Hey, sorry for not responding. I missed the notification on this thread for some reason. I thought lithovore is pretty balanced, and I haven't heard many other complaints for others. It is really good though, which is why it's 20 points. Do you think it should be nerfed a bit?

No problem, i thought you test stuff :P

From what i experienced the last games, it is ridiculous OP in early game. Even without the +20 perk points we use, those go in "i feel good" perks.
I dont see any way to keep up properly with that. Somewhere around the doomstar tech the game turns (/can turn). If you reach that....

You just need +50% growth, +50% production, ultra rich homeworld, volcanic+inferno and you are too fast. Overcompensates all negative perks.

We tried an unexpected 2 man rush on that. No way.... 1v2 easy win.

So... One possibility is: Even after i tried to optimize my game with other playstyles i suck. Second one: It is too strong :D

I did quite a bit of testing with lithovore when I set the growth rates, but I admit that I didn't test them with +50% growth much. I was more focused on getting -25% growth and +0% growth to be balanced for the sake of the Silicoids keeping up and having a balanced base line growth.

Perhaps the growth bonus is too strong on rich and ultra rich worlds. Or maybe ultra rich home world is too cheap.

Have you played with lithovore much since patch 55.1? They changed the population growth formula, and the result is that +50% growth is nerfed now (that trait alone was OP before). If not, maybe it was just the 50% growth that was the culprit.

I didnt play 5X before 55.1.1

Lithovore is strong on so many aspects.
You get the ignore pollution trait for free. If you want to see it that way, no food is only 15 points.
ALL your planets are useful. Bad biomes cause more growth which leads to good biomes pretty fast, good biomes means all of your population can do something useful. When you need food, bad biomes take a long time to start doing anything, good biomes still need people to keep everyone alive. This causes - in research to be as fast as ++ for others.
Gravity is no problem. My giant ultra rich planets have -50%? Well... idc, my population will grow as fast.
The combination of ultra rich, +50% growth and volcanic normal sized gives you 1 new population, which means new colonyship, every 4-5 rounds, from the beginning. (Very fast on all options, i dont like analyzing that on slow :D) Feels like you can have 5 planets when the others start building ships. Oh and you dont need the colonybase to keep your population alive and useful....

I see only one disadvantage: you are always low on credits. Where low doesnt mean it slows you down effectively. One planet producing credits is usually enough, if anomalys are that rare...

Okay I will take a close look at the balance then. Currently I have ultra rich planets growing at just over double the rate of abundant planets for lithovore, which is probably too much seeing as that gives you 4 times the growth when coupled with +50% growth. The Silicoid AI will probably fall behind a bit if I nerf that growth rate, but I suppose it's more important to keep the player's growth in check than to worry about balancing a bad AI.

You could fix that by cheating them a hidden trait, that has for example +75% growth
Add me when you want a detailed discussion about the balancing :)