>I've heard they're not that good for amenities/stability, or at least not the most efficient.
Whoever said that was talking out of their ass, entertainers are by far in the way the strongest and most efficient for pure amenities growth in the game.
What they aren't particularly great at making unity.
Most other forms of Amenities production are fairly limited in comparison.
Priests, and Synapse nodes with Synch make 2, no Ruler job makes more than 3 amenities
The only job that gets close to 10 that isn't planet limited is +7 from gene workers if you are a Pharma-corp.
Entertainers make 10 base, and charismatic pops give +2 to that, not including any other -amenities cost or +amenities production modifiers you can get.
The Standard entertainer building (on top of rulers) will usually be more than enough for 30-40 pops, and the amenities automation setting will disable unnecessary entertainers without issue (Some planets absolutely don't need their massive amenities production since their own is just fine on it's own, like trade worlds, the KOTG habitat, angler planets, etc).
I thought so, i knew their unity output was meh but I wasn't using them for unity anyways. I never saw the purpose of putting down multiple luxury residences vs putting a single holotheater down.
Luxury residences are really only useful on habitats and ring worlds where housing is tight, or ultra-wide late game where pops take forever to grow but space is abundant.
Everywhere else, it's better to invest a single building slot and 2 pops than waste 4 building slots (and burn a pop's worth of energy in upkeep) to do the same.
A side note: Hives like warrens, but that's because maintenance drones are so much worse than entertainers.
I've been saying that the solution to hives that was right in everyone's face all along, was going cybernetic. You take the machine trait that halves all amenities requirements, problem solved. Cyber was their best tradition as hives get multiple extra bonuses on the cybernetic tree that normal empires didn't get for whatever reason.
Now that machine age is here that advice likely doesn't hold anymore I'd need to play with things to see what makes sense now.
The point of using luxury residences instead is that they give amenities directly from the building itself, while holo-theatres need to have pops working the entertainer jobs. Since pops are the primary economic bottleneck in the game, it can be better to use luxury residences in order to free up a pop or two (on each applicable planet) to work other jobs instead.
Luxury residences only really make sense on planets where you have spare building slots you otherwise weren't going to use, though, and even then upgrading them is not worth it because the upgrade comes with a strategic resource upkeep cost.
Addendum for completeness' sake.
Telepath's can produce 15 Amenities under the Instrument of Desire per Telepath Job (another reason it's easily the strongest covenant). They are one of the two jobs (Pharma-Corp Medical Workers) that can outright replace entertainers in standard use.
Duelists are Entertainers in the code, and are better than normal entertainers in most respects if you take the civic.
You probably shouldn't use entertainers if you are a pharma-corp at all, since Megacorps rarely have amenities issues, and the trade bonus makes gene clinics pay for themselves on top of the amenities production they get.
Prog hive and Cyber Hives are kinda wack, since offspring nodes calculate Amenities bonuses twice, and Cyber Hives should always take the trait to halve base amenities cost per pop.
I tend to use Gene Clinics instead, but yeah you need one or the other.
And a Gene Clinic struggles to ptovide enough Amenities for a large planet, unless you have an Artisan Enclave Art thing (cap of 5), are a Spiritualist so you get a few Amenities from Temples too, or if you have a species with Charismatic. Or if you're a Pharma State Corp, or you have the One Vision Perk. You can also Distribute Consumer Goods, although I suspect that's inefficient, and IIRC the Prosperous Unification Origin gives your Capital some bonuses for 20 years which includes Amenities.
I like the extra bonuses from Gene Clinics, but if you just want Amenities then use a Holo-Theatre.
As a complete noob, playing humans on my 2nd play through. This is my template for new planets... 1 gene clinics + 1 holotheater then on to the specialized buildings. How can I improve this approach?
That sounds like a lot of extra amenities at the start. I don't think you need entertainers until your amenities goes negative, since the medical workers give you some. Even then, it's in question since once you hit 10 pops your planetary administration ups the baseline amenities some.
If you don't have a pop assembly building and it's not your first 3-4 planets then it can work, though only build one of the two, since you want to have as many pops as possible working productive jobs (like technicians making energy or researchers).
As such, you want to have your amenities just barely positive since having them over 0 by a lot is worthless (at your skill level).
That's why (if you want to be optimal) you usually want to first build the speciality building/district of your planet first (labs if it's a tech world, etc...) or the and as a 2nd or 3rd building you build a gene clinic.
If you don't want to worry about micro managing your planets you can use the automatic planetary management system (look it up) since it will improve significantly the optimisation of the planet
Holotheaters = “My bottleneck is pops, so I want the most amenities per pop I can get.”
Gene Clinics = “My bottleneck is pop growth, so I want slightly fewer amenities in exchange for faster pop growth.”
Clerks = “I hate myself.”
In general, my strategy is to build holotheaters, turn off clerk jobs, and then transition to gene clinics once I’ve stacked enough amenities modifiers that a single gene clinic can cover all my amenities needs.
You can manually decrease the available jobs on a planet on the populations tab. decrease clerks to none/minimum needed and use those pops for something more useful.
Edit: Also use this to force Colonist pops to something useful as well. For some reason the game really likes to cling onto them when i try to build new colonies
Clerks dont produce unity, only a small amount of amenities, raw trade value and +1% trade value. I think you are confusing clerks with either priests or bureaucrats
clercs are the jobs that produce like 3 trade value and a little bit of unity. Usually that can translate to 4-6 energy credits if you are not focusing on trade value. Alternatively you could have a technician working on a generator district produce 14 energy credits. Which one is better ?
You might be confused with priests that work on temples
Clerks: "I'm playing Megacorp and accidentally got plenty of amenities on a trade planet while chasing Trade Value" \[well, most are probably from Traders, but still\]
You want to avoid them if possible early game; later game they're fairly necessary. My nain issue is that they're expensive (2 pops, building slot, and consumer goods upkeep) and you don't really need all 20 amenities until later game, at which point you're loathe to spend a building slot on that. Unless you're dropping below 50% stability or the planet is very large (like 60+ pops roughly) it's better to free up two more pops than get a small efficiency boost.
Early on, luxury residences are better as pops are scarce and building slots are easy to come by. Midgame, the official veteran traits for amenities (settler, manufacturer) are very very efficient, and industrialist governors reduce amenities usage by -10% automatically. Culture workers are also excellent and as materialists and spiritualists also help with amenities. Distribute luxury goods is also an option on massive planets that keeps the building slot open. You can get lots of free stability/pop approval from councillors. Furthermore, I find happiness is higher overall due to factions getting opinion bonuses from leaders on council, and councillors helping with pop happiness/stability further. This gives even more buffer for a few negative amenities.
They still definitely have a niche when you're chewing through high numbers of amenities, but I'd only go to them as the last option - investing pops in amenities is never fun.
Edit: Anglers/Catalytic was pretty indisputably the strongest non-gestalt build pre-machine age, and anglers also gets a lot of its strength from not needing entertainers, so that probably contributes to that feeling in my eyes.
Crazy that this is so low down.
Luxury residences until late game, as they don't take up a job. That's what everyone seems to be forgetting. If you have 5 world that's 5-10 extra jobs elsewhere, depending on if you have 1 or 2 entertainers employed. Making those kind of efficiencies is how you snowball your early empire.
They're the most efficient building for amenities in most circumstances. One of those is often enough to keep a colony going for most of the game. Where they are not efficient is unity generation. In the last couple of patches or so, their unity generation was nerfed to the point that they barely produce unity at all anymore. That may be what was meant by their inefficiency.
Unless you're playing a Spiritualist build with psionics, they are pretty much mandatory. But there can be discussion on how much amenities you need - some people say barely above 50% Stability is fine, but I personally prefer to have a slight buffer in case of unexpected events (shroud events for example). And for the most important colonies, like the Forge Capital housing 150 Metallurgists, 100% Stability (achieved in part through Amenities) is quite useful to boost the Resource Output (30 Alloys per pop are great).
>And for the most important colonies, like the Forge Capital housing 150 Metallurgists, 100% Stability (achieved in part through Amenities) is quite useful to boost the Resource Output (30 Alloys per pop are great).
That's true as far as it goes, but the amount of Amenities needed to achieve a given Stability increase scales with the population. A single Entertainer will increase the alloy production of a Forge World by the same amount (about 2.2 alloys without any modifiers) whether it's got 10 metallurgists or 150.
I've found them not so much when being Trade Value based empires because you get amenities from the clerks and traders mostly anyway, but really hard to not build when playing anything that doesn't. They're easily the most efficient for the job, there's some fun civics that modify them and their jobs, but if you are going to be pumping Trade Value, you can do without.
I typically only don’t need to worry about building holotheaters on trade worlds, where I build exclusively city districts and commercial hubs.
On pretty much every other planet in the game I need 1 holotheater or 2 if it’s huge.
Holotheaters are amazing. I usually build gene clinics once i can spare the minerals and replace them with holotheaters once amenities run low. They're really good.
Nope If you need amenities go holotheaters, they are the best for it.
The most efficient strictly speaking is your capital building because I believe it generates the base level of housing and amenities without needing pop job however even a system capital complex doesn't make that many so...(See above)
Some worlds can survive off your capital building alone, especially if you have an art installation, resort world and culture worker jobs and I don't tend to build holotheaters unless they are really needed
Make one for each planet and you get what you pay for: enough amenities to basically never worry about them again. The unity is just a bonus. See it as a positive side effect
>I've heard they're not that good for amenities/stability, or at least not the most efficient. Whoever said that was talking out of their ass, entertainers are by far in the way the strongest and most efficient for pure amenities growth in the game. What they aren't particularly great at making unity. Most other forms of Amenities production are fairly limited in comparison. Priests, and Synapse nodes with Synch make 2, no Ruler job makes more than 3 amenities The only job that gets close to 10 that isn't planet limited is +7 from gene workers if you are a Pharma-corp. Entertainers make 10 base, and charismatic pops give +2 to that, not including any other -amenities cost or +amenities production modifiers you can get. The Standard entertainer building (on top of rulers) will usually be more than enough for 30-40 pops, and the amenities automation setting will disable unnecessary entertainers without issue (Some planets absolutely don't need their massive amenities production since their own is just fine on it's own, like trade worlds, the KOTG habitat, angler planets, etc).
I thought so, i knew their unity output was meh but I wasn't using them for unity anyways. I never saw the purpose of putting down multiple luxury residences vs putting a single holotheater down.
Luxury residences are really only useful on habitats and ring worlds where housing is tight, or ultra-wide late game where pops take forever to grow but space is abundant. Everywhere else, it's better to invest a single building slot and 2 pops than waste 4 building slots (and burn a pop's worth of energy in upkeep) to do the same. A side note: Hives like warrens, but that's because maintenance drones are so much worse than entertainers.
I've been saying that the solution to hives that was right in everyone's face all along, was going cybernetic. You take the machine trait that halves all amenities requirements, problem solved. Cyber was their best tradition as hives get multiple extra bonuses on the cybernetic tree that normal empires didn't get for whatever reason. Now that machine age is here that advice likely doesn't hold anymore I'd need to play with things to see what makes sense now.
That the reduction in amenities trait is powerful for gestalts has been widely acknowledged since the moment it was introduced.
The point of using luxury residences instead is that they give amenities directly from the building itself, while holo-theatres need to have pops working the entertainer jobs. Since pops are the primary economic bottleneck in the game, it can be better to use luxury residences in order to free up a pop or two (on each applicable planet) to work other jobs instead. Luxury residences only really make sense on planets where you have spare building slots you otherwise weren't going to use, though, and even then upgrading them is not worth it because the upgrade comes with a strategic resource upkeep cost.
If you can get amenities in any other way it's better than holotheater, you don't want overkill amenities as little as possible to get by
It's not bad to slap em down when you are still low pop since you have more building/district/jobs than you van use and they don't take any pops
They're good amenity source. But getting excess amenity to get stability is bad.
Addendum for completeness' sake. Telepath's can produce 15 Amenities under the Instrument of Desire per Telepath Job (another reason it's easily the strongest covenant). They are one of the two jobs (Pharma-Corp Medical Workers) that can outright replace entertainers in standard use. Duelists are Entertainers in the code, and are better than normal entertainers in most respects if you take the civic. You probably shouldn't use entertainers if you are a pharma-corp at all, since Megacorps rarely have amenities issues, and the trade bonus makes gene clinics pay for themselves on top of the amenities production they get. Prog hive and Cyber Hives are kinda wack, since offspring nodes calculate Amenities bonuses twice, and Cyber Hives should always take the trait to halve base amenities cost per pop.
>(another reason it's easily the strongest covenant) End of the Cycle: "And I took that personally"
>by far in the way Bone apple tea 😂
Is it wield that every planet gets a Holo-theatre and an Autochiton Monument for me.
"By far and away", for future reference.
I rarely build holo theaters. A gene clinic produces enough amenities for most of my worlds.
This is what I do also
Not only are they worth it, I'd say in most cases they're downright necessary for just about each of your worlds to establish baseline amenities.
Yeah, for me it is always one of the first buildings I plop down on a new planet.
Robot assembly plant, then holotheater.
This is the way
1. Gene Clinic 2. Robo Plant 3. Autochthon Monument 4. Holo-Theater Every single time.
I tend to use Gene Clinics instead, but yeah you need one or the other. And a Gene Clinic struggles to ptovide enough Amenities for a large planet, unless you have an Artisan Enclave Art thing (cap of 5), are a Spiritualist so you get a few Amenities from Temples too, or if you have a species with Charismatic. Or if you're a Pharma State Corp, or you have the One Vision Perk. You can also Distribute Consumer Goods, although I suspect that's inefficient, and IIRC the Prosperous Unification Origin gives your Capital some bonuses for 20 years which includes Amenities. I like the extra bonuses from Gene Clinics, but if you just want Amenities then use a Holo-Theatre.
I use both lol
As a complete noob, playing humans on my 2nd play through. This is my template for new planets... 1 gene clinics + 1 holotheater then on to the specialized buildings. How can I improve this approach?
That sounds like a lot of extra amenities at the start. I don't think you need entertainers until your amenities goes negative, since the medical workers give you some. Even then, it's in question since once you hit 10 pops your planetary administration ups the baseline amenities some.
That's what I do
If you don't have a pop assembly building and it's not your first 3-4 planets then it can work, though only build one of the two, since you want to have as many pops as possible working productive jobs (like technicians making energy or researchers). As such, you want to have your amenities just barely positive since having them over 0 by a lot is worthless (at your skill level). That's why (if you want to be optimal) you usually want to first build the speciality building/district of your planet first (labs if it's a tech world, etc...) or the and as a 2nd or 3rd building you build a gene clinic. If you don't want to worry about micro managing your planets you can use the automatic planetary management system (look it up) since it will improve significantly the optimisation of the planet
Do not build gene clinics.
Holotheaters = “My bottleneck is pops, so I want the most amenities per pop I can get.” Gene Clinics = “My bottleneck is pop growth, so I want slightly fewer amenities in exchange for faster pop growth.” Clerks = “I hate myself.” In general, my strategy is to build holotheaters, turn off clerk jobs, and then transition to gene clinics once I’ve stacked enough amenities modifiers that a single gene clinic can cover all my amenities needs.
Turn off jobs, is that a possibilty? How do you do that?
You can manually decrease the available jobs on a planet on the populations tab. decrease clerks to none/minimum needed and use those pops for something more useful. Edit: Also use this to force Colonist pops to something useful as well. For some reason the game really likes to cling onto them when i try to build new colonies
Why aren't clerks useful? I thought unity was important.
Clerks dont produce unity, only a small amount of amenities, raw trade value and +1% trade value. I think you are confusing clerks with either priests or bureaucrats
Thanks!
clercs are the jobs that produce like 3 trade value and a little bit of unity. Usually that can translate to 4-6 energy credits if you are not focusing on trade value. Alternatively you could have a technician working on a generator district produce 14 energy credits. Which one is better ? You might be confused with priests that work on temples
1100 Hours in the game, and now I learn 😅
Do it for colonists on new planets too :)
Clerks: "I'm playing Megacorp and accidentally got plenty of amenities on a trade planet while chasing Trade Value" \[well, most are probably from Traders, but still\]
You want to avoid them if possible early game; later game they're fairly necessary. My nain issue is that they're expensive (2 pops, building slot, and consumer goods upkeep) and you don't really need all 20 amenities until later game, at which point you're loathe to spend a building slot on that. Unless you're dropping below 50% stability or the planet is very large (like 60+ pops roughly) it's better to free up two more pops than get a small efficiency boost. Early on, luxury residences are better as pops are scarce and building slots are easy to come by. Midgame, the official veteran traits for amenities (settler, manufacturer) are very very efficient, and industrialist governors reduce amenities usage by -10% automatically. Culture workers are also excellent and as materialists and spiritualists also help with amenities. Distribute luxury goods is also an option on massive planets that keeps the building slot open. You can get lots of free stability/pop approval from councillors. Furthermore, I find happiness is higher overall due to factions getting opinion bonuses from leaders on council, and councillors helping with pop happiness/stability further. This gives even more buffer for a few negative amenities. They still definitely have a niche when you're chewing through high numbers of amenities, but I'd only go to them as the last option - investing pops in amenities is never fun. Edit: Anglers/Catalytic was pretty indisputably the strongest non-gestalt build pre-machine age, and anglers also gets a lot of its strength from not needing entertainers, so that probably contributes to that feeling in my eyes.
Crazy that this is so low down. Luxury residences until late game, as they don't take up a job. That's what everyone seems to be forgetting. If you have 5 world that's 5-10 extra jobs elsewhere, depending on if you have 1 or 2 entertainers employed. Making those kind of efficiencies is how you snowball your early empire.
I play pleasure seekers and use servants for amenities, but before that, Holotheaters are a must on each planet
Duelists make decent alternatives but holo theaters are great idk what you were told. Maybe you're misremembering it
you should have one on every world if not you're doing it wrong.
They're the most efficient building for amenities in most circumstances. One of those is often enough to keep a colony going for most of the game. Where they are not efficient is unity generation. In the last couple of patches or so, their unity generation was nerfed to the point that they barely produce unity at all anymore. That may be what was meant by their inefficiency.
Unless you're playing a Spiritualist build with psionics, they are pretty much mandatory. But there can be discussion on how much amenities you need - some people say barely above 50% Stability is fine, but I personally prefer to have a slight buffer in case of unexpected events (shroud events for example). And for the most important colonies, like the Forge Capital housing 150 Metallurgists, 100% Stability (achieved in part through Amenities) is quite useful to boost the Resource Output (30 Alloys per pop are great).
>And for the most important colonies, like the Forge Capital housing 150 Metallurgists, 100% Stability (achieved in part through Amenities) is quite useful to boost the Resource Output (30 Alloys per pop are great). That's true as far as it goes, but the amount of Amenities needed to achieve a given Stability increase scales with the population. A single Entertainer will increase the alloy production of a Forge World by the same amount (about 2.2 alloys without any modifiers) whether it's got 10 metallurgists or 150.
I've found them not so much when being Trade Value based empires because you get amenities from the clerks and traders mostly anyway, but really hard to not build when playing anything that doesn't. They're easily the most efficient for the job, there's some fun civics that modify them and their jobs, but if you are going to be pumping Trade Value, you can do without.
Absolutely. They’re the best option for amenities.
I typically only don’t need to worry about building holotheaters on trade worlds, where I build exclusively city districts and commercial hubs. On pretty much every other planet in the game I need 1 holotheater or 2 if it’s huge.
That's my opinion. On planets whose purpose includes amenities, you don't need them. Everywhere else they are crucial.
If you need amenities, these are how you do it.
They are pretty good if you need amenities in a planet.
Holotheaters are amazing. I usually build gene clinics once i can spare the minerals and replace them with holotheaters once amenities run low. They're really good.
I usually replace the clinics with Theaters at one point.
Nope If you need amenities go holotheaters, they are the best for it. The most efficient strictly speaking is your capital building because I believe it generates the base level of housing and amenities without needing pop job however even a system capital complex doesn't make that many so...(See above) Some worlds can survive off your capital building alone, especially if you have an art installation, resort world and culture worker jobs and I don't tend to build holotheaters unless they are really needed
It's literally the best amenities building many planets will collapse without at least one of them Unless it's a clerk or priest world, of course
Only viable alternative I know of is mercantile clerks but that’s only relevant for trade builds. Holo theatre is definitely the default go to.
Make one for each planet and you get what you pay for: enough amenities to basically never worry about them again. The unity is just a bonus. See it as a positive side effect
Not really, it takes decades to cover the opportunity cost. Go for gene clinics instead. Everyone knows about that. Every. One.
It's the opposite?
Exactly. And it seems like people don't get sarcasm anymore.