Ancient Trait, Broken, OP, or WAD?

You get 10% per relic mined and 1 (flat) point per ascension relic mined. Got lots of relics? Get lots of research, done. 

Is it overpowered? 

For the Ai? Not sure, if the ai prioritizes mining bases for relics above all else then no. I currently do not see this behavior, however I am sure it will be coming. 

In the hands of the human, hell yes. I play Ancient and Intuitive on Very slow pace. I still have 10 relics at this point and 6 of them are 'double mined' which means a flat out 160% bonus. Couple that with Ghost worlds and some Micro and you can pull ahead of all gifted ai quickly. 

I am not advocating any kind of nerf. I find it fun to play with. If anything lets encourage the Ai through mods or coding to play as we do with the bonuses given. 

On larger maps with lots of planets is Ancient better than getting Patriotic or Colonizer?

If so I might try it.  

Theorycrafting: Ancient bonuses don't matter as much until after the colony rush is over.  Ancient might give out huge bonuses later in the game, but Colonizer lets you spam 30-40% more colonies.  So... your thoughts? 

Ancient will get you the tech for warfare way sooner. I play far differently than you do. I play on RARE hab and RARE extreme but with abundant stars and planets. So an Insane map with abundant planets tight clusters will have at most 200 hab planets split up among 15 ai and  you get a very different game. 

In my game colony rush is not as important as building each planet tall. You have VAST spaces between clusters so you have a good 70 turns before you meet anyone, however they are going to be as built up as you, more so. The LEP does not factor in much until you go a' conquering. Big things to shoot for are Engines, Life support and LOTS of constructors to get relics, resources and to extend your faster ships to the next cluster of stars. 

I find sensor stacked ships vital in that I can park a few and see what is coming in the void areas between clusters, very helpful during war. 

Perhaps I did not make myself clear. 

You do not get 10% per relic mined.  You get 10% for each constructor module mining that relic, up to a total of 50% 

The tooltip for research on the planet screen breaks down your research bonus.  It actually itemizes by relic types.  You will see the counter add 10% when you claim the relic.  You will see the counter for the relic type increase with each module you add to an existing relic of that type.  You will see the same type of increment steps for the ascension crystals, only they will be for research points, not percentages.  You can also see this information in the hovertip for any one relic.

I don't see how the trait colonizers (first improvement free on each colony) would help you get 30-40% more worlds. I play on Immense, loose clusters, suicidal and I find the Colonizers trait to be underwhelming. As far as I can tell so far Patriotic and Ancient are by far the strongest traits the way I play the game.

As for the original post, I play with only conquest and influence victory enabled so I disable ascension crystals. Still, this trait is in my opinion WAY better than any of the alternatives by a massive margin except for my top choice; Patriotic (upping the frequency of Precursor Relics from Occasional to Common or Abundant might make me switch the order of the two).

Erischild you are correct. That is really what I ment as well. So if you have Ancient and yoiu are mining a culture relic and you added 3 modules of mining you would get 30% culture bonus and 30% research bonus (ancient trait) from that ONE relic. 

This alone makes Approval relics very tasty and Research ones doubly so!

Actually, marigoldran is pretty much the top expert on colony rushing and uses the Colonizers trait to rush shipyards on each newly colonized world. His playstyle is very foreign to me, but he knows how to use the trait for its maximum effect.

Personally, I prefer a game that's fun to me, so I use a completely different setup. To each his own though and if someone finds breaking the game fun, I say go for it. (Preferably quietly.)

Why?

Your logic makes no sense.  If you break the game YOU SHOULD BE AS LOUD ABOUT IT AS POSSIBLE so the developers will be motivated to fix it.  

Set it to abundant/abundant on those settings with 15 AI and go and try it.  

My logic is flawless.

You should play vanilla races against vanilla races against vanilla races because that's what I prefer. 

Part of the fun of breaking a game, by the way, is NOT being quiet about it.  

First thing is I appreciate the confirmation that I am not deluded about what I saw.  On abundant settings with large maps, I find that this trait is seriously more powerful than the others.  It is to the point that I believe the devs meant it to match the description and not the present behavior.  They will get to decide that.  I fully expect it to be adjusted sometime in the future. 

It's like the colonizer trait.  The ability to rush shipyards makes obscene colony rushing possible.  Paul has said he didn't want it to work out that way, but he has been fighting improvement tags.  I am trying a game now with colonizers and not rushing shipyards.  First of all, resisting the temptation to rush a shipyard each time I start a new planet is not my idea of fun.  I like giving into temptation.  It makes the colonizer trait good but not spectacular.  I find myself rushing a lot of factories.  Late game, I am rushing an entertainment center to jump start the approval.  Gotta have happy people! 

Anyway, I am hopeful the Colonizers trait will be better balanced.  I think the same may need to be applied to Ancient.  We'll see.

Do you build a shipyard for every planet you colonize? Maybe I am playing it wrong but I only build shipyards on about 20% of my planets.

If you are specializing, it doesn't make sense to me to build a shipyard next to a research or financial planet. I have never had a problem pumping out all the ships I can use in the early to mid game and with relics and other bonuses you can build a shipyard in 1-2 turns in the late game if needed.

I don't see colonizer as OP, unless your strategy is to build a shipyard on every planet. I use the trait, but I have been pondering it's value compared to other traits.

I build a shipyard on almost every planet.  And then that planet goes on to build more colony ships.

On abundant/abundant larger maps with reasonable amount of AIs, this strat will effectively win you the game by the time the colonization rush is over.  

Every planet sponsors a shipyard.  I play with lots of planets so there are often multiple planets per shipyard.  But compared to your style I have lots of shipyards.  I do not specialize they way you do.  I specialize planets with higher tile counts, but consider other planets as general sources of goodness, including military production.  I do full infrastructure with embassies and culture and missionary centers on all planets.  I keep my people as happy as possible.  Shipyards with multiple sponsors create big military ships.  Medium shipyards put out support ships.  Everybody elses puts out constructors of various sizes.  I have a lot of shipyard!  If shipyards affected the spacing of starbases, I'd be borked badly.

I am presently steamrolling the AI at gifted with my settings and strategy.  I am moving up towards genius.  Presently, I have a mixture of genius and gifted opponents, all random so I can't tell which is which.  I also have one random AI set at normal in case the galaxy needs a stooge someone can invade.  The Drengin have a military lead because I am slow that way, and they have declared war.  They have been pushing me around a little, but there are now a lot of shipyards working on the latest military ships.  I think I am going to have a nasty surprise for them.  The big shipyards are producing capitol ships and everybody else is working on transports.  There are going to be a whole lot of those transports.  When the AI gets smarter and more aggressive about its war plans, I will have to more careful, but I think I am going to get away with it this time.

I never say someone else is playing "wrong"" unless they aren't having fun.  I never offer my playstyle as an example of best practices.  I win often enough at the settings I play to satisfy myself and get challenged enough to entertain myself.  That's the most I can claim as game authority or expertise.  I can sometimes break the ship designer, but that is a different set of skills and goals entirely.

Well, I really don't like specializing planets but based on what many here say and even what the devs say, it gives me the impression that it is the best strategy. All of the re-naming planets and deciding what the planets should be doing becomes a huge bother to me as the game wears on. I will probably start playing a more balance strategy. As long as I can win fairly easy on normal, I am fine. I can always move up in difficulty if I want to work a little harder.

Curiosity about your strategy, You say you specialize the planets with a lot of tiles. It seems that those planets would be the easiest to build multiple improvement, while the lower quality planets don't have sufficient tiles to allow a full range of production. I have been only mixing production on huge PQ colonies

I would guess that if you are non-specializing small planets you are building only a couple of factory improvements and a couple or research improvements, along with onesies for military, influence, etc., then waiting for them to produce more in the later game

In the later game it becomes moot since all planets are producing a huge amount of mfg and research with no improvements.

I have a similar game on gifted. I have a custom Ai faction called "Humanity Under Gaia" with Sexy Picard as the FG picture. He has Patriotic and adaptable and was at 800 pwer while I was 300 at the time. He promptly DOWd me and sent me some 'H.U.G.S" to my planets. Needless to say I didn't want any H.U.G.S. and put my war machine into high gear. 

On rare planets but 'uncommon' relic settings I am easily getting a new tech every turn. I am now into AoE and working on Phasors and Nightmare torps. While I have far fewer ships he now has large but his tech is still stingers and pulse guns. 

So, stay away from H.U.G.S. ....heheh

Quoting Franco, reply 16

Well, I really don't like specializing planets but based on what many here say and even what the devs say, it gives me the impression that it is the best strategy. All of the re-naming planets and deciding what the planets should be doing becomes a huge bother to me as the game wears on. I will probably start playing a more balance strategy. As long as I can win fairly easy on normal, I am fine. I can always move up in difficulty if I want to work a little harder.

Curiosity about your strategy, You say you specialize the planets with a lot of tiles. It seems that those planets would be the easiest to build multiple improvement, while the lower quality planets don't have sufficient tiles to allow a full range of production. I have been only mixing production on huge PQ colonies

I would guess that if you are non-specializing small planets you are building only a couple of factory improvements and a couple or research improvements, along with onesies for military, influence, etc., then waiting for them to produce more in the later game

In the later game it becomes moot since all planets are producing a huge amount of mfg and research with no improvements.

End of Franco's quote

My style is to take planets at 14 or better and make them either production, research, or wealth.  Usually, the terrain bonuses suggest a type and I try to exploit their adjacencies.  I put all my infrastructure on the sparse parts of the map and leave the big clumps for the payload.  I put two to three factories down. 

High PQ doesn't seem to make the same differences it did in GC2.  I find population feuls the economy the most. 

I start each planet with a base set of available infrastructure.  My must have buildings are Hospital, Farm, Entertainment, Factory, and Missionary.  Most important is the Hospital.  I set the individual planet governor to all production.  When the planet goes idle, I decide its specialty, re-adjust the governor, and set up a substantial build cue.  Even if there are only one or two tiles left after infrastucture assignments, I make sure they are they the same type and that becomes that planet's "specialty".  The planet takes care of itself for a long while.  I consider it a lazy person's form of micromanagement.  I'm still formulating a plan for late game.  I am still figuring out terraforming and projects. 

Two or three factories seems to keep the build cue pumping through all the upgrades and stuff.  I have thought about replacing them with payload buildings, but I like my distributed manufacturing base for late war efforts.  A few but not many planets will specialize in production with as many factories as I can stuff in there.  For the rest, I try to split roughly evenly between Research and Wealth specialization, leaning towards research.   My home planet will have a bunch of factories and late game wonders, so that is its specialty.  One planet will be named Shrinker and be used for that purpose.  I build three factories there and then cue up military adjacencies around the shrinker.  I leave the planet governor on all social manufacturing until it finishes with that whole cue.  I rush buy a couple of infrastructure buildings to keep it growing.  It probably receives the most micromanagement of my planets except for the home world itself.

This question has been answered today in the dev stream.  It is a bug and will take some work to get rid off due to how the trait works.  No ETA on resolution. 

Thanks, Paul, for the answer!

I advise marigoldran to try and abuse it while it lasts.    I'm thinking of using both Ancient and Colonizers to take on god-like AI, myself.  Might as well break it while it's still broken.   I don't think I would have a chance otherwise.  I've watched them in soak.  Those god-like bonuses scare me!

Yea Paul was pretty surprised that we were getting 10% per module instead of 10% per relic. Not sure if this will ever get fixed because why would have have higher tiers of archaeology 'mining' if  this is not the case. 

We mine research relics and get 10% per module.

Add in Ancient trait and we get 'another' 10% but currently we are getting that per module on each and every relic. Overpowered BIG time!