other jobs to produce amenities, which without Uncanny, you probably can get away without using, giving you, as I just said, greater pop efficiency empire-wide.
Now I want to take a moment and talk about what is pop efficiency. Because I've mentioned that a few times in this video. If we can have nine pops working some jobs to produce the same resources as 10 pops, that means our extra 10th pop that we're not using in the nine pop case can be placed in another task, doing other work. Most economies require some pops to produce things like amenities, so the fewer pops we need producing those amenities, the more of other more critical resources we can make. And this is generally called pop efficiency in Stellaris.
We're now up to the C tier items. In this tier, they may seem all right, but generally, you probably shouldn't run them. There are going to be better options for your empire and your species.
Power Drills is the Harvesters of minerals. This grants you plus 15% minerals from jobs at the cost of two trait points. This again suffers from the fact that there are many technologies, many traditions, lots of ways of getting bonuses to your mineral output from jobs that will, over the course of your game, reduce the impact of this 15% down to very little. Not only that, but something I haven't quite mentioned yet is that we can get access to this trait, or at least the effect of this trait, without actually needing it.
Durable costs you but a single point and reduces your robot upkeep by 10%. Normally, this means you'll get a small reduction in energy upkeep of 0.1 per pop. Which across your entire species isn't very much. Let's say, for example, you have, oh, I don't know, 1,000 pops. That means you're getting 100 energy upkeep less. That can be good, but for an entire trait pick and one point, that's not really amazing. There is a case to be made, however, for species that have many traits which require rare resources like volatile motes or gases or dark matter. Running Durable on those species is slightly more beneficial. It could possibly push this up into the low B tier, but it really won't be giving you much bang for your buck.
Ladies and gentlemen, Recycled reduces your pop assembly cost by 20% at a very large trait point cost of two. This is going to give you a slight reduction in the number of alloys you're spending on creating new pops, but overall, I really do not think this will ever be worth it. It is much, much better to increase your alloy output to get more alloys than spend a trait on reducing pop assembly cost. If you're really worried about those alloys, you could always reduce the number of workers working on pop assembly for a few months at a time if you're in a tight spot.
Streamlined Protocols is going to give you minus 10% empire size from pops. This at the start of the game is entirely useless, but as the game goes on, it becomes better and better. In fact, minus 10% empire size from pops when you've got, let's say, a thousand empire size worth of pops is much, much better than getting plus 10% or even plus 20% to your research output and or Unity output. This means you probably don't want to pick this at the start of the game, but you may consider modding it in later on. However, if you really want to do away with empire size from pops, it's better to look at traditions and ethics because they will stack together to give you a larger reduction than just something like this trait. This trait reduces the empire size from pops on a planet and does not stack with those other effects that come from things like traditions or civics, just so you are aware, meaning that let's say you've got minus 60% empire size from pops from your traditions and civics and whatnot, this will be scaled down to actually only reduce your empire size from pops by 4%, not 10%. I hope that makes sense to everybody. If it doesn't, leave me a comment, I can probably try and explain it a little bit more clearly.
Eternal Machine seems really, really good when you're designing your species at the start of the game. It costs four points and will make all of your leaders immortal. The biological equivalent of this only grants them plus 80 years. Now, ladies and gentlemen, it's time to laugh at those poor bio-ascensionist fools that think they can match the purity of the blessed machine. Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power. However, the reason it's all the way down here in the C tier is that there are better alternatives that might even be free that can allow you to make your machines immortal. So yeah, you probably don't need this one, especially not right at the start of the game. Your machines are going to live for a long, long time. Do not worry. That is because when you finally go through the synthetic age or synthetically ascend, your species will have their age reset to zero. So you actually kind of get double lifespans out of most of your empire leaders, assuming you can ascend within the first 50 or 60 years, which really should be possible.
Enhanced Memory reduces your leader upkeep by 25% and reduces the leader maximum negative traits that any of your leaders can get by one. It does cost you two points, which is rather expensive. Honestly, I considered putting this down in the F tier. However, for some Gestalt empires that have some issues with unity generation at the start of the game, if you do have relatively high-level leaders, getting a 25% reduction to that unity upkeep could help you out a little bit, but only a little bit.
Physics Core is arguably the second best of the three cores. It grants you plus 15% physics research from jobs and costs a single point. Because physics is generally, and honestly, there might not be full consensus on this anymore, what with disruptors being so powerful in the mid-game, but considering physics is generally the second strongest of the research types, that places the Physics Core here in the C tier.
Workerbots is one of those design traits that doesn't cost you a single point. It's going to grant you plus 5% minerals from jobs. That's nice, but as I have mentioned before, it will quickly be drowned out by other bonuses, eventually making it kind of irrelevant.
Shielded Components is a modularity trait that's going to cost you three points. You'll get plus 30% habitability, meaning you will have at least 80% habitability on every normal type of world, and on worlds that your species is meant to live on, that boosts you to an easy 105%, but we're capped out at 100%, so you'll be perfectly able to live on every type of planet, pretty much. You'll also get plus 5% resources from jobs and plus 50 years of leader lifespan. There is a biological equivalent to this, and the biological equivalent isn't great either. There are better ways of getting increased resources from jobs, there are better ways of becoming more habitable on your planets through technology, and actually just robot modding your species to make them possible to live there. Now, if you have a tomb world and you don't have the right technology, you might consider Shielded Components for any tomb world pops, but only those pops living on a tomb world. In that case, this might go up to the low A, high B tier for just those pops.
High Maintenance increases your robot upkeep by 10%. That's not a massive impact on your empire in the same way that Durable wasn't a massive impact in the other direction, but there are many other negative traits that have a far lower impact on your species and your empire, which is why High Maintenance is all the way down here in the C tier.
Wasteful is only available to machine empires that are not a Gestalt Consciousness. This is going to increase your pop consumer goods upkeep by 10%. That is not a thing that you really want to have happening. You want to minimize the number of consumer goods workers you have in your empire, that is pops producing consumer goods, so that they can focus on other more productive jobs like researchers or alloy monkeys.
Decadent is also not available to machine intelligence type empires, just like Wasteful. This is going to reduce your worker happiness and slave happiness by 10%. Generally, you don't want to reduce the happiness of pops in your empire unless you can help it. If you have two different types of species, for example, one pop class which only ever works specialist or ruler jobs, and another pop class that works all of your menial worker jobs, then you could consider taking this. It would be something like a free pick. But if you're not segregating your species like that, you probably don't want to pick Decadent. And given that you generally only add in these negative traits at the start of the game and then remove them as the game goes on, you almost certainly won't start unless you have Syncretic Evolution with a two-tier system with two different species, so you'll be forced to make some of your pops unhappy. Don't make your pops unhappy, that reduces stability, which reduces your resource output. Won't somebody please think of the economy?
Delicate Chassis reduces your army damage by 50%. That's not great, but you can probably mostly ignore that. The big negative here is you also get minus 5% to worker pop resource output. You don't want to be reducing your worker pop resource output, even though you're going to get lots of bonuses to worker resource output. There are other less impactful traits you can pick that will not hurt you as much.
Welcome to the B tier. First up, we have Efficient Processes. Going through these traits, I find it kind of perplexing how terrible biological species and the biological ascension are when you start looking at the machine traits. They are missing out on. Regular biological species have absolutely no way of accessing anything like Efficient Processes, which grants you plus 5% resources from jobs for every single type of job and every single type of resource. Yes, it costs you three points, but that's a nice boost you can get everywhere. It's also available right at the start of the game, so you can put this on your starting species. The closest that biologicals get to this is if they biologically ascend, they can take Robust, which I did mention earlier. That is basically a more expensive version of Shielded Components. It does cost four points. I don't want to sound like a broken record here, but look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power. And if you're enjoying this video, please mimic a fraction of the machine's power with that like button.
Superconductive is the last of the three basic resource traits, granting you plus 15% energy credits from jobs at the cost of two trait points. Energy is one of the most useful resources for machine empires. They're going to need energy not just for their buildings, their ships, their starbases, and all of the normal stuff, but also this is what machine empires use for their pop upkeep. Machines require energy to keep running, so getting more energy makes your empire, I don't know, more better, I guess.
Domestic Protocols can only be placed on mechanical machines, which is different to the other type of machine that are a machine intelligence. This allows them to work servant jobs if the AI policy is set to servitude. Basically, unemployed machines will become servants, producing four amenities and reducing their housing usage. On top of that, you'll also get plus 20% amenities from jobs, which is very nice. That increases your pop efficiency. This does cost two trait points, but better pop efficiency is just, well, better. However, I should mention there is a better version of Domestic Protocols available which costs you half as many points. So unless you really, really want those servants, you're probably not going to pick Domestic Protocols.
Loyalty Circuits grants you a plus 10% happiness bonus. Yes, you cannot be a Gestalt Consciousness for obvious reasons, they don't use happiness, but at only two points, this is quite a nice buff that should equate to 6% increase to your stability, which in turn is going to grant you plus 4% resource output from jobs. This is pretty much equivalent to a civic. There are quite a few civics that grant you something similar in the game. Of course, you don't want to put this on a species that's already at maximum happiness, because then it won't have any effect, so do watch out for that in your games.
Volatile Mote Reactor is pretty much the first trait we've come across that has an upkeep of rare resources. This is only going to cost you a single point and will grant you 30% additional habitability at the cost of plus 0.02 volatile motes per pop. If you were to go something like Syncretic Evolution at the start of the game and get some weird lithoids, which are of course syncretically evolved but have the trait to grant you some volatile motes, you could robot mod this in relatively early to grant you a boost to habitability on those other planets that you discover out in the galaxy. With this, plus changing up your habitability type between dry, wet, and cold, you can get 100% habitability on every single world other than tomb worlds, which is, I think, very, very good. And even then, with tomb worlds, you should be on a nice toasty plus 80%. However, that rare resource upkeep is not excellent. You probably want to avoid it because of that.
Engineering Core is the best of the three cores because it grants you plus 15% engineering research from jobs at the cost of only a single point, and I think arguably engineering is the most important tree if you are a machine because you'll need it to get lots of important things like ship weapons, economic technologies, and also the ability to make your species better. I'm talking about robot modding and additional trait points and the like.
Ancient Dreadnought is a mechanical leviathan trait that is only available if you have found and defeated the Ancient Dreadnought out there in the galaxy and have the Leviathan Tech Genesis technology, and then they all cost three points. Ancient Dreadnought grants you plus 500% army damage, which honestly is pretty barmy. You can do some silly, silly things with that, especially if you can manage to build your own war forms. Yeah, that gets pretty crazy. However, the main bonus here, in my opinion, is the plus 15% metallurgist output. I do want to point out, though, we haven't seen any of the other mechanical leviathan traits yet, and that's because this one is honest to goodness the worst of the four. It is good, but it's not as good as the others.
Moving over to the modularity traits in the B tier, we first got Monoform. This is going to give you plus 20% mechanical pop assembly speed and minus 80% pop housing usage. The pop housing usage is relatively pleasant, though overall, you'll probably not really care about that. The main bonus here is that lovely plus 20% mechanical pop assembly speed. This can also be stacked with other traits that increase your mechanical pop assembly speed, so by taking this, you can get some really, really good pop assembly speed. You might want to use this to create a race or a species template, I should say, that has maximized mechanical pop assembly speed, and then you'll produce that on every single world. After they've been produced, every few years, maybe 10 or 20, you'll round up all the pops like this and you will convert them into the normal pop type without this additional bonus to mechanical pop assembly speed. That's if you want to do a bit of micro. If you don't, you know, maybe go with the other trait, possibly that's cheaper and does almost the same thing at a quarter of the price.
Inquisitive Axioms cost you a very large four points. You'll get plus 20% researchers output, minus 25% leader upkeep, and minus one leader maximum negative traits. Those last two points are kind of irrelevant here. The main bonus is that plus 20% researchers output. However, at a whopping four points, this is a very, very expensive trait for you to pick. There are other better traits. Now, there is one thing you could do, and that is assuming you've dedicated a couple of worlds to only research on those worlds, you could stack this trait with other traits we're going to cover a little bit later in order to get maximized researcher output. But because of how expensive this trait is, it's probably not a trait you want everywhere in your empire, across all of your pops.
Repurposed Hardware is a negative trait that will refund you a single trait point and give you minus 10% leader experience gain. That's not excellent at the start of the game, but later on, you can probably ignore it. The main issue here is that by the time you get to that later on point, you'll have probably modded it out anyway because you'll have more trait points available due to technologies and traditions, so it's kind of in a weird middle ground where you don't really want to take it at the start of the game, but by the time you could think about taking it, you probably don't want to take it either. Minus 10% leader experience gain, though, is not that much, so generally speaking, it's pretty ignorable if you do take it.
Quarrelsome reduces your Unity from jobs by 10%. This is not great, especially at the start of the game, but you can most often ignore it after you've got going, after, you know, the first 20, 30 years, you've stacked up a few bonuses and also found probably some other ways of generating Unity rather than just your Unity from jobs.
Welcome to the A tier. I expect you might use a couple of traits from this tier in your runthrough. They're good, they're not the best traits available, but they are still very, very good.
Waterproof is the machine version of Aquatic. It's going to grant you plus 20% ocean habitability, giving you 95% habitability on ocean worlds. I must admit, I'm confused. It's not plus 25% given that for regular aquatic empires, if you're a biological, you'll end up hitting 100% with the combination of your normal ocean preference plus 20% habitability. In this case, we lose 5% because we're machines, but I guess given how many other areas inferior organics are well, inferior to machines, it does seem reasonable to lose on one battlefield. You'd also get minus 10% housing on ocean worlds, plus 10% worker output on ocean worlds or menial output. That's really good. Minus 20% dry and frozen planet habitability, reducing you to, I believe, 30% on those planets, but still, I think you've got a bottom cap of 50% as a machine empire, so you can't go below that anyway. And then also plus 30% housing usage on dry and frozen worlds, but you don't really care about housing usage. You cannot change your habitability without removing this trait, but you can remove the trait if you take Hydrocentric. The Ascension there will boost the effects of this by 50%, both the positive and also, I believe, the negative. You also can't be a Molebot along side this, but you know, that's just by the by. Overall, Waterproof can give you a very nice boost at the start of the game, giving you more basic resources and just more resources in general, because those early ocean worlds you colonize will have a higher habitability, which means you'll get a higher resource output from jobs, you'll need lower upkeep, so you'll be paying less for those pops, and you'll require fewer amenities.
Speaking of Molebots, I'd actually like to go through the four origin traits that are not ranked in this tier list. All of those traits are generally pretty good, though they don't cost you any points and you usually can't remove them. Well, you can't remove half of them at least. So let's go through them.
Radiation Shields gives you plus 10% leader lifespan and 70% tomb world habitability. That's plus 70%, meaning you'll be guaranteed to hit 100% habitability on all your tomb worlds, as far as I'm aware.
Zero-G Optimization is if you are a Void Dweller, so if you're living on habitats, you'll get plus 15% pop output on your habitats, minus 15% output on non-artificial worlds, and plus 15% robot upkeep on all planets. That one's really good. It's a much better version of the normal biological one. It doesn't nerf your happiness.
Molebots can't be removed. It's going to give you plus 50% species minimum habitability, which I believe places your 100% habitability on every single planet. That's insane. You'll also get plus 15% minerals from jobs, but you do get plus 10% empire size from pops and minus 20% pop assembly. So you are losing out when it comes to pop assembly. That's not good.
Finally, we've got Synthetic Salvation, which is just a crazy good free trait. You'll get if you picked the Synthetic Fertility origin, meaning you've transitioned from a regular biological into a blessed machine. You'll get plus 50% governing ethics attraction, plus 5% happiness, and then weakest of all, plus 5% Unity from jobs. Synthetic Salvation is amazing given that it's free, and if you are Synthetic Fertility origin, you're ascending quite quickly anyway. I don't think Synthetic Fertility need this buff, but I'm sure they're going to take it nonetheless. That was just a brief honorable mention of the origin traits. I just wanted to talk about them and briefly explain what they do. They're all good and you generally want to keep them if you start off with them because they are free.
Emotion Emulators is next up in the A tier. That's basically just a better version of Domestic Protocols. It grants you plus 20% amenities from jobs, just like Domestic Protocols, but only costs you a single trait point. As mentioned before, increasing your amenities from jobs from each pop that's working an amenity-producing job will reduce the overall number of pops you need working those jobs and thus increase your pop efficiency. They can go and work other more productive jobs.
Trading Algorithms increases your trade value from jobs by 25%. For most of the game, even if you're focusing on trade, this isn't that amazing for a machine. It's a good boost, yes, but not amazing. However, if you're trying to rush your Ascension path, especially as a pre-ascended machine species, if you haven't taken Synthetic yet, but started off as individualistic machines, this is really, really good. It's going to help you get more Unity from the special trade policy you can get through the Mercantile tradition and thus let you ascend into Virtual or Modular you're probably not going Nanite. Tell me you're not going Nanite sooner than ever after that Ascension. It kind of falls off in its usefulness. There are honestly other better ways of producing resources than trade as a machine empire because you'll see when we get up to the A tier, but there are some crazy powerful bonuses that we can stack.
Logic Engines increases your research from jobs by plus 10%. It does cost you two points, but we have very few ways of increasing our research output now, and given that research is harder than it used to be after the tech rework that happened a couple of patches ago, this is now a very nice trait to put in. There are better traits, as I just mentioned previously in the S tier, that are going to do the same but better. However, if you're trying to maximize your research output on specific research worlds, don't ignore this trait.
Research Assistance is a design trait that again costs nothing and it's going to grant you plus 2% research from jobs. As I just mentioned, it is hard to get bonuses to your research from jobs output, so this can be useful for boosting your tech, especially early on in the game.
If you're a callous individual and decide to finally kill the Infinity Sphere because it's been annoying you with its infinite calculations, you'll get access to the Infinity Sphere mechanical leviathan trait, assuming you have that technology, Leviathan Tech Genesis. I spoke about previously. This one is going to grant you minus 50% researchers upkeep. Either that's a big reduction to your energy usage for your researchers if you're a Gestalt Consciousness, or if you're a regular empire, you're not Gestalt, it's going to be a big reduction to the number of consumer goods you need for your researchers, thus improving the pop efficiency of your empire, allowing you to put more pops from consumer goods production into research. Very, very good stuff, but still not the best mechanical leviathan trait.
If you really, really want to go hard into your trading after you ascend and assuming you went for a Modularity Ascension, you'll want to pick up Matrix Trading. This is going to give you a plus 50% trade value from jobs increase. It will give you plus one energy upkeep to the pops with this trait and a little bit of rare crystal upkeep, which isn't amazing, but it only costs you a single trait point. You can also, I'm pretty sure, stack this with the trading trait we just looked at a moment ago, Trading Algorithms, to get a base increase of plus 75%. If you're going to go for a trade run through as machines, this is the way to do it. Let's not forget that these bonuses to your trade value from jobs are multiplicative because first they'll boost your base trade value from jobs output, and then at that output will get further modified by things like stability, different traditions, different empire bonuses that will then increase the trade value on your planet as a whole.
Jumping into our A tier negatives, if you're not going to go for trade, if you're just doing a normal machine run through, or perhaps you've ascended already and you no longer need the trade value, you're going to look at making resources through regular jobs and an honest day's work rather than fake trade nonsense. You might want Scarcity Subroutines. It's going to refund you a single point and give you minus 25% trade value from jobs. If you don't have any trade value jobs, this is entirely something you can ignore. Yes, Gestalt Consciousness empires can't take this, but individualistic machines and synthetically ascended biologicals absolutely can take this. Let's imagine a world in which we've gotten rid of all farmers, gotten rid of all clerks, then making people believe that scarcity is a problem is going to be just free money for you, or in this case, free trade points that can be then used to give you bonuses to resources. So, yeah, yeah, free money.
High Bandwidth is going to give you two trade points back. That's pretty big, actually. There aren't many negative traits you get access to that refund two trade points. It will cost you plus 10% empire size from pops. In the first part of the game, the first 50 years or so, this is probably irrelevant. Definitely right at the start of the game, it won't impact you at all. But as the game goes on and your empire increases in size, you have more pops, this is going to be worse and worse. Eventually, you do need to get rid of this trait and not increase your empire size with, you know, this negative nonsense.
Welcome to the S tier. If you didn't skip ahead to this point and you've actually watched through, well done. If you did skip ahead, naughty, naughty. Yeah, I'm not going to do anything about it, but, yeah, just just know that there's a disapproving headshake on this end of the screen. Traits in this tier are absolutely fantastic. You're probably going to want to pick them all the time. They are amazing.
Adaptive Frames is possibly the best trait going for machines outside of those traits in Modularity we'll look at in a minute. This is going to cost you three points and then depending on the job your pop is working, this trait will change. If they are working an amenity job, it will change to Emotion Emulators for plus 20% there. If they're working an energy, food, or mineral job, it will give you that appropriate trait to give you plus 15% for those. If they work a research job, you'll get additional boost to your research output from becoming Logic Engines. If they're working trade value, it becomes Trading Algorithms, and if they're working a Unity job, it becomes Propaganda Machines. It does not stack with the same trait type, so basically, it kind of means there's very little point in taking Emotion Emulators, Superconductive, Harvesters, Power Drills, Logic Engines, Trading Algorithms, or Propaganda Machines if you're going to take this trait. In fact, there is no point in taking those, just take Adaptive Frames. This is in essence somewhere between a 10% booster resource output from jobs at the lowest level, up to 20% output from not just jobs, but amenities and trade, yes, 25% there. So it is really, really good. I honestly think you should probably put this on every species you have at the start of the game if you can, and once you build machines, let's say you're a regular biological and you're building machines and you've got robot modding, put this one on.
Mass Produced costs you only a single point and grants you plus 15% pop assembly speed. We can briefly compare that to Monoform, which cost four points, that's why it's all the way down in the B tier, and only grants you plus 20% mechanical pop assembly speed. If you have a game where you're making pops, I, if you have robots, you should put this on your robots. Plus 15% pop assembly speed means you're going to get more robots faster, so that's just really, really good.
Exotic Fuel Consumption requires some rare resources. You'll need plus 0.04 exotic gases per pop, but for that and only a single trait point, you'll get 10% more resources from jobs. Biological empires simply do not have access to this. Yes, you can't put this on at empire creation, but as soon as you get access to exotic gases, you can robot mod your pops to have Exotic Fuel Consumption and laugh all the way to the bank because outside of amenities and trade value, this is going to affect every single job in your empire. A 10% boost is amazing, especially early on.
Rare Crystal Exterior is very good to put on pops working on a Forge World. You'll get plus 20% metallurgist output at a cost of only 0.02 rare crystals per pop. 20% metallurgist output is at least 0.6 alloys, it could be much more though. This later on in the game is probably going to be an additional one or two alloys per pop you have working a metallurgist job. That is fantastic. And also, I'd like to point out this and Exotic Fuel Consumption are available to empires that have not gone through a Modularity Ascension. So if you are a Nano Ascended Empire or you are a Virtual Ascended Empire, you can still take these and utilize their great bonuses. And some of these bonuses honestly are as good as the traits you can expect to get if you biologically ascend. Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power.
Now we have the last two design traits that we are yet to cover. They are Conversational AI and also Nanny Bots. Conversational AI reduces your upkeep from jobs by 2%, which is small, but that will always have an impact on your empire throughout the game. Honestly, though, I personally prefer Nanny Bots. That's going to grant you plus 5% amenities from jobs to every single pop in your empire, and it will stack with other bonuses to your amenity output. That's going to, say it with me, ladies and gentlemen, increase your pop efficiency empire-wide.
Now we have the last two mechanical leviathan traits. First off, Enigmatic Fortress. Yes, it costs you three points, but it gives you a massive minus 50% pop amenities usage. Honestly, if you can see the Enigmatic Fortress and your machine, go and kill it, get your hands on this trait and use it. This is going to, in essence, double the pop efficiency of all your amenity-producing jobs. I'm quite confident with this trait, you will never need to actually have any pops producing amenities outside of your ruler jobs and a couple of amenities from buildings and that sort of thing. It is simply bonkers.
The other one is the Scavenger Bot trait, which grants you for three points a very large, very healthy plus 50% mechanical pop assembly speed. Combining this with other pop assembly speed bonuses, we can comfortably get up to, you know, plus 100% mechanical pop assembly speed for our pops on top of the base output, means we should be making somewhere in the region of 20 to 30 pop assembly every single month. If you can find the Scavenger Bot, go and kill it and claim your glorious prize.
Virtual trait might possibly be one of the best traits I've ever seen in the game. It is entirely free. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you heard me, it is free. It doesn't cost you anything and it's going to make all of your leaders immortal. A trait that costs nothing and makes all of your leaders immortal sounds good enough already. On top of that, you'll also get minus 90% pop housing usage, so housing will never be an issue, plus 25% species minimum habitability, so you should be able to get 100% habitability on every single world, assuming you mod your species correctly to have the right preference for the planet, which you can do. It's very easy, it's quite a quick project, and then if that wasn't enough, you also get Virtual Leaders. The Virtual Leader trait is very good, and your pops cannot be abducted by the raiding bombardment. If you've gone down the Virtual Ascension path, this gets even better. However, if you're a synthetic Virtual Authority, that means you've synthetically ascended from a biological empire, this is as good as it gets for you. So yeah, don't don't look at what the machines get if you start machine, you'll just get sad.
Moving over to the two best modularity traits and possibly best traits from machines in the game, we have Dark Matter Engines. Dark Matter Engines may look almost identical in art design to the Eternal Machine trait, but don't be fooled. This costs you only two trait points and will grant you a massive plus 40% resources from jobs empire-wide. That is insane for only two trait points. Yes, it does require a small amount of Dark Matter upkeep, but that is a tiny amount of Dark Matter. You'll need one Dark Matter per 50 pops. You can buy Dark Matter for around 25 or 30 energy credits, assuming it's at the base price. And if you are a regular machine and go for a Modularity Ascension, you'll also get a source of Dark Matter on your Capital, making this probably free for the first few hundred pops, and then after that, it's a small cost of energy credits, which will be worth it. You'll be making more energy credits from this on your energy credit jobs than you'll actually require to pay for the thing, so it's pretty much free when it comes to that Dark Matter upkeep, or at least so free that you can ignore it. Stacking this with Exotic Fuel Consumption and then one of the traits to boost researcher output, we can get at least 50% resources from jobs from all of our normal jobs, and then 70% or 60% or 80% from our researchers. That is crazy good.
Living Metal Augmentations gives you minus 50% pop amenities usage. If we can get the Leviathan trait to stack with this, we can get down to that magical minus 90% minimum, which is amazing, but even then, minus 50% is
Already good enough. On top of that, you'll get plus 50 years of leader lifespan, which should, assuming your pops have reset on their ages, allow you to get all the way to the end of the game, defeat the crisis, and keep all of your leaders alive. Especially if you get some other bonuses to your leader lifespan.
Yes, there is some living metal upkeep, but don't forget, as a modular ascended Empire, all of your metallurgists should also be producing living metal. If you've gone for a synthetic Ascension, that won't be the case, but you should still be able to get your hands on living metal either through the galactic market or finding some out there in the galaxy. And if you can, this is definitely worth it.
Now we have the last few negative traits at the top of the tier list. These traits are basically the traits I would recommend you take when you're designing your empire because they're kind of free, or at least they're so cheap you can pretty much ignore them.
First up, we have luxurious. This is going to increase your pop assembly cost by 20%. At the start of the game, this is a negligible amount of additional alloys. Even 50 years into the game, we're probably talking about an increase of two or three, maybe even four alloys. That's not even a single metallurgist. So yeah, you can probably ignore this trait and cash in on those lovely two additional trade points to go and grab something better like, oh, I don't know, Dark Matter Engines for plus 40% resource output from jobs. Holy crap, machines are so powerful compared to decrepit biologicals.
Bulky is my go-to negative trait pick if I am a machine. It's going to give me a free point and increase my housing usage by 10%, but let's not forget, as long as we have more housing than our population, which should easily be doable with a few city districts, we can entirely ignore housing. Having excess housing does not give us any benefit, so bulky is a free pick.
Deviant is not available to Gestalt Consciousness Empires because they don't have factions or ethics. This will reduce your governing ethics attraction by 15% and refund a trade point. At the start of the game, you don't have any factions, so you don't really care about that. Once your factions spawn in, you can promote them, which is going to entirely wipe out this negative effect, and promoting a faction is free. Let's not forget, so deviant is entirely something you can ignore. You also get lots and lots of traits throughout the game for your officials if you put them on the council that are going to increase your governing ethics attraction, so all this minus 15% is completely irrelevant. And as the game goes on, it becomes more and more irrelevant, if that's even possible.
Now let's take a look at a few of the example designs I've chosen to show off these traits. First up here, we have an all-rounder design. The bot I've started off with adaptive frame, so this bot's going to get a bonus to basically any job. I've combined that with Dark Matter Engines and also exotic fuel consumption, so we will get at least plus 50% resources from jobs, and if it's working any basic resource jobs, that's going up to plus 65%. Research is at plus 60%, Unity output at plus 65%. You can get the idea. I've also combined this with living metal augmentation to reduce the amenities usage of this bot.
Now, the important thing to note here is that this bot does not have any special bonuses to build speed, and for that reason, I wouldn't actually recommend you build this. But this could be your design for planets where you're producing basic resources, unity, anything like that. In terms of negatives, I've gone with bulky, deviant, and luxurious. They're basically the top of my list, and I think they work quite nicely.
Speaking of building robots, here we have a builder bot. This one grabs monoform and mass produced for additional pop mechanical assembly speed of plus 35%. Of course, I want my bots to do well once they've been built, so I am going to throw in Dark Matter Engines and also exotic fuel consumption here, so I'm getting at least plus 50% resource output from jobs.
What about if we want to maximize our alloy production on one of our alloy planets? Well, here I've combined Dark Matter Engines with moat-powered tools, exotic fuel consumption, and rare crystal exterior, granting us plus 90% output for our alloy workers. And we'll also get a nice minus 50% pop amenities usage here from living metal augmentations, so we won't need many amenities on that forge world.
When it comes to research, I've combined inquisitive axioms with logic engines, Dark Matter Engines, and exotic fuel consumption, granting us a total of plus 80% research output, which is very, very nice.
But what about if trade is more your fancy? Well, here I've grabbed adaptive frames. That is going to turn into trading algorithms if we have anyone working a trade job, and matrix trading for a total of plus 75% base trade trade value output. No bot worth its salt would be complete without Dark Matter Engines for that juicy plus 40% resources from jobs, because there are always other jobs on your planet producing other resources than just the one you specify, like trade, alloys, or research.
Instead of living metal augmentation, I've thrown in loyalty circuits. Why have I done that? Well, on a trade planet, you will generally have an overflowing glut of amenities, and therefore, actually reducing your amenities usage is kind of pointless because you'll probably be at your maximum bonus from amenities anyway. So I've thrown in loyalty circuits to get plus 10% happiness, which should translate into more stability and thus more trade value.
These are just a few examples of the kinds of robot I would recommend you build. That's the end of the tier list. If you disagree with me, I'd love to hear about it. If you're on the Stellaris official Discord and you do agree with me, feel free to share this with the Discord and definitely make the day of somebody who might not agree with this tier list. Either way, I'd love to hear from you what you thought about my rankings. Do you think things are in the right place? Do you think they should go higher or lower? Let me know down in the comments below.
During this video, I talked a lot about the impact of traditions on your playthrough. If you'd like to find out more about the traditions, what each one does, and see where I would rank them in a tier list, you'll probably want to watch my tradition tier list. To do that, click the video on screen now.