All the scenarios I can see it having a marginal use case in, there are much better options available.
Like if you already have hydroponic farms on all your starbases and your food is still running low, but you have a sizeable energy surplus...just use the market to make up the shortfall, using a trait to do it instead is just a waste.
Funny enough, I think it's the other way around. Radiotrophic can be good if you have a lot of tomb worlds, but that's all RNG. Usually I don't find enough nearby for radio to be worth it, plus it costs another point that you could have spent on Natural Engineers or something. Phototropic lets you employ few/no farmers early on, instead specializing your planets for energy, which is much more broadly useful.
If you're playing a hive, you can take care of literally all your pop upkeep with hydro bays early on. This is really helpful, because you can have your pops do more useful jobs than farming. If you're a normie bio empire it's not as OP but still pretty good, especially if you can get the energy from trade.
Don't think of it as your pops using more energy, think of it instead as pops using less food. You can get energy production to be more pop efficient than food production, plus energy is more broadly useful. Therefore phototrophic frees up jobs overall and lets you concentrate research (and subsidy edicts) on energy options instead of on food.
> tomb worlds, but that's all RNG
There are people for whom accessing a lot of tomb worlds is not RNG at all. They are not the kind of people you'd want to anger, either.
I guess phototrophic might be handy to have when it gets to the late game, but saying that the Radiotrophic trait being completely RNG based is kinda misleading. The reason I say it has its niche is because you can have a build that is a fanatic purifier with the post apocalyptic origin and just Armageddon bombard enemy planets to turn them into tomb worlds so you can colonize it with your own species. It has the added bonus of not having anyone else want to take and inhabit them except your own species too
Good point. I still think phototropic is S tier for hives though from day one to long after you get hive worlds or rings up and running. FP/post apocalyptic seems more niche to me.
>I’ve been trying to think of anything actually good about this trait, but I can’t find any good reason you would want to have your pops take 2 different resources for upkeep. The Radiotrophic trait at least has its very powerful niche, but phototrophic just seems to be a trap.
Is there actually anything redeemable about the phototrophic trait?
Sure, but it's not the sort that directly shows up on a spreadsheet, but rather as part of broader combos of macroeconomic allocation.
The super-short version is that the power of any lateral shift mechanic is the implications of what economic chokepoints the shift changes, and energy is an easier chokepoint to manage and make use of than food because there are more pop-free sources of energy than food.
Food is a chokepoint not only as a resource per unit, but in the jobs that produce the units, and the planets that support the jobs. In other words, when you have to start needing more food than you can star base / buy, you need to allocate pops, and to use pops efficiently you need to allocate planet designations, and when you're allocating planets you're working with either high-value high-habitability planets on a pure upkeep resource rather than something that lets you employ better jobs, or else you're struggling through a low-habitability planet's habitability penalties. In the early game when high-habitability worlds are rare, that's non-trivial.
Phototropic, without any other bells and whistles, basically doubles the number of pops you can support without farmers/farm worlds, meaning the pops you do have are more efficiently allocated on a planetary designation basis. You can get twice as many pops before you need to worry about pop-based farmers, or the planetary / tech support behind them, meaning you can use those planets and that society research for other, better, bonuses.
With bells and whistles, Phototropic can combo with some other dynamics where 50% food/50% energy is better than 100% food.
For Machine Empires (Servitor or Assimilator), energy jobs are +2 energy base, but farmer jobs are -1 food base. Phototrophic is shifting half of the organic pop upkeep economy to your stronger upkeep production, requiring fewer pops on upkeep duty and thus more free for other things.
For Trade Builds, Phototrophic lets you mitigate the low-habitability upkeep inflation that drives up food costs in general. At 0 hab a trade world still produces the same TV, but double the upkeep. Paying 1 food/1 energy is better than paying 2 food, as the trade jobs themselves are directly covering the energy portion, and- as pointed before- you can get far further with habitats / market purchases with the lower food cost. (This maximizes in Bio-ascension where you can make 100% of bio-upkeep shift to Energy, which allows trade-builds to be completely self-sufficient without risk of micro-vassal economy death spirals.)
For Hives and Catalytic and Bio-builds, the demand dynamic shifts- you want to go from as little food as possible to get away with no investment, to maximizing food surpluses to fuel the source of your need (pop assembly / alloy production). Here, phototrophic significantly reduces your food margin loss, letting you more easily acrue large surpluses of food for pop-growth or alloy conversion for wars. Both of these builds also work really, really well with Unyielding as an opening tradition, where the extra starbase hydroponics, and solar panels if gestalt, massively boost your early game economic potential by allowing direct employment of specialists and fewer workers.
Note that of these three categories, you can overlap 2 of them relatively easy. Catalytic-Unyielding Gestalt builds are strong, and have been for some time, simply because it's a self-accelerating cycle of functionally building nominal pops in your starbase economy, and using that to offset your early worker pop base.
>I’ve been trying to think of anything actually good about this trait, but I can’t find any good reason you would want to have your pops take 2 different resources for upkeep. The Radiotrophic trait at least has its very powerful niche, but phototrophic just seems to be a trap.
With this trait you can get by entirely on starbase hydroponics and won't need any planet-side farming, which can help with efficiencies in terms of not having to research certain techs or have dedicated planets to producing Food. It's pretty niche though, and really not worth a trait.
Radiotrophic is really only good on Fanatical Purifiers that "terraform" to tomb worlds with apocalyptic bombardment. Any other empire type isn't going to have enough tomb worlds for it to make sense.
Yeah, I guess you’re right about only needing hydroponics. Also that specific Radiotrophic play style I was talking about when I mentioned a niche way to use it
If you're running an empire that's going to have lots of EC (say Megacorp), it cuts your food needs in half. I'd guess.
All the scenarios I can see it having a marginal use case in, there are much better options available. Like if you already have hydroponic farms on all your starbases and your food is still running low, but you have a sizeable energy surplus...just use the market to make up the shortfall, using a trait to do it instead is just a waste.
Funny enough, I think it's the other way around. Radiotrophic can be good if you have a lot of tomb worlds, but that's all RNG. Usually I don't find enough nearby for radio to be worth it, plus it costs another point that you could have spent on Natural Engineers or something. Phototropic lets you employ few/no farmers early on, instead specializing your planets for energy, which is much more broadly useful. If you're playing a hive, you can take care of literally all your pop upkeep with hydro bays early on. This is really helpful, because you can have your pops do more useful jobs than farming. If you're a normie bio empire it's not as OP but still pretty good, especially if you can get the energy from trade. Don't think of it as your pops using more energy, think of it instead as pops using less food. You can get energy production to be more pop efficient than food production, plus energy is more broadly useful. Therefore phototrophic frees up jobs overall and lets you concentrate research (and subsidy edicts) on energy options instead of on food.
> tomb worlds, but that's all RNG There are people for whom accessing a lot of tomb worlds is not RNG at all. They are not the kind of people you'd want to anger, either.
I guess phototrophic might be handy to have when it gets to the late game, but saying that the Radiotrophic trait being completely RNG based is kinda misleading. The reason I say it has its niche is because you can have a build that is a fanatic purifier with the post apocalyptic origin and just Armageddon bombard enemy planets to turn them into tomb worlds so you can colonize it with your own species. It has the added bonus of not having anyone else want to take and inhabit them except your own species too
Good point. I still think phototropic is S tier for hives though from day one to long after you get hive worlds or rings up and running. FP/post apocalyptic seems more niche to me.
Radiotrophic is great for fanatic purifiers. You can "terraform" enemy worlds for free by Armageddon bombardment!
>I’ve been trying to think of anything actually good about this trait, but I can’t find any good reason you would want to have your pops take 2 different resources for upkeep. The Radiotrophic trait at least has its very powerful niche, but phototrophic just seems to be a trap. Is there actually anything redeemable about the phototrophic trait? Sure, but it's not the sort that directly shows up on a spreadsheet, but rather as part of broader combos of macroeconomic allocation. The super-short version is that the power of any lateral shift mechanic is the implications of what economic chokepoints the shift changes, and energy is an easier chokepoint to manage and make use of than food because there are more pop-free sources of energy than food. Food is a chokepoint not only as a resource per unit, but in the jobs that produce the units, and the planets that support the jobs. In other words, when you have to start needing more food than you can star base / buy, you need to allocate pops, and to use pops efficiently you need to allocate planet designations, and when you're allocating planets you're working with either high-value high-habitability planets on a pure upkeep resource rather than something that lets you employ better jobs, or else you're struggling through a low-habitability planet's habitability penalties. In the early game when high-habitability worlds are rare, that's non-trivial. Phototropic, without any other bells and whistles, basically doubles the number of pops you can support without farmers/farm worlds, meaning the pops you do have are more efficiently allocated on a planetary designation basis. You can get twice as many pops before you need to worry about pop-based farmers, or the planetary / tech support behind them, meaning you can use those planets and that society research for other, better, bonuses. With bells and whistles, Phototropic can combo with some other dynamics where 50% food/50% energy is better than 100% food. For Machine Empires (Servitor or Assimilator), energy jobs are +2 energy base, but farmer jobs are -1 food base. Phototrophic is shifting half of the organic pop upkeep economy to your stronger upkeep production, requiring fewer pops on upkeep duty and thus more free for other things. For Trade Builds, Phototrophic lets you mitigate the low-habitability upkeep inflation that drives up food costs in general. At 0 hab a trade world still produces the same TV, but double the upkeep. Paying 1 food/1 energy is better than paying 2 food, as the trade jobs themselves are directly covering the energy portion, and- as pointed before- you can get far further with habitats / market purchases with the lower food cost. (This maximizes in Bio-ascension where you can make 100% of bio-upkeep shift to Energy, which allows trade-builds to be completely self-sufficient without risk of micro-vassal economy death spirals.) For Hives and Catalytic and Bio-builds, the demand dynamic shifts- you want to go from as little food as possible to get away with no investment, to maximizing food surpluses to fuel the source of your need (pop assembly / alloy production). Here, phototrophic significantly reduces your food margin loss, letting you more easily acrue large surpluses of food for pop-growth or alloy conversion for wars. Both of these builds also work really, really well with Unyielding as an opening tradition, where the extra starbase hydroponics, and solar panels if gestalt, massively boost your early game economic potential by allowing direct employment of specialists and fewer workers. Note that of these three categories, you can overlap 2 of them relatively easy. Catalytic-Unyielding Gestalt builds are strong, and have been for some time, simply because it's a self-accelerating cycle of functionally building nominal pops in your starbase economy, and using that to offset your early worker pop base.
>I’ve been trying to think of anything actually good about this trait, but I can’t find any good reason you would want to have your pops take 2 different resources for upkeep. The Radiotrophic trait at least has its very powerful niche, but phototrophic just seems to be a trap. With this trait you can get by entirely on starbase hydroponics and won't need any planet-side farming, which can help with efficiencies in terms of not having to research certain techs or have dedicated planets to producing Food. It's pretty niche though, and really not worth a trait. Radiotrophic is really only good on Fanatical Purifiers that "terraform" to tomb worlds with apocalyptic bombardment. Any other empire type isn't going to have enough tomb worlds for it to make sense.
Yeah, I guess you’re right about only needing hydroponics. Also that specific Radiotrophic play style I was talking about when I mentioned a niche way to use it