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- Robots grow at a rate of 2.0/month and take 100 growth, giving you a new pop every 50 months. Meanwhile, in 2.1, Robots needed 30 months to grow. Machine Empires have two techs to reduce Assembly Speed, but Synthetic/normal empires don't have access to them, and they still don't get close to 2.1 speeds (and given how cripplingly slow the early game is, it hardly matters).
- In addition, Robots cost about 5x as much as in 2.1, though overall most things cost about 3x as much so it's not as massive a nerf as it sounds (just a major one). The more crippling nerf is to the energy upkeep.
- Furthermore, producing robots takes full-time dedicated pop jobs.
- For some reason, the ME replicator job is even twice as slow at producing robots than the normal empire one, though you can have 2 of them. In other words, you can build at the same rate by occupying twice as many of yours pops
- Colonizing with droids is no longer possible
- Droids and Synths are gone, incidentally (though for some reason this was left out of the patch notes); the upgrades just give you a flat bonus and no easy way to see how advanced any given pop is. Default Droid in 2.1 produces +15% minerals. 2.2 Droid produces no additional minerals Default Synthetic in 2.1 received +20% to all productions including research and unity. Default Synthetic in 2.2 gets a +10% robotic pop modifier. At this point, Synth Ascension is a waste of two Ascension perks.
- Finally, the process by which pops are automatically assigned to the best job for them? Doesn't work for robot pops.
To summarize, 2.2 nerfs upkeep, cost, build time, and utility of robots into the ground, and makes Mechanist, ME, and Synthetic Ascension playstyles essentially unplayable.
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