Should harmonized Orthin really have 0.25 research?

Other races seem to maintain their affinity when harmonized e.g.: harmonized Haduir still produce 1.5 Coin
Now I understand that according to lore, harmonized races are not creative and thus suffer major penalty when it comes to research yield of pops, but there is little reason to Harmonie Orthin this way outside of less food consumption and moral reasons.

So how about this: instead of reducing Orthin pop research yield from 1 to 0.25, have them reduced to 0.5
This is till in line with the lore, give a big boost for harmonization consideration and makes them unique even afterwords which is always a good thing to have for colonization population consideration

I think that the argument against is that the Tinkers are loosely based on the Borg (Star Trek), where individuality is minimized. Part of the individual consciousness is supplanted by the communal voice. This is why removing that voice (no machine altars) puts the tinkers in disarray.

You could try the change in your own game. Go to the folder Lua State, then @Technology. copy the file RACES.lua to the MODS folder in the game's root folder. (You can re-create the directory tree, but I don't think this is required. I think finding a second copy of a lua file anywhere will overwrite the previous copy in memory. If you are hacking multiple files, though, definitely copy the Lua State directory structure for ease of use.)

The harmonization overrides are a single block:
You would want something like this, but this code does not work. If someone is better at Lua, a quick way to make this work would be appreciated.

akkamaddi wrote: You could try the change in your own game.

Thanks for the info, I am sure a couple of people will play around with this but I will leave as is as it would not canon

I generally do not shy away from modding if it makes the game more difficult, but this would benefit the player (the AI does not seem to harmonize yet) so I would prefer the DEVs reconsidering - I might also be wrong in my argument and might simply be missing some other aspect that makes this reduced research value logical - the way I see it right now there is just too much sacrificed not much gained here for this race especially when compared to others

I understand your point.

From my point of view, the Tinkers are not particularly creative. Like the Borg, they assimilate, not create. The Orthin get "intellectually homogenized", so for them it is a loss. As for what you still have, the Orthin are the only race that do well in Vent environments. When you get some Orthin in your empire, you really should spread them out and drop one on every Garden and Paradise world you have. Of course, Tinkers prefer Hive worlds, but Orthin and Phidi mix well in Ocean, Island, and Coral worlds. They can also take any Iceballs that don't have enough atmosphere to become Hives.

Yes exactly, there is room for the level of homogenization

For example, all other races that are harmonized, get 0.5 research per pop whereas Tinkers have 0
So clearly harmonized pops have a different yield for resources for some reason not stopping at research and that reason is probably this: to make them interesting to manage (fun) and make harmonization worthwhile.

The question why exactly is the research bonus nullified when compared to other races where other production values are not?
The answer with the Borg like behaviour makes sense if all harmonized races would get the same value as the Tinkers get so: 0
If there is room for the harmonized races to have higher research yield, can1t this be higher for this particular race seeing that this is their unique attribute even if not so high as before?

You've made a good point.

I think to find your answer, we have to go in a different direction of the game lore. After the Machine God Dzibix allowed everything to be, It created two minions to handle the busy work of further creation, Sven and Arioch.



There are three ways to handle the harmonized sub-type. The easiest way is a single overlay of "convert these stats to these numbers". This is what the Minions of Dzibix did, and given all the new game mechanics they were dealing with creating, I can completely understand why.

The most complicated way would be one overly per species, which can get rather complicated, and possibly be difficult in that the "harmonized" is treated as an add-on to the base race, like "slave" or "unhappy" or "refugee". Even so, these other add-on templates do tend to reset different production values to zero in a single table.

A compromise here would be adding a few if/else clauses, so some races would have advantages if harmonized over others. To your point, the Orthin may be somewhat crippled as workers in exchange for augmenting their brains, effectively making them mobile computers. They would even be water-cooled computers. Assuming Lua would let this work, of course.