Hive immunity to negative efficiency

[Slim-Neo]

In the readme, in the 2.0 section of the patch, it says "The Hive now has the "Immunity, EFFIC" ability; Hive never receives negative EFFICIENCY penalties."

But I'm playing Hive and I can't get positive efficiency from trying Knowledge in Social Engineering. Is this supposed to happen, is it like cancelling out both positive and negative effects to keep game balance, or is it just a bug?

[Nakar Gabab]

I haven't gone to test it, but I think the Hive is immune to efficiency changes altogether. Anyone know for sure? Try running Green and putting in Creches, and check that.

[Deimos]

Slim-Neo,

I once noticed the same thing that you did: expecting Knowledge to kick my efficiency to +1. I went and played with the SE settings in the late game and figured out what was going on.

The Immunity faction attribute is just that: you are immune to the effects of a negative efficiency rating. It does not mean that your ACTUAL efficiency is equal to 0. So running PS/Planed as Yang, you will have an actual efficiency rating of -4, but the game displays this as a 0, and it calculates b-drones and energy loss as 0.

I believe that the way the developers coded the efficiency functios was:

Actual Efficiency = Faction Base Efficiency +/- SE settings
If Actual Efficiency < 0 and Immune,Effic = True Then
Effective Efficiency = 0
Else
Effective Efficiency = Actual Efficiency
End If

At least that's the way it appears to operate. You can check yourself by setting all you SE settings to the initial setting. Then add in all the settings you can that have an efficiency increase. Your efficiency will go up. Then add PS and you'll see your eff. drop by 2, as it should.

[vitamin j]

For all the simpletons out there, like me, Yang will never have a negative efficiency rating, but planned and police state will counteract any positives he might get. For example, police state/green/knowledge still only gets him +1 efficiency, since the -2 from police state counters the +2 from green. I think that's it anyway...

[Sikander]

Another interesting thing that I discovered is that no faction (AFAIK) suffers from bureaucracy drones at anything worse than 0 efficiency (ie a similar effect for B drones for all factions). This has been very well tested by me with several factions, though I can't remember what happened when I tried Lal (who has a -1 effic. to start). Of course you still suffer from the other effects of negative efficiency.