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The thing I like about synthetic is that it converts all the diverse bio pops into one.

You need Integrated Cybernetics for the Flesh is Weak, not Neuro-Quantum Links. Neuro-Quantum Links is the tech you get for Cybernetically ascended.

16:20 I just want to note that in the Expansion tradition tree there is an additional +10% assembly speed allowing to get as high as 18.97 assembly per month.

Montu Plays: Is synthetic ascension nerfed? Also Montu Plays: Well yes, but actually no.

Vtuber montu

I noticed that in most of my beta games the AI really favors synthetic and cybernetic ascension. I was the only genetically ascended empire in the game most times.

One nice side effect from synthetic ascension is just the insane faction attraction it gives. And since this build is materialist and uses faction unity that just helps our unity even more.

Happy to see new/reworked Ascension Paths, hopefully a portent of more to come. I always feel pigeon-holed into Psionics because I don't like Synthetic Ascension thematically, still think Cybernetic is cool so happy to have that split off, but I'm worried it will tend toward the same micro issue as Bio ascension. Speaking of: Bio Ascension is always so much micro in order to not feel wasted it's unfun. So I guess I just really hope we can get some more organic ascensions that don't focus on pop-modding.

I love that they reworked the mechanist origin

I think this should the case for the Machine Empires. Synthetic is my favourite. Thanks for the summary.

Okay, it might just take some time to get used to, but right now I find the moving animated head to be VERY distracting.

Thanks for the video Montu, the new Tradition trees really looks nice. I'm still annoyed by the micromanagment with making colony ships to keep some organic species. It would make sense to have something like "Voluntary Assimilation", where only the Materialists pops will choose to become machines (with maybe a "Forced assimilation" if we want full robots).

Ascending into beings of energy/raw consciousness/fully digital without physicality would be cool later on. The latter two would probably be similar to gestalts only in that it’s hard to use these new ‘pops’ outside of dedicated empires that can accommodate them (ex. Mainframes to support the digital pops to ‘live in’

Really looking forward to your video on Cybernetic ascension. Enjoyed this video :)

*11:54* It is actually pretty nice to see that the Devs didn't exclusively slap Pop Growth/Assembly Bonuses on this patch. The 50% Ecu bonus was quite a lot I suppose.

Thanks for the continues updates on the open beta, really looking forward to the reworked ships videos now that we don't have our usual Neutron Launchers in the L-slots but in the G-slot instead.

I remember the patch notes saying that Ecumenopolis would also give +25% pop assembly speed. But I wasn’t seeing that bonus for robot assembly. Does that only apply to biological pop assembly?

Finally Machine Empire enjoyers like me, who don't have all the DLC yet, will have another actually useful Ascension perk to take. I haven't checked the combat rework yet, but this update seems to keep getting better and better.

Did you check to see if a ringworld's new pop assembly bonus affects mechanical pop assembly? I'm sure you could push it to around 14 with a fully ascended ring world with the basic ringworld designation. 16 if you stack the ascension affect boosting civic, perk and tradition finisher. For a regular empire that synthetically ascends.

Montu could you make a genetics ascension guide? I want to see this crazy pop-assembly you discussed.

Really excited about this. And especially excited for more Timelines stuff.

I’ve been under a rock recently, but has 3.6 done that thing where galaxies can become standard for mods? Like, they could spawn a galaxy then edit the different systems through their normal way, then save that galaxy into the mod

would be good to see a comparison video of the ascensions in 3.6

Hopefully you'll do a similar deep dive for the cybernetic ascension path. If so, a couple questions: 1. If you start with overtuned origin and take cybernetic ascension, does that mean you can take three copies of any given trait? 2. It's a long shot, but does radiotrophic negate cybernetic trait energy upkeep?

thank you montu-sensei)

What was your first tradition slot? Your second was discovery and third supremecy. I was told to do discovery first but if there's a better option I'd love to know.

Also machines can get something crazy like 19 pop assembly on capital. It's really insane.

I'd say synthetic ascension has had a sideways balance change. Whether it's stronger or weaker really depends on how you used it before, and now, but it's still comparably powerful.

We need perk or edict that will give % chance that bio pops will go to positions where they should be. Call it Meritocracy edict or self realization edict. Pops with miner treat will go mining, pops with intelligent will be scientist etc.

I really like the little new avatar in the corner.

I have to say, while I liked the overall changes to the traditions, I was extremelly bummed when after Psi ascending and doing the long ass research project for the covenant, I actually had no choice of taking it because you can fail contacting the darn thing anyway!

This is close to my favourite build I have been testing it too. I like the changes. A slight nerf indeed. You do get the food to energy building after going synth. However you still get all the food techs and organic techs. Not sure that is good as they take slots. The 15% mech growth remains after going synth so mechanist now offers long term benefit. And finally migration pacts give organic growth on your planets as well which some may like but I did not, as well as refugees.

That staggering machine empire pop assembly speed tho

As someone who mains machine empires I’m really happy to see this and I can’t wait to micro manage to 5 different pop templates to make up for not having crazy all rounder pops

One of the reasons I hate multispecies empires is all the microing needed for pop management. Sure sure, being galactic imperium is great and all but having seventeen different slave species you need to keep modding and resettling to maximize their output is so annoying.

Montu, are you planning to make one for 3.6 bio ascension?

Can you please increase in size that moving head thingy, I still can see other stuff

Vtuber Montu is in full effect

Don’t forget that machine empires can also benefit from organic growth, particularly rogue servitors. Their organic growth rate is halved and non-assimilators will be limited to biotrophies or grid amalgamation, but those can still add a lot of value to your economy.

Part of me wishes you could snag the machine empire civics once you ascended, or at least ones that make sense for a synth empire to have like rapid replicators

Montu, id really like to play as a meta MegaCorp. But I'm relatively new to Stellaris and I can't figure a build. Could you make a video about one?

So basically synthetic ascension is the Necron RP path

Psychic ascension definitely has gotten stronger.

Interesting. I've never really found a good path to play as the borg, or borg type of civilization, without starting off as a robot. Cool stuff.

I love the new little talking avatar.

Just go relic world origin, technocracy civic in addition to slaver guilds. Synthetic ascend, around 44 and have an operational ecu by 2255. Around 2k tech depends how you focus you production. Academic privilege also helps with tech. Also mega ship yard and then interstellar assembly are of most importance.

What is that new mechanical trait with the chart-going-up icon? I can't seem to find its description anywhere.

Cool, so we will now have Mechanist to speed run Cybernetic or Synthetic, as well as Robot Species to Speedrun Synthetic, Cool! This means that with the new Overtuned and the Teachers of the Shroud, we have all the bases covered for speedy species ascension. It also makes sense that the Mechanists would be the bio pops that would make that choice. I like this a lot!

I've been debating what other kind of ascension perks could possibly be added, short of some kind of nanite or viral one the best thought I've come up with is energy beings. Something like Stargate. So like what synthetics is to cybernetics, this would be it to psyonics. Instead of a psychic trait, they'd get the Healer trait increasing planetary pop and leader life expectancy exponentially (maybe 20 or 40 first the first perk) as well as reducing pop upkeep. Then, later on once your species starts to ascend properly into energy beings they effectively become immortal and increase pop happiness. From there one of two things could happen; First, was thinking we do something like the End of the Cycle where a little count down timer sort of pops up and any Crisis Empire or Fanatic Purifier Species, as well as any player looking to win the game, has to wipe enough of your species out or conquer them maybe, before enough of you can ascend and take over this mortal plane as the true guardians of galaxy or whatever it is such energy beings would do. After all, can't properly purify a galaxy if a good chunk just f off to the next plane of existence can ya? Alternatively, they just become super pops with zero upkeep. Was thinking Paladins/Immortals for an army unit that are effectively immortal or maybe they just have a much higher chance of retreating instead of dying. Depending on how they do Cybernetics and Synthetics, this could be tied to spirituality as well or alternatively pacifist to better reflect it's origin in Stargate.

Amazing - can't wait to play my beloved robots again :)

The animated montu scares me

I'm pretty sure Robotic Assembly Plants weren't restricted to synth empires before this. I've always started out as an organic empire and had access to them as soon as I researched robotics.

Devs changed the tradition a lot in today's dev note. Synthetic Evolution special project now converts all non-robotic, non-livestock pops that are not being purged to synths. Synthetic Evolution AP now requires Synthetic Workers instead of Droid Workers, in turn it grants Synthetic Personality Matrix as a research option.

Glad machine intelligences got some love.

I don't think there's any other KZfaqr from whom I look forward to hearing the reminder to like the video

Sounds OK to me, I'm happy when more options are worthwhile to use.

I don't quite understand how the colony ship trick works. Do the colony ships have to be under construction at the same time that the synthetic Ascension project finishes or can they be finished before synthetic Ascension is complete? I have long thought that synthetic Ascension should allow for specific populations to ascend synthetically like what can be done with Gene modification since it can be applied on either a species wide or planet-wide scale. Why doesn't synthetic get the same treatment? As always excellent work thanks for keeping me updated!

do i need dlc to use ascension perks or no because i cant for the life of me get any of these perks

I am trying to understand. With a bio ascending into synthetics, we could before assimilate other bios but not robots. Can we now assimilate robots as well? Or only if I go as a machine intelligence going synthetics? And can a machine intelligence assimilate bios as synthetics then?

Wow i've literally never made an ecumenopolis and they got nerfed into the ground before I get the chance lol

Is now possible to have clones with cybernetic?

As for me, the idea of a gradual transformation - first into cyborgs, and then - if desired - into synthetics - was more interesting than what they have done now. This was a logical development of civilization - first - a partial replacement of organic parts with cybernetic ones, and only then - a complete replacement - that is, a transformation into synthetics.

Me and a buddy were playing a game recently where all but 6 empires went synthetic. It was kinda weird

As a very small vtuber with 20 followers who occasionally streams Stellaris I might be biased, but I’m really loving vtuber montu

I like your video, but would it be possible to make the talking head a bit smaller in the corner?

One word: DamnedovertunedPreplanfertilecommunalpheromonClonespawningpermutationpooledHivemind I´m at ~25 combined Popgrowth and NaturalNeuralNetwork can be slapped on when i run out of planets to assimilate

Tbh, I always wanted to have an option with this ascension. What if I don't want to forcibly "necrontyr" my entire population? What if I want to RP only dying or willing ones being uploaded ie get bonus pop assembly without full shift, but also without antagonizing spiritualists? What if I want to make a copy of every living one and not just once, but twice or whatever amount of times I want, which would be hard to balance, but might be done in a way similar to clone army by unlocking more robot factories and making whole project much more expensive in science?

Will we ever get a Machine Empire "ascending" into Organics?

The Montu PNG is...a bit distracting? Maybe turn down the movement on the body? Otherwise, great video.

Does the species on the colony ship and on colonizing planets stay the biological species now or does it still get ascendet?

Montu has gone full Png tuber... May the shroud help us.

Why is a lizard talking to me about Stellaris lmao

A migration pact?! What kind of monster are you? What’s next, holding hands?

Can you still get synthetics normally like before I have an empire I like to have cyber bio pops and producing synths

I see you have ascended to having a moving model

Only the output of leaders and speacialists ist neved, because of the governour trait +5% to worker output.

Relatively new to Stellaris but playing on Beta branch. Not sure if it was always this way or was a patch result, but the AI seem to all be going for synethic ascenion. Like...almost all of them. If the game goes too much longer it will be nothing but robots left in the galaxy, battling each other for supremacy over resources to create more robots...

Oh, so we have Montuber now?

sounds good. earlier adoption makes it interesting how empires diversify, not being an all-in-one solution removes the "must-go" meta game

i like this so much more

Animated Montu!

When you take synthetic ascension as a spiritualist empire... From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. But for real machine cult civic when? And if we get one will it make materialist more spiritualist or will it make spiritualist more materialist?

If there was any nerf i didn't see it's effect since I was able to fight my overload and his 22 allies twice, winning both time

I just tried a game today using this origin but the Synthetic ascension didnt use Droids as the requirement. It required Synthetics. And unlike what this video showed, Mechanist did NOT grant me it immediately as a research option. By 2260 i had the ability to psionically ascend, genetically ascend, and cyberneticaly ascend but was waiting to roll synthetics in order to synthetic ascend. I had banked so much unity i could do it outright, except the synthetic personality matrix tech is locked until rolling this. As a result, I waited forever for this path. Also, all my colony ships with the origin Species were converted, as were all my empire species, not just primary. Perhaps the devs are hot fixing this after you put it out but my trial today was significantly behind.

Hey montu, did you know the overtuned traits don't conflict with any regular genetic traits or with any of each other? So you can stack both pop growth traits on with rapid breeders to start the game with plus 50 percent growth speed. With tech, expansion tradition, and damn the consequences your first colony can have a hundred percent bonus pop growth. Also you can remove overtuned traits at any time you don't need to wait for the tech that lets you remove positive traits, so you can respect those rapid breeders pops into specialized workers at any point you want. Also it seems like leaders pull their genetic traits from a randomly chosen template, so as long as you don't stack two of the -30 year leader penalties on all your pops your leaders should still live until they're at least 90 or a hundred years old. You can even make a few pops with the extra leader life span traits to increase the odds of getting a few long lasting leaders. Some fun stuff you can do if you're willing to damn the consequences: 80 percent habitability on all planets before tech increases. 70 percent bonus science, 85 for one type 55 percent bonus worker output: you'll need genetic ascension to get that one though

Here I am taking almost 100 years to Synthetically Ascend and my ruler dying. Montu: You can do this in the first 30 years.

I transferred my consciousness to the like button

seems very nice to have the opotion to choose between cybernetic and pure robots without modding, altough stellaris evolved does it better in my opinion with situations and more choices

Very interesting. I just have a personal preference for gene-modding.

Why am I always in the middle of a game when these patches come out?

Wasn't it changed, so it now requires the Synthetics technology to unlock? And then it locks Synthetic Leaders technology, which you need to research to get the species modification tradition perk. So yeah, it was nerfed, you need to go for Synthetics technology, which is very late.

Can we take both cybernetic and synthetic ascentions?, or are they already mutually exclusive. I liked the idea of ​​a civilization that was putting on more and more robotic parts until they were robots themselves, now it's a bit untimely.

Hold up is synthetics locked behind an ascension perk now? Or can we still find it naturally? I don't want my favourite RP empire to be ruined 😬

Honestly not too bothered by the 'nerf', I liked synthetic ascention a lot before but with cybernetic ascention becoming a thing, I feel like I'll enjoy that so much more. I already enjoy machine intelligence the most in terms of gameplay so it's ok :)

Can you ascend robots? Can you merge robots with your organic origined synthetics?

The robot assembly is so slow I fell asleep watching the video

They need to now allow for an extra tradition slot, since all these ascensions also take up a tradition slot. It would be hilarious if you ascend and not take the tradition itself.

I Still love my, lithoid venerable necrophages. 300 years each leader. While oy peasants had to replace your leaders atleast 5 times, i still have my level 10 scientist at the age of 280.

I still don't like how every single pop in your empire becomes synthetic, or how it happens all at once. You would think that some people would decide not to get roboticized, and that it would be a little more gradual. I also don't like that the Synthetics technology is locked behind the ascension perk -- it limits roleplaying for empires that want sentient AI, but not necessarily to roboticize themselves. I guess you could do the tradition and not the special project, but it's just a little weird and probably underpowered with the new meta.