Korath and their Pop Growth Bonus.

from GalCiv2 Forums
I have been playing the Korath a lot in this beta, and the amount of Pop Growth bonus that the Korath can accumulate early in the game may be a bit too much.

The Korath can generate a 50% increase in Pop Growth with only about 10 technologies early in the game. This bonus allow them to expand very quickly because their starter colony tax bases grows very fast. They never actually get into a money crunch. Their slave based factories are also very cheap in maintenance.

The technologies that apply:
Corrupted Genetics + 10 Moral +10 Pop Growth + 10 Loyalty - This is the cheapest tech for the Korgath and leads into

Xeno Medicine + 10 Pop Growth


Xeno Farm I+II+III - Each of these add +10 Pop Growth to the Korath. Xeno Farming 1 is important enough to research it fairly early. I find it strange that the Korath get +10 here while other races who also have Xeno Farming don't get +10 Pop Growth.

Conquest Strategies - "Recruitment Center" - Recruitment Center gives a planet 20% population growth and 10% Economy.


Together that is 50% Pop Growth. This causes planets to be a lot more self-sufficient early on then other races. A home world and/or 1 or 2 industry worlds can churn out colony ships at a rate that will dominate other races.

The Torians are supposed to be the Pop Growth race, but they get a significant production block early on by only being able to build that 1 deep core mine on each planet. Even then I do not thing they get as many Pop Growth bonuses as the Korath get, not to mention that the +10 Moral Bonus helps tremendously as well.



Korath are limited with Diplomacy throughout the game sure, but they are evil so that doesn't hamper them at all. The Influence problems in the mid game can slow them down, but the fact they usually out colonized the other races by a wide margin means they are still at least in the Top 3 in influence.



Solution ideas:

One possibility is to remove the Pop Growth bonus. Still that would be boring. I think keeping the Growth but adding either more maintenance to the slave factories, or adding a negative bonus to them that reduced Pop Growth for the Korath instead of influence or maybe both.
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Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
How much does morale suffer if you go that route at the expense of any of techs? Do you have to drop the tax rate significantly to keep them happier at that early of a stage?

And do the KoRath start with a negative pop. growth bonus like the Drath and the Thalans? That might be why they get so many bonuses.
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Korgath don't have a negative starting attribute. They also start with an innate +25 Moral Bonus so with the first tech you research, they are at +35% Moral already. Which means you can live very comfortably at 49% tax rate and still have 100% spending.

My colonies just get 2 slave factories and the recruitment center and then I just leave them there unless there are significant 300% bonus tiles.

Consider how cheap slave factories are. Traditional Factories are 3BC for 4 Industry. While Basic Slave Pit are 1BC for 3 Industry.

This adds up, maybe here is the main cause of why the Korgath never run into a major deficit, but Pop Growth factors in later. The Slave Imagination Center are also cheap. 2 BC for 4 Research Points while a Research Lab is 5 BC for 6 Research Points.


A Korgath Player has to use more tiles to end up with better bonuses early, but he is expanding fast enough that he can afford it. I think it just adds too many advantages together.
Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
It's KORATH... Not KorGath...
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
To be honest, I've played with the Korath a bit and I didn't even notice that the farms gave pop. bonuses to the Korath but that other races lacked that advantage. Netherless, it's still very rare that I will get to the farm techs before the dreaded expansion crash usually happens anyway. Without the farms, your looking at most a 10% bonus to population growth, and that's only assuming that the other races don't decide to go for their own fertility acceleration techs. What settings are you running on, I usually do large maps, maybe on gig. or immense the difference would be more pronounced maybe?


Actually, it's because of the morale boost early on that the Korath don't have as a tough time early in the game, not because of pop. growth which is nearly the same as any other race early on at least. As I said though, the morale advantage lessens as the game goes on anyway, mostly because they can't build any morale boosting trade goods except for harmony crystals and the the weakness of their morale boosting improvements.

The Korath get production for alot cheaper than almost every other race aside from the Drengin, but they get less of it and their economic buildings aren't as powerful. I consider it on of the races strengths that makes them fun to play and ties in nicely with their persona.

Than there are the definite weaknesses in the Korath tech tree. They don't have counter-espionage, their research is pretty weak, they don't have planetary defenses and they don't have full trade techs. For that matter, they can't even get full armor or point defense techs for their ships. They also can't really extract very much from resource starbases, although this might be changed I wouldn't be surprised if they were still nerfed an extraction resource tech or two.

For the most part, I think the Korath are a well balanced race and I like playing them. There are other races that are definitely harder to play than the Korath, but I would rather see the abilities of the other races brought up to the level where they are a match to the Korath rather than the Korath being nerfed to make everyone just as weak as the least playable race.

Honestly, if I wanted to play a race with pop. growth penalties I'd play the Drath. If I wanted expensive factories there are plenty of other races I would rather play instead. I like the Korath because they are badass and unique, while still being somewhat flexible.

If it is really felt that the Korath are too powerful, at least give them a different disadvantage than everyone else has. I think in their case, a trade income penalty would be the most appropiate unique penalty you could give the Korath imho.
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
First of, sorry about the name. Korgath is WoW Horde Town, which was the main hub to get into Blackrock Mountain and into the Raid Zones there. I spent a lot of time there.

Anyways, concerning the Korath.

Yes, the Korath have penalties later in the game. Most races do. Late game problems can be out weighed by early game gains. The issue here is that the Korath are so strong early on that in larger games with many worlds to colonize that they out colonize everyone so they dont have any problems in the late game, because they are the largest civ.


A pop growth penalty on the early slave pens that later gets replaced by influence would slow down the Korath.


Still, I m willing to wait balancing overall till the rest of the races get a more complete tech tree, but for right now that is my opinion on the Korath. Their early game is a LOT more powerful then races like the terrans, and early game victory means total domination in the later half of the game.