Synthetic play - question

 Without going into to much detail, some quick tricks are.
 
 -Focus on nothing but factories on your homeworld at the start.
 -Build a cheap colony ship that you can use as a pop transport from your higher production planets that can build pop faster to the newer or less manufacturing based planets.
-New colony's, no matter what you want to do with it later build factories at the start until it gets more pop or has stabilized.
-Dont neglect the Power matrix improvement, it can give +2 manufacturing to near by factories.
-Dont be fearful of sending out a colony with even as low as .5 pop early on. that way you can keep the home world production high and just transport more pop over to them later.

-If your going evil then focus on the line that gives +production bonuses to all planets first. Tho you dont HAVE to do it, it can be a nice boost.
-and if you really want it easier, get the prolific ability that doubles the pop of all new planets you colonize

The yor, or synthetic in general are slow to start but then become a powerhouse and can rocket ahead really fast. Once you get max pop on each planet the raw production can be huge compared to other races.

You got right. I try now game and use advice from you and on begining it's slooow like hell but later... explode production.

Im glad i could help Good luck and have fun!

when i play i immidietly grab the second planet in system get 2x factorys up on both and then spam assembly project on both

both worlds are set to 100% manufacturing and 50/50 social/military i can usually push out a colony ship every 2 -3 turns with 3 pop each

the prolific trait means that those ships are doubled to 6 pop when they land and thats usually more then enough pop to survive until you start meeting some races 

A general synthetic vs biological question

Comparison

ability                           synthetic                biological
pop. growth(max)          2.0/turn                  0.3
automatic growth             no                        yes

So as synthetic you can chunk out people almost 7 times
faster than any biological species.
For what would you need this amount of people?

1) Income [Wealth, Manufacture, Research]

The formula for total production is
tp = 2*p^0.7.  With p being the population count in
Billions.

After 25 Billions you get to the point of deminishing returns.
If you get to 31 Billion you only get 2 points in total production.
Considering falling happiness its not really worth going beyond
25 BP.

2) Population growth

here comes the population growth. With biological species you
would need 22/0.3 = 73 Turns to get 25 Billion people (BP) .
I assume you had 3 BP with you colony ship.

With synthetic about 19/2 = 10 Turns. Considering you've got
6 BP on your colony ship.

3) Invading planets

Invading planets sucessfully is very easy in GC 3.
In fact with max. 3 BP of invaders you can take over pretty much
every planet even considering the highest amount of planetary defenses.

In GC 2 you needed twice the amount of invaders compared to
planet population. For a 16 BP world 32 BP of invaders would be
needed. With biospecies 32/0.3 106 Turn for 1 planet are needed.
Or even 10 Turns for 10 Planets.
Witch synthetic, and 10 planets you can get the number in 2 turns.

4) Major drawbacks

Manually increasing population
and distributing them to other colonies

Manually increasing population: What is almost automatically done with
biological species (you only need 1 Fertiliy booster building on
each planet) is very tiresome with synthetic beings.

distributing them to other colonies

This is the major problem in my opinion.
It is very time consuming.

considering manufacturing ability.Only few planets are able to generate
population in reasonalbly fast rates.

The amount of work, transport ships, ...  scales with amount of planets.
What is manageble with 5 Planets on small map will be overwelming considering
you have 50+ planets.

Conclusion: Stardock needs to implement a autogenerate + distribution funcionallity,
To lower micromanagemt an a large scale.

throu buildings. Like linking planets to starbases you need to link planets

to planets and set population transfer rates.

Or even transport routes much like trade routes.

At least thats my opinion. I don't play with synthetic on maps bigger than small.
Due to the fast increasing amount of micromanagement involved with synthetic beings.

I personally like the extra micro, keeps me engaged . Tho i guess a solution would be have the Assemble take a fixed amount of turns, and then the Fast Assemble etc just decrease the base Value. That way they could easily balance the rate of pop growth compared to other races but still give them there inorganic edge.

Afaik synthetic can grow at 6/turn, not just 2.  The advanced assembly techs are mid-late game, but they are very very fast.  

Assembly starts at 2 for approx. 150 manufacture cost, then you can research +4,+6,+8 in each of the three ages, the cost grows by approx 50% for each tier so it becomes cheaper per population.

Also birthing subsidies project, I don't know if it is intended or working as expected but you get a 10% bonus for every approx. 10 social manufacturing.  So for each 100 manufacturing birthing subsidies gives 0.1 faster growth as I haven't found anything that gives base growth.  So I have had over 0.5 population growth per turn.

Yor grows population ridiculously fast with decent production.  Hard to measure opportunity cost comparing growth to production but I believe Yor comes out ahead in terms of growth and production per turn.  A small investment in manufacturing gives large production/population return.

I would have to disagree about the transportation mechanic other then the initial colony ive never used a transport to move people 

the first things i build are 2 factories after that if the approval is high enough to support more population it only takes about 1-2 turns

if i had some weird mechanic like -95% to production You could always rush buy

I don't even build 2 factories. One is sufficient with everything towards manufacturing. Once you produce an Assembly another is a mere 3 to 6 turns. And that with me only sending 2 pop over. Way beyond what those silly meatba-er organics can do. And I rush buy the factory.

Synthetic races should automatically build transports and colony ships with the population already in them.  It would take the same amount of time as building them both manually but it would cut down on the micromanagement.

I really dislike the current way that birthing subsidies works.  Compare the cost to assembly, its horrific.  

Assembly: 2 pop for 121 MP.  1 pop for 60.5 MP.  .1 pop for 6 MP

Birthing subsidies:  10 MP per 10% boost to growth rate.  Base growth rate is .10.  A 10% boost to .10 is .01.  So you're paying 10 MP for .01 pop.  100 MP for .1 pop.  1000 MP for 1 pop.  2000 MP for 2 pop.

Birthing subsidies are horribly horribly expensive and an inefficient use of points.  You're better off doing almost anything else, though I will admit that I frequently use .01 manufacturing for the initial 10%.  

While I agree it maybe should be looked at, I think people forget it is a race ability. And it kinda should be stronger then most races by default. Otherwise what's the point of the ability