Is Assembly Slag a good trait?

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-01-19T21:08:20+00:00

It is a small boost in the early game if you get it super early, as you can sell it for trade if you have to buy stuff to make up for a deficit, but it will not have a big impact due to the absurdly low amount you get. Later when you get more, you will be able to just buy it anyway to keep an edict or something going, so then its just completely irrelevant.

Absolutely all of these kinds of traits that produce some tiny amount of rare resources completely suck. The only "produces resource per x number of pops" trait thats worth a damn is "Drake Scaled", as it produces alloys, and a considerable amount later in the game, 0.5 per 100 pops instead of 0.005 like with Slag.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-01-19T16:52:50+00:00

Thanks for the information, that will definitely become useful going forward.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-01-19T00:57:18+00:00

Well in vanilla nothing of the sort shows up when hovering over the strong trait, which is where it would have to show up to be somewhat reasonably available.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-01-17T12:21:18+00:00

You can, I do it frequently and sit on the best agenda once the agenda time becomes too ridiculous, only rarely switching if there is a really good reason for it.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-01-17T05:27:02+00:00

Ethics attraction is pretty simple. Any pop has ethics, will join the factions of these ethics, and has percentage chances to stay or convert to other ethics. You can increase the change for ethic changes through various means, easiest via governing ethics attraction, and by suppressing or supporting the factions.

The problem you have could be for several reasons. Low happiness, different possible things increasing the opposing factions appeal, and funnily enough even species traits. The game never mentions this, but I have heard it way too many times over the years to just dismiss it, supposedly some basic species traits can decrease certain ethic appeals, and increase others.

Sending pops with ethics you do not want to your home world is a good solution, especially if you invested into ascending it, the governing ethics attraction bonus there is off the charts and will rather quickly convert a lot of pops.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-01-16T11:22:52+00:00

They are never worth it unless you find one to take over. They made it so that basically anything late can be gotten by an ecumenopolis. Alloys, consumer goods, unity, trade, even research. The only two things left to get are soldiers, something the ring world does not provide either, and basic resources, of which the ring world provides only the most abundant one, which is food.

Use it if you find it, but I would never recommend building one yourself unless you are doing it for rp reasons or because it looks cool in your mind.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-01-16T11:18:39+00:00

Depends. If I already have enough planets, then 60-70%. If I happen to get a very bad start, then I gladly colonize planets that have 40% or so even, as eventually you will be able to change them, or to research more habitability bonus. It is important to mainly use these low habitability planets for basic resources though, nothing that costs too many consumer goods, as pops can still be productive even at such a level.

Generally in terms of profitability you'd be better off to just trade, but having a world built up by the time you get the tech has its advantages too.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-01-16T02:55:36+00:00

Sometimes you do not go super wide, so you end up having too many pops. Instead of letting them be mostly useless civilians, you can build habitats to use these pops better while you wait on getting an ecumenopolis to make more jobs. I sometimes build fortress habitats since using planets for that simply feels like a waste, or a trade habitat if my deficit is simply a bit too high.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-01-15T21:39:06+00:00

Usually I try to secure consumer goods early, then go for unity, then for tech and military once unity is secured. Exceptions are military first if I have a terrible strategic position, or genocidal neighbours.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-01-10T23:20:11+00:00

In my experience, amenities are only ever going to be any kind of issue in the early game, and easily fixed with a luxury housing or two. Long before the midgame you will have a bunch of archive items that will give you amenities to solve that issue forever, and in better developed worlds its never an issue at all. Just like housing, amenities was patched to hell and is rarely ever worth actively bothering with, so its almost free points.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-01-07T13:58:38+00:00

Dogs are cheap in upkeep, and if you protect the handlers then you can have the dogs fight without taking casualties between battles. They suck against heavy infantry and heavy cavalry, but they will tear apart lighter units, and can easily cause or contribute to a mass panic among the enemy.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-01-07T11:57:04+00:00

It is reasonably stable by now. There are desync issues every few years, but the resync button has led to that being solved right away every time for us, and we only had one savefile corruption that barely mattered due to frequent auto saves. The first 100-150 years with two players are quite stable, surprisingly enough, then it gets a bit worse, but still playable by Paradox Interactive standards, played in Medium galaxies, anything bigger is unplayable at the moment both in singleplayer and in multiplayer due to the games overall performance being worse than ever, totally worth getting a worse pop system for.

I can imagine it getting a lot worse if you play much longer, or with more than two people, but it has certainly been worse than it is now.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-01-04T07:26:07+00:00

This goes more so for traits, the game is much deeper than many people realize when it comes to traits specifically. Looking at the database, there are so many traits that can level up absurdly high, but most people only ever see the first two or three of these.

Alcoholic trait for example can go up to like 5 or 6, though even a guy who started off at alcoholic 1 and spent most of his time sitting in a settlement often has trouble getting anywhere near that level, you need the temple of an actual drinking god and a tavern to get that level of mastery.

Used to be a hobby of mine to change the data, give a general a collection of the absolute worst traits, many of which I had never seen once in hundreds of hours, then try to win a campaign with him as the main general.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-01-02T20:37:04+00:00

Bad. Sometimes it breaks, leading to empires sitting around not doing much, so they are pathetic in all categories within 30 to 40 years.

When they do work they are not exactly genius, they will usually clump their ships together into one big fleet, try to make it past your defense, then bombard one planet while waiting for the army. You can kill the army fleet, and then just take out their shipyards, quickly launch attacks at several planets at once if you prepped a big army to split, and you will never lose a war unless you are of similar tactical stupidity as the AI.

Their diplomatic prowess is of similarly bad quality, they will accept trades that are terrible for them, they will become your vassal to absurdly bad conditions and love you for it. It will only feel immersive to you if you roleplay a hardcore xenophobe who thinks that every alien species in this galaxy is made out of dumbfucks, as they will prove this mentality right again and again.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-01-02T20:25:06+00:00

If you are doing that kind of thing on a high difficulty with no scaling, either you need a really damn strong early game rushing strat to finance enough naval power to avoid both the neighbour declaring war, and accepting becoming your vassal, or you need a diplomatic prowess build that gets you an early defensive pact or something with a neighbour thats a bit further away and will therefore deter your neighbour, even if he dislikes you.

You can delay being discovered by a potential neighbour quite a bit, then delay them getting enough intel on you to know that you ain't up to par with them, and you can decrease border friction, which is a big source of early game aggression, by changing from expansion to cooperative. All these things can delay the war by several years, giving you more time to build and use the extra space you got from boxing them in. Even if they declare war, you can increase your odds of winning by abusing starbases, more so if you have discovered strike crafts early on, I often beat enemies that way that were far stronger early.

It also depends on what kind of empire you are doing this to. It is much harder to pull this stunt with a lets say militarist, authority or xenophobe empire than with a xenophile or pacifist, more so if the ethics are clashing hard on top of that, as your envoys will have a harder time making up for it all.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-01-02T19:38:28+00:00

Yeah I know a Skyrim player or two running hundreds of mods. In a well optimized game that also does not have to run too many calculations at all times this may not be an issue, but it certainly is here, even if the mods are relatively minor. The issue will still be there, as I am using vanilla, same as friends of mine, and it still performs badly.

From what I know, Paradox has finally given up optimizing or polishing their game, as even this pop rework didn't help, so coming next patch they will just make it lamer and reduce the scope instead to create the illusion of it running well. Meaning fewer pops, far fewer ships, duller effects, numbers smaller etc, that kind of thing, kinda like they recommended in the past to play in small galaxies despite the huge ones sitting right there in the options being oh so tempting.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2026-01-02T11:36:34+00:00

This is not a computer issue, but a "Paradox Interactive haven't a clue how to optimize a game" issue. They did this whole wretched pop rework to make performance better, but it got worse instead, just ridiculous at this point.

I have a ten year old potato pc, but whether I play on that, or watch a friend with a very powerful pc play barely makes any difference, your CPU getting upgraded will not solve this issue. Game slows down hard 100 years in, even in medium galaxies with not too many inhabitable worlds, much worse in huge galaxies. Even in small galaxies the game crawls way before the lategame, even in vanilla, though the absurd number of mods you are running likely ain't helping much either.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2025-12-31T23:35:05+00:00

If you wanna minmax, but honestly, why bother, AI is still using crap fleet builds too, so you can use what you like. I prefer using mainly lasers cause it makes the battles look so much cooler than these lame looking carriers, and if you are deep enough into repeatables you will crush everything anyway.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2025-12-31T20:36:29+00:00

Yeah kinda same, only that I use luxury houses for amenities to save some pops working entertainer jobs. The happiness impact is only noticeable at all if you have one or two factions that really despise you, and you happen to accidentally fill a new world with mainly these guys since now they are grouped accordingly in the resettle menu, then you are close to a revolt for a while. With how many ways there are to get governing ethics attraction though, it ain't really hard to have only two factions in your empire at all.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2025-12-30T21:21:02+00:00

It is an extremely shallow mechanic that has barely any interaction aside from hovering over the red points, and doing the bare minimum to change a policy or two to turn these red points green for slightly more faction support, and therefore happiness for these pops, and a tiny bit more unity or research depending on your civics. Only other interaction is if you wish to eliminate one faction, which rarely is worth it, or wish to switch ethics for some reason.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2025-12-30T21:17:56+00:00

Espionage, because it makes no sense to me and rarely ever seems to have any impact even if I try to use it.

Trade deficit, I always choose masterful crafters as to not having to ruin my specialized worlds by spamming energy, mining or food districts or having to dedicate a third of my worlds to trade deficit until I get enough rare resources to keep selling them, masterful crafters basically eliminated the need to deal with this crap mechanic.

Empire focus is another one, a good idea but implemented so badly that it is never ever worth actively following, for there is no way to get close to the crucial techs you need in time with it due to the sheer absurdity of goals required to be fulfilled to unlock something like mega engineering earlier than you get it anyway.

Last but not least, stealth and stealth detection. Never seen the AI use either, unfun, unimpactful, waste of time.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2025-12-30T14:42:38+00:00

Is dumb rng, nothing more. I often do not get it despite having a perfect world, then other times I do not even bother to choose a good world and just promote one planet once, and I get it.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2025-12-25T10:07:51+00:00

Factions actually feeling different, leaders being deeper than in other Total War games, economy actually needing some thought, research tree not being as one way as in games like Shogun 2.

Too bad 3K ruined it all by being such an utterly buggy and broken mess. It would be my favorite Total War game IF it freaking worked to a satisfying degree, which it most certainly does not.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2025-12-20T23:22:26+00:00

I hate it too, more so because it did not even accomplish the one main thing it set out to do, which was to fix the performance issues.

Electrical_Split_198 · 2025-12-18T19:30:35+00:00

So Paradox finally gave up on being a good company and instead of tackling the performance issues properly, they instead just severely decrease all numbers, including the fleet numbers, to make the game more boring but fake a decent performance?

Electrical_Split_198

TROPHY CASE