Better Robotics

Patches 2.2.5 and 2.2.6 have largely fixed Machine empires as far as I can tell, but there can be a larger difference in playstyle between them and Biological empires. This mod shifts robot pop production from the capital structures onto the Assembly Plants instead- with the caveat that first-tier new-colony capitals have two robot assembly jobs until you upgrade it to ensure Machine empires don’t just have a 300 mineral and 500 energy tax on every new planet due to needing to build an assembly plant and requiring 5 population to open up the slot for it.

Vanilla Values for comparison:
Both Non-Machine and Machine assembly buildings are capped at 1 per world and provide 1 of their respective job.
Roboticist (Non-Machine): +2 Growth, 10 Mineral Upkeep
Replicator (Machine): +1 Growth, 5 Mineral Upkeep

Mod Changes:
Non-Machine Assembly Plants
1 Structure Cap / Planet
2 Roboticist Jobs / Structure
1.5 Robot Production / Job
Roboticist Upkeep: 6 minerals, 2 energy
(3 max growth; equal to base Bio growth)

Machine-Empire Robot Assembly Plants
2 Structure Cap / Planet
2 Replicator Jobs / Structure
+2 Robot Production / Job
Replicator Upkeep: 6 minerals, 2 energy
Replicators no longer produce Amenities to partially compensate how much more powerful their production is.

Machine Planetary Capital Buildings (All Tiers)
Replicator jobs removed from all tiers except for the initial colony, which retains 2
Job counts / tier shuffled around (I keep tweaking this and am feeling lazy thus you don’t get exact numbers)
Do note they effectively gained housing and base amenities across the board to allow Machine empires some lee-way due to requiring one (or more) of their planet slots just to gain population growth.

As mentioned, the initial colony structure is the only one that has Replicator jobs (2 of them). Once you upgrade this to the next tier it loses those jobs. You cannot build Assembly Plants until you upgrade your capital on the planet. This is to prevent an awkward min-max that would result if it weren’t the case: that is, the maximum growth/planet would be using a colony shelter and max slots of assembly plants due to those jobs. The only purpose of those jobs on the Colony Shelter is to alloy Machine Empires to get their colonies going without shipping pop in just to build and man an assembly plant. I feel it provides an interesting trade-off while solving a couple issues.

Coordinator Jobs (Machine Empire)
3 Unity, 1 Engineering Research (Robots have a slight Engineering research advantage)

Synapse Jobs (Hive Mind)
3 Unity, 1 Society Research (Vanilla values)

You’d be surprised how many Coordinator and Synapse drones end up in your empire. Was originally 3 research, respectively, but that turned out feeling fairly overpowered. May bring it to 1.5 or 2, needs testing. Interested in feedback on this.

Telepath Jobs (Psionics)
3 Unity, 3 Physics Research (Psionic species have a slight Physics research advantage, though this likely will be significantly smaller than Hive / Machine)

Ascension Perks:
Robot Assembly Protocols (T3)
+1 Replicator job on Robot Assembly Plants
+25% Robot Production Rate
Reveals the Climate Restoration Tech

Drone Design: Material Breakthroughs (T0)
Robot Pop Upkeep: -10%
Resettlement Cost: -35%

Drone Design: Cognition Cores (T1)
Robot Pop Upkeep: -10%
Robot Pop Output: +5%
The output modifier affects everything from mineral output to research and alloy production; it’s a lot stronger than it seems. It can also be stacked with the "Efficient Processors" trait which does the same.

Universal Image (T3)
Terraforming Cost: -75%
Terraforming Speed: +300%
Intended as a 5th perk for coating the galaxy in Machine Worlds. For the empire that wants to expand and keep expanding.

All above perks are Machine-Empire only.

Planetary Expansion (T3)
Requires Mastery of Nature Perk
Provides access to the "Planetary Sculpting" planet decision

Planetary Sculpting (Decision)
Time: 540 Days
150 Influence, 7500 Energy, 15000 Minerals
Converts a planet into a size-25 world.

Starbase Module: Solar Panel
Energy Output 3 -> 4
This is because Trade exists for Non-Gestalt empires and Trade Hubs inherently produce +2 Trade Value by themselves. The effective 3-energy difference between a Trade Hub and a Solar Panel (TH has 1 upkeep) is more than compensated for by the inherent TV produced by a planet’s population (30-80 TV on a populated planet seemed fairly normal to me).

Conflicts:
Any mod that overwrites:
02_specialist_jobs
04_gestalt_jobs
01_pop_assembly_buildings

Lesser conflicts (You’ll lose a relatively small portion of the changes) with mods that overwrite:
00_capital_buildings
pop_categories: 01_gestalt_drones

The other changes done do not require overwriting the entire file and are thus largely non-conflicting aside from the obvious factor that if both mods affect the exact same module/building then whichever is loaded last will be the one that actually affects the game.