Incompetent said:
I don't think the Aquatic trait changes the calculation much on synth ascension, to be honest. By the time you're advanced enough for synth ascension, a +X% overall output bonus is worth far more than a +X% farmer/miner/technician bonus, because a) only a minority of your pops are farmers/miners/technicians and b) the proportional effect of an additional bonus is much larger on specialists than workers (certainly in the case of Metallurgists/Artisans, maybe less so for Researchers) because you have such huge bonuses to workers from other sources. Also, the Aquatic bonus doesn't apply on Habitats, where a lot of minerals end up being made at this stage of the game, and it's incompatible with the Gaia world bonus, so even in terms of worker output, most of the advantage of Aquatic over non-Aquatic is conditional. Aquatic is even less impactful on psi-ascended empires, because if you're not bio-ascended you can't give it to xenos, and chances are, xenos will be doing most of the menial labour. The great thing about the synth bonuses is that every synth benefits (except trade/amenities jobs) regardless of job or environment, and you can make everyone a synth.
The one significant bio trait that can't be mimicked by synths is Thrifty, but there are ways to manoeuvre Thrifty bio pops into Merchant jobs, even as a full synth empire (as Merchants, their lack of genetic optimization beyond Thrifty doesn't really matter), and for everyone except Merchants, the trait doesn't really matter (either because the job doesn't make trade or the job isn't worth filling).
1. Your bio Ascended chattel slaves will get the Aquatic, Fertile, Communal, Nerve Stapled, and your choice of food, energy, or mineral output production bonuses. They also get the chattel slavery bonus. Each of your bio worker pops is more efficient per pop than robo pops in terms of pure raw resource output in addition to being nearly twice as space efficient in most situations. Sure, a might only have 25% of my pops working worker jobs, but at this stage of the game we're talking about a minimum of about 75 pops with an upper limit (depending how raid heavy a player decided to get) of around 300ish worker pops (out of about 1200 total in perhaps 2260, an example from one of my playthroughs where I deliberately tried to reach that upper limit). Just assuming the lower end with 75 pops, all working tech jobs, let's say, which are producing (we'll go conservative) say 10 energy credits apiece base. Your 10% more efficient pops produce an additional 75 credits of value per month. This might not seem like a lot, but it's the upkeep cost of 2 fleets, or an additional pop every 6 months from the slave market, or about 10 alloys worth of production value (as market prices have usually crept upwards by this point). This all breaks down to about 5 pops worth of production value at base market values allowing those pops to work other jobs. Which won't quite match the 25% specialist output from robo pops, but it makes the difference mostly negligible and this is without considering that the Bio empire should theoretically have acquired more pops in total in that same time frame.
2. You aren't making habs any more post patch 3.2 unless you're a Void Dweller empire if your playing for competitive optimization. Aquatic is simply so much better, terraforming to ocean worlds is trivially simple. If you're relying on habs for mineral production in 2250 or 2260 you're playing a horribly inefficient style (again, unless you're Void Dweller). It is NOT worth the 1500 alloy 150 influence cost to make a damn mineral mining station. Just period. That's never optimal. Hell, pre patch 3.0 you didn't do this if you were trying to play competitively optimal. This has never been done. Habs get build over research deposits and nothing else, ever, if you're playing for competitive optimization (again, exception for Void Dweller only). You should be getting more than enough base resources from your planets and space mining that your ONLY hab resource expenditures should be for Research habs.
3. Aquatic bonuses to production are better than Gaia bonuses, and significantly more so. Again, you're missing out on a small amount of specialist output production, but the increased production efficiency of all the other jobs allows those works to migrate into additional specialist positions for a net gain to those outputs as well.
4. As long as Merchants are this strong, not having access to the Thrifty trait is a MASSIVE disadvantage in the current game state.
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