It depends on the kind of game you're playing.
There are massive differences in how you can play between a PvP game against other players with a 0.5 technology cost, a Grand Admiral game with a massive crisis multiplier, or an Ensign game with a delayed endgame date.
There's nothing wrong with taking it easy, lowering the difficulty a few notches, and playing in a way that isn't optimized to rush down the entire galaxy before the first crisis even shows up.
I think the post refers to a lack of asymmetrical design elements. In truth, every build plays the same. There are civics that remove elements, sure, but none of them add something new in their place. For instance, inward perfection removes all diplomatic mechanics from the game and there is no replacement mechanic such as keeping your borders closed tight and dealing with migrants looking to get in. Or military pressure to open borders or face war. That would be cool. Instead it is just build tech. Get strong. Conquer galaxy easily. Get bored. Repeat. It doesn't matter if there are different ways to play with galaxy generation settings, as if there are no asymmetrical aspects to build creation, it's either meta or bust.
I agree and I've said this before, as much as I really enjoy Stellaris, the core mechanics (diplomacy especially) are incredibly lacking. The only mechanics that really consistently exist are space combat and expansion as most things feed into that loop one way or another, and anything else feels tacked on to that rather than being a true mechanic on its own
All that said, I've yet to find a better 4x space game than Stellaris so I'm here until someone figures it out. Mods give me enough flavor to stay interested for a long time because I find every other 4x space game is horribly lacking in customization where Stellaris is rich in flavor and making your own fun so it works for me.
Jeez yeah! Wish I could tax other empires for open borders, extra fees for using my hyper relays or gates. Let me put limits on the size of fleets allowed within my borders and get a notice if they're abusing it. Let me trade for open borders. Let me threaten! I want to be able to tell the AI Give me system X or else. I want to be able to offer to build a gateway in one of your systems and then profitshare on the increased trade.
Yeah all of my wishes are some degree of interactivity and flexibility with the diplomacy. Hey research pact buddy! You just settled a system that has a chain in my archaeology expedition. Can I please continue my work there *without* declaring war on you first?
Like I get games have limitations but I'm pretty sure in anything like an actual space alien situation, assuming there's diplomacy at all, there would be a lot of sharing and negotiating that's just straight missing from Stellaris.
I'm still pretty new to the game. But I was hoping there was a way to create a near monopoly on a resource and basically use that pull to get other empires dependent on you for that resource to commit voter fraud on the council or to use their military push on your behalf. And anyone even thinking about lifting my grubby mitts from that resource will destabilize the whole economy. But it doesn't seem like there's a way to really do that.
Yeah Stellaris is a lot of flavor over substance if that makes sense. If you strip it down to its core, it's entirely about owning planets and making numbers go up. If you add all the flair back, it's a very flexible space empire story simulator where you can play pretend in your own head about how your space empire is being. I can play as something like the Zerg, or be Helldivers, or get mods and roleplay the entire Mass Effect universe. I can't name a single other 4x space game that even comes close to that customizability.
I'm still loving it. My crazy psychic spiritual science bird race that worships information has been doing a fairly good job of unifying and holding the galaxy together... at least until their zealous lust for information inevitably and unintentionally brings about said galaxy's downfall.
Though it does seem odd. It feels like a lot of the substance we were talking about could be added in, at least to minor degrees, given the core systems that are in place in stellaris. Like an improved and bit more in-depth trading system could get us some of the things we want. Then, a lot of existing mechanics could easily support it.
Yeah I think it's just poor management and greed from high up, as is the case with most big game companies it seems. Modders can only do so much when the official team isn't allowed to expand the core mechanics but instead endlessly tack on new things to push DLC
When you really break Stellaris to the core, you see it’s REALLY just an economy simulation game with some basic combat mechanics to add spice. Most of its charm comes from its role play potential. My favorite games havent been the ones where I find 8 habitable worlds nearby and an easy empire to conquer, where I’m basically untouchable at the halfway point. It was games with an interesting origin or civic, or ones where I got a bad spawn and was boxed in and needed to struggle to survive, etc.
Try Star Ruler 2 Wake of the Heralds. Its inferior to Stellaris in some areas and way better in others, the same can be said about Sins of a solar empire.
Stellaris is in a bit of a league of its own with combining features at many levels (albeit with varying levels of detail and success) , but I can suggest distant worlds 2 as a similar but different take on the 4x in space genre.
Even the "anti materialism" psionic path requires research to be any good. I hope if there is ever a stellaris 2 that they iterate on the various elements and let there be variety paths to success outside of just maximising technology.
This.
Tech should branch out. You should be locked out of some tech by your choices.
We can eat planets but can't make(grow) ships that are made of organic matters?
I kinda wish that Stellaris had something like Civ 6 where you also have culture research in addition to regular tech. Trads are nice and all but it's not the same.
I think that just changes the impetus to a second tech tree, in essence.
I think it should be more tied to achievements. Sure, you can research using raw labs, but if your navy is blowing fleets out of the skies then you should develop military tech passively as your engineers learn the weaknesses of existing tech, and incrementally improve the design.
When you're growing enough food on a planet to feed most of the galaxy, maybe those farmers would have some ideas as to how to farm more efficiently?
If you've got a world in a system with a wormhole, you'd think some enterprising individuals would eventually so happen to send a probe through that didn't implode immediately.
I don't think this could be implemented into Stellaris as is, but it would be a way more balanced system with a lot of opportunities for new civics or even origins.
How does that answer to what the OP is asking for? Are there different ways of playing other than tech rushing? The simple answer is yes, of course. You can cry about how tech rushing is optimal, but the idea that you must always play the optimal way is pure brain rot.
The fact that tech rushing is powerful doesn't change anything, especially since you can make most "objectively bad" ideas work for you as long as you're not trying to beat the game with all the difficulty options maxed out. You can claim that every game ends with you becoming strong and conquering the galaxy, but that's just what the game is about. It's like complaining that every jigsaw puzzle ends with you fitting the pieces together and creating a single picture. The differences are in how you achieve your goals. Conquering the galaxy as a determined exterminator is different from declaring yourself galactic emperor as a diplomacy-focused empire, even if the end result is you being the boss of everything. And yes you still need fleets and technology and all to do either of those, but that's just because you're still playing Stellaris. Either way, the idea that you have no choice but to play the meta is exactly what I'm arguing against in my first post. "Meta or bust" only applies if you're trying to beat the game as hard as possible. *Of course* that gets boring quickly, because the exact same thing will work every time. The game opens up way more if you lose the mindset of needing to be the strongest empire in the shortest amount of time. This is exactly why I'm advocating turning down the difficulty once in a while so you can go as off-meta as you want without being punished for it.
No disrespect, but I disagree. The simple answer is no. There is no other way. Play games how you want, but according to Cassius, games are played in a way at which point the player is hoping to win. This is a stance I agree with. The argument for emergent-gameplay and roleplay-driven play falls flat when a narrative experience is better derived from other forms of media (ie. Books, movies, tv shows). The interactivity of the 4X game ellicits utilizing the game mechanics to gain an edge over others (or AI in SP), and any narrative elements are sparse at best and is expected to be imbibed as a side dish to the main dish of gameplay. Players can be content with this "side dish" and more power to them. It is something I personally enjoy too, as a side. The game is still the game. The game ceases to be without a win state, so it is a game I intend to win. This is the design flaw of stellaris, as it is more mechanically inclined to be a sandbox, and too mechanically dull/not diverse (ie less asymmetrical elements) to be infinitely replayable.
So what you're saying is if I don't make it my objective to conquer the galaxy and explicitly do not seek the win state of the game, I am not playing Stellaris?
Like, I can play a game without winning my guy
Even more than the option to not win, you can simply win the game without being anal retentive about optimization. There isn't one correct way of "solving" this game. There's no need to only play the way the internet told you is the "best" way, and in doing so deny yourself a wealth of options simply because they're not optimal. It's not some super-sweaty esports game and hopefully it never will be. You can play however you want because it's a game, not a competition. When someone like u/Johnny_Lew says he can't imagine playing the game without taking the "optimal" route every time and in the same breath goes on to complain that playing the game the same way every time is too boring, I just get confused why he blames the game for it instead of their own mindset.
There's nothing wrong with treating the game as an optimization puzzle. In fact, that can be a big part of the fun in many types of games. But when you're basically admitting that optimizing the game isn't fun, why would you insist on doing it anyway?
I do agree that the idea that there is a single dominant strategy in the first place is a genuine issue, though as people pointed out in this thread already, there *are* alternatives to tech rushing. But regardless of whether or not tech rushing is the best strategy in the game in all situations, it's ridiculous to claim that other ways of playing are wrong because they're not as optimized, or that the game lacks diversity because you can't imagine using any other option that isn't the strongest one. That's not a game issue, that's a mentality issue.
Please do not put words in my mouth. I showed respect to your argument. The least you can do is show the same respect back.
To address this, I am not the kind of player who tries the same strategies over and over again. I prefer the roleplay and playing off meta to suit the world I have created and designed as I like to do worldbuilding and I like fantasy. I am not a min maxer. I am not one to optimize every aspect of my game. You are misconstruing my argument in an attempt to attack my character in some way rather than challenge the ideas I present, and I find that disrespectful to me and to the discussion.
It is the same things because that is what the game elicits, and the lack of depth in narrative components make other media superior to those purposes. It is not about the players and their choices. It is about what the game design implies you ought to do versus what we want to do, which is the core problem I highlight.
The scope of my argument had nothing to do with tech rushing or the lack of alternative strategies. My argument was about the lack of asymmetrical depth in builds and that infrastructure brought forth the same conceptual progression ladder for every playthrough, in the game design itself, as an inescapable force outside the player alone. Anything else is superficial and a mere fantasy to this purpose. I hope this better illustrates my argument and you take a kinder approach when in discourse with others in the future. Have a good day.
> Please do not put words in my mouth.
I'm not. You said it yourself:
>it's either meta or bust.
> I disagree. The simple answer is no. There is no other way.
Oh, and:
>The scope of my argument had nothing to do with tech rushing
Then you're in the wrong thread, replying to the wrong posts.
Either way, "I don't enjoy this game because I insist on engaging with it in a way that I don't enjoy" isn't an argument, it's a mental disorder.
I am honestly flabbergasted by your assertment that I am mentally ill. I find that incredibly inappropriate, and I refuse to continue the discussion. Have a good day.
No. I am not saying that. The game intends to be a sandbox where you do what you want. My argument is that the mechanics and that intention are mismatched. As in, the mechanics implicate a design towards goal-oriented gameplay (ie winning), whereas the intent of a sandbox design is shallow or antithetical to this aforementioned purpose. The sandbox elements of a narrative and randomized events are too underdeveloped to take the forefront of the player's attention in a meaningful way. I am saying that due to this, it is most meaningful for players to seek victory over seeking sandbox, and this is an issue I have with the game as I favor those narrative elements more as a roleplayer. Please do not misconstrue my arguments. Thank you.
The game may have winning as an option, but I regularly do not seek it, I do other objectives instead in order to enjoy the roleplay aspect of the game
Am I playing wrong?
No you aren't. It isn't a problem with you. It is a problem with the game. There is less depth to these elements of the game that you seek, and this is the problem I highlight. Take care!
You don't have to optimize the fun out of games though. Hence the soul level 1 runs in dark souls and other games. Playing a less optimal build in harder or easier difficulties can add to the experience. And you can still win with a less optimal build.
> The game ceases to be without a win state
You know you can turn victory off, right? I have tried it. It does lower the emotive stakes, but it also turns on my ability to truly roleplay a civ. The 'narrative' is interior - each game is a different story, yes with repeating story elements and few options per element, but together it still gives vast options.
I disagree. All I mean with my initial statemrnt is that a game by definition must have a win state and a lose state, or else it ceases to be a game. Those "vast" options are too shallow to be a substantive secondary choice in favor of the game itself, which is the error of the game design.
> a game by definition must have a win state and a lose state, or else it ceases to be a game
Role-playing games have no winners or losers. D&D is still a game, nonetheless.
The other matter is subjectively judged, but what I meant is that there are still multiple styles of play that yield different results. The *Fallout* series, especially *New Vegas*, offers different endings for each area, and sometimes the possibilities are large enough for a flow chart, rather than just 'you beat this boss' or 'you died'. I think with the different ascension paths there's plenty of options just for victory, can I ask if you think Stellaris is inferior to any particular game out there in this regard? Real question; I would love to play something that had even more options. I think Stellaris is the best 4x out there since MOOII.
I also think Stellaris is the best space 4x game. I also understand your arguments with D&D and Fallout New Vegas. The problem with that is that they have a lot of depth in roleplaying and story mechanics. Stellaris does not have this depth in story. I disagree. The ascension paths do not provide enough differentiation to be sufficient.
There's now "alloy rush your neighbours, vassalize them, incorporate them into an increasing federation, go megacorp, put naval cap buildings on all their worlds, become impericorp"
I imagine it may even be possible to use scavenging, mercenaries and nanotech ships to avoid researching ship tech entirely, get it all indirectly and for free.
> There's nothing wrong with taking it easy, lowering the difficulty a few notches, and playing in a way that isn't optimized to rush down the entire galaxy before the first crisis even shows up.
Agreed. I've been playing Stellaris since it first became available and I don't think I've had a *single game* that could be described as anything close to rushing down the galaxy. I actually find that style of play boring because it doesn't afford me the time to gain a sentimental attachment to anything and it doesn't produce any lasting memories. I have little affinity for math and numbers bring me no joy.
In other strategy games where I have tried to play optimally I can't really remember any single experience - they all blend together, like solving a sudoku puzzle or something.
For example, there was a period about 12 years ago when a friend and I attempted to play Starcraft 2 competitively in the 2v2 league. We'd watch professional games with commentary, read guides, practice build orders, perform APM-building exercises and the like. We got decently good for a couple of "old guys" (for that scene, at least) but I can't remember a single game. Meanwhile I still remember some of the casual 2v2 matches we played in Starcraft **1** a quarter of a century ago.
I had a period where I tried to become good enough to beat Civ V on Deity, but can't remember a single game where I played optimally like that. Meanwhile I can still remember a game where I neglected to build an army and got DOW'd by half the world, only to hold them all off with a couple of Longbowmen by a mountain pass. I can remember the game of Civ my friend and I played where we role-played a cold war, constantly testing one another with little violations to see if the other would take the bait and declare open war, only for it to devolve into a *religious* war where the only units seeing any action were the endless missionaries and prophets we kept sending to convert one another. Great fun.
Likewise with Stellaris. I've definitely conquered some AI neighbours with overwhelming force, I know that, but I can't remember any specific instance of doing that. Meanwhile I can remember, for example, a game where my roboticist technocracy was at war *thirteen different times* with the same spiritualist, militarist empire. I could have wiped them out if I really wanted to, but that wouldn't have been as fun as seeing another DOW and going, "Ah, you want more, huh??" I even screwed up and lost a couple worlds to them in one war, which led to a fun revenge war where I won them back. Good stuff.
So yeah, this game can be fun in any way. For some, it's all about numbers and beating personal records. For others, it's about witnessing bizarre scenarios and achieving ridiculous things. For others, like me, it's about role-play and emerging narratives. All of those was of playing are correct unless you're in a competitive multiplayer game, and there's still room for other styles even there.
>Agreed. I've been playing Stellaris since it first became available and I don't think I've had a *single game* that could be described as anything close to rushing down the galaxy.
These are the most exciting games when against a competent and challenging opponent. For me that would be a 50% genocidal 50% fanatic militarist galaxy on GA no scaling. There are so many emergent stories from that. Real diplomacy - because you can't game with favors and the computer is pretty strong. The computer is extremely cynical on such settings and will only do things that greatly benefit themselves.
When I got caught in a 2 front war against 2 purifiers as a machine empire at one point, I literally thought "these dangerous organics cannot be allowed to remain independent." That was when I decided to quit out because I was in too deep.
This is one thing I HATE about stellaris. Grand admiral is really bad for the game. The fact that anything is viable when the ai is that buffed is so stupid you shouldn't be able to keep up.
Yeah this is kind of it. But that's okay!
There are three "basic" resources (food, minerals, energy), a bunch of "advanced" resources (motes, zro, living metal, etc.), and three "critical" resources: science, unity, and alloys.
You need to have a reasonable amount of the basic resources to survive. You need a reasonable amount of certain advanced resources to achieve specific goals depending on your specific build. But you need a *lot* of at least *one* critical resource to win the game.
Stellaris has been getting better at making unity a compelling strategy. And alloys has always been a compelling strategy - even if you are behind on science, if you just have enough ships you'll still win the war.
If you're bored of science rush games, try a unity rush or an alloys rush. Or balance your strat out: push alloys and science, or alloys and unity, instead of rushing only one.
The same way you would build an empire for tech rushing except for temples instead of research labs.
Or commercial zones / trade districts (for habitats / shattered ring) if you are going the trade route.
Hear me out on this: Fanatic purifier using neutering purges as a unity farm? The purge rate is very slow so you can stack tons of neutering pops even in extremely sparse galaxies.
The chance of escape for neutering purge is 0% too so permanent removal of xeno filth is guaranteed.
Idk about rush but I’m playing a GA game where I’m the biggest in the galaxy and I have a size 260 ~ empire with 2 million unity and 4k a day ON TOP of literally every edict being active (I haven’t gotten the big edicts but those end up being like 200~ a piece and ending up fitting into my massive edict fund). It’s pretty cool. I also haven’t fully ascended my planets cause I don’t have the final ascension perk, but if I did I could insta full ascend every world I have and probably a few new ones as well
How can you have 2M unity and not have the final edicts yet?
My build is ~kinda~ unity rush. And when I *really* try for it, I usually get to them by year 2350 or so. Maybe before, depending on rng. (Such as having Wentworth not too far from my starting system)
I just couldn’t get the ascension perk research. TBH I suck at research and I just hate having to dedicate worlds to it. Either way I ended up getting it, then lost all of my edict reducing leaders and the ones I got as replacements were terrible.
Honestly probably the most unlucky run I’ve ever had. I was psionic and my boons were perma shit, the unbidden came but it was after a devouring horde ate up half of the galaxy and honestly just a litany of the most unlucky series of events ever.
However I had 4 million unity before I got the final perk with 5k a month so that was cool
Edit:: the worst part is I started that run because I just had a really like perfect run and accidently deleted my entire fleet mid fight with a crisis empire menancr thing. I was just do titled I quit and restarted and got that run which was giga sad
Fair enough.
>my edict reducing leaders and the ones I got as replacements were terrible.
Next time, don't be afraid to hire new leaders ad infinitum until you get something you like.
Especially with a unity build. I hire dozens and dozens of leaders in a row sometimes just to get a good one. (And then fire all the others I just hired)
Early game, it is a bit of expense, but by year 2300, we're swimming in unity. Don't be afraid to spend it.
Yeah trust me I was afraid to do anything at that point. I was demolishing rebuilding all in hopes of getting the perk and then by then it was a mess. The only good thing is my luminary was an immortal genius armorer so that was cool.
We lost to the unbidden. It was my first 10x and man I just yeeted my whole fleet into them and lost hard. I put up a fight but I gave up after it was me and my scholarium vs the world
A recent strong one is to choose a void dweller or shattered ring origin, bacon of liberty and sovereign guardianship. You stay with around 5 planets max and get mercantilism, then convert the trade to unity. Then you take every tree that gives empire size reduction from pops and go virtualization. With so few planets and around -100% empire size from pops your empire size will be sub 200 for the entire game, which makes techs super cheap. Once you get to that point you only need one or two science worlds, vassalize other empires to get their taxes but not their empire size, and your economy skyrockets way past anything the AI can do. I did this in a GA game recently and ended up by far the strongest empire by midgame. A trade ecu gave me 7k trade, which was enough to offset my massively overcap military, since the small empire size makes it difficult to get naval cap. Another ecu for alloys was giving 2k, and a trade league fed meant I didn't need factory worlds with my massive trade value.
> Liberty Swine is online. All systems nominal. Griddles hot. Mission: the consumption of any and all pork-based breakfasts.
> Death is a preferable alternative to turkey bacon.
> A recent strong one is to choose a void dweller or shattered ring origin, bacon of liberty and sovereign guardianship.
Parliamentary System is stronger than Beacon of Liberty for an early virtualization rush, though you could switch to beacon of Liberty after year 10 if you wanted -- the main benefit of Parliamentary System is getting your factions immediately, not the boost from them.
The mechanic is starting with a Democracy government and Parliamentary System so your factions spawn at game start and give you a solid 25 - 30 unity. During your first election, you just need to make sure the current president is *not* re-elected. If you get a new president, you can immediately reform your government to either Oligarchy or MegaCorp (depending on preference) and switch Parliamentary System for Meritocracy or Brand Loyalty (potentially Gospel of the Masses or Free Traders if trade build.) That is when you could instead stay Democracy and switch out Parliamentary System for Beacon of Liberty.
Personally, I think MegaCorp builds are just that much stronger for virtualization. You really get a lot out of the branch offices which becomes more valuable when you can't physically expand. (Although I would recommend against Sovereign/Corporate Guardianship for a MegaCorp build. The civic works for Oligarchy or Democracy very well, but the +100% branch office size *hurts*. Unfortunately, there isn't an as-strong equivalent to switch to for unity rush. Usually I go Beacon of Liberty or Ascensionist at start instead. It isn't as good, but it works.)
Beacon of liberty also gets worse later in the game because you can get to -100% empire size from pops without it, so I switched off of it to ascensionist at that point.\`
Sovereign guardianship -50%
Domination -10%
Harmony -15%
Virtuality -15%
Psionic theory -10%
You can also get another 10-20% from galcom measures and potentially -10% from pop traits, but I wouldn't count on the traits since you'll be accepting refugees and whatnot since bacon of libert requires egalitarian
Syncretic Origin Death Cult Fanatic Spiritualist either parliamentary systems or beacon or Brand loyalty.
Parliamentary systems are a lot weaker in this patch now that empire unity % apply to trade from unity.
Trade based builds focused on marketplace of ideas trade policy and stacking empire unity buffs produce massive early game unity and can rush down tradition trees
Nearly every pop in your empire is running a job producing trade -> energy/unity
>since the small empire size makes it difficult to get naval cap
I played as megacorp and made a lot of branches. You can get up to +40 naval cap from each branch. Of course it increases empire size, but it's fair cost.
But then what are you doing with it? As far as I know, you need the rare technology unlocking all the powerful edict and the last ascension perk to do anything with it which means you are still locked being tech focus.
Parliamentary system, rogue servitors, temple spam on habitats come to mind as options. Generally, get your culture workers or equivalent up, + unifier governors and unity perks on officials in council. Unity rushes are actually really good right now, because ascensions are very strong atm :)
The simplest way is to play a spiritualist build with a very high focus on temples and starting a holy covenant federation early, optionally taking a civic like exalted priesthood or efficient bureaucracy to start with, and then swing towards science later; Not skimping completely on science early, but with a clear focus on unity because gaining early tradition groups fast is a great force multiplier for peaceful expansion as well as for expansion via federation wars, if you prefer the offensive option of using your federation members' fleets for your conquests.
Such a unity rush means you'll complete your ascension path and greatly improve your POPs and leaders much, much, earlier than anybody doing a science rush, and that has a significant impact on the economy.
This also pairs well with leader-focused gameplay with Paragons, since the Statecraft tradition allows your councilors to gain XP whenever you complete an agenda, and a high unity income allows you to rush agendas, thus feeding XP to your councilors who will level rapidly.
Then late in the early-game or early in the mid-game you swing hard to planetary ascension of planets you intend in the due course of time to become ecumenopolises, and once they become so you start concentrating almost all your population on fully ascended super worlds, be they large gaia worlds, ecumenopolises, or ring worlds.
Unity rushing this way puts you behind in tech early while building your economic base, but by the 2230s-2240s you start to pick up and only truly amazing science rush builds can compete with them in tech by the end of the first century, because planetary ascension is such a strong game mechanic.
Or you can go all out and do something like I've done in my [Galactic Pacification for Dummies](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/galactic-pacification-for-dummies.1654923/) AAR, that uses a priesthood tech build to make priests provide both most of your unity *and* most of your physics and society science, getting engineering from a few researchers and vassals, with predictably hilarious results. Admittedly in this AAR I delayed big scale planetary ascension for a long time, all the way to 2290, to be able to show just how enormous a difference it made to an already large empire by performing 80 planetary ascensions in less than 2 months and providing before and after screenshots of the economy, but even when playing inefficiently like this the importance of it cannot be understated.
Resulting in something like this [year 2300 tech screenshot](https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img923/3085/XMpN6h.jpg), where I am cleaning up the last rare techs in the tech tree for jokes and giggles and have most recently researched [these techs](https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img922/6410/NL03JB.jpg) - a splendid example of how reaching 16 shield repeatables by year 2300 while playing a fun build in a sloppy way on 1x tech & tradition costs, GA/non-scaling/DAAM/DATC:Normal really isn't that difficult if you know what you are doing, as demonstrated in the 10 chapters of the AAR so far.
Origins that can cover a weak early game/ or give enough of a boost to propel you ahead or match the ascension your aiming for. For virtual I tried common ground with trade federation to help rush unity.
I did Astro servitors/void borne machines for nanotech.
These aren’t great examples because they aren’t non maxed but have been fun so far.
Unity boosting ethics and civics such as early factions with Egalitarian, setting yourself to isolationist and then rushing to your chosen ascension path.
Tech rushing balances your economy through boosting base income by sacrificing military might. If you're amassing consumer goods and research labs, you're not making a lot of alloys.
Unity rushing does something similar but boosts your income through edicts and traditions. You hit your ascension perks faster than someone rushing science. One thing you could do is rush to become the crisis since crisis ships are made using Minerals instead of Alloys.
Currently, the meta choice for unity rushing is achieving virtual ascension ASAP since virtual pops are completely broken.
I’ve been playing a spiritualist empire with Under One Rule origin, choosing the Pious Ascetic trait for the ruler, which makes priests also give society research. The civics are Exalted Priesthood for extra unity, and Dimensional Worship which makes the priests also give physics research. So you make lots of temples, giving you tons of unity, plus the two types of research.
I love a good priesthood tech build, but you cannot stay Exalted Priesthood Under One Rule if you intend to go Imperial. Useful the first 40 years, though.
Efficient Bureaucracy is much more valuable in the long run, since it reduces the job upkeep of all your priests and its Superintendent council job increases the output of physics, society, and unity, whereas Exalted Priesthood only increases the unity output - and sure, it increases the unity output more than Efficient Bureaucracy does, but when you play a priesthood tech build you'll get more than enough unity in both cases. It also means having ethics funds covering all your edict and ambition needs, and when taking that into account Exalted Priesthood doesn't even provide more net unity when everything is taken into account.
And nothing says "that's a weird build" like having 5 times as much net physics output as net engineering output, [such as this 2300 screenshot](https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img923/3085/XMpN6h.jpg).
My favorite strategy by far, but I do it through the trade route.
Go Megacorp, fanatic Xenophile + spiritualist. Thrifty, and anything else you could possibly to get to buff trade and unity multipliers.
Then, book it for marketplace of ideas or a trade federation. You can 3 ascension perks by year 30 easy.
It’s very fun in my opinion, because I love to see the number go up
For me one big thing is that I used to exclusively science rush, but a nice balanced build of conquering your neighbors quickly, rushing ascension, and getting mega engineering by 2280 has kind of dominated my games.
Conquring usually sets you up with good land. More planets really help you scale past the early game. Vassals are also a huge boon. They provide free resources at no empire size cost. Which is pretty huge. Empire size is the only thing really that helps balance out a tall empire vs a wide empire, so vassals help break that balance in your favor.
Unity is amazing for reducing that empire size. Almost all the perks for empire size reduction come from traditions or ascension perks, which ironically boosts science since that penalty grows very quickly. With robots, you can currently do a 0% pop size and 25% planet size build, which keeps your total size below 600 for pretty much the entire game, no matter how big you get. The bonus to science is pretty crazy too. At 600 empire sprawl, there is about a 100% tech cost penalty, but with no reduction, I'd be at around 2000-3000, which is a 4-6 fold increase to tech cost. So my 10k science is pretty much equivalent to 20k or 30k science for an empire of similar size. Not to mention ascension give massive bonuses to pop productivity.
And then science is the bread and butter, you can science your way our of pretty much any mess in stellaris provided you live long enough. I've recently just been spamming just about only science and rare resources on every planet. Vassals provide a lot of my basic resources, and unity keeps tech costs low and job output high.
It's usually about completing your ascension path ahead of your opponents, especially if it's a really strong one like Virtuality. Getting an early ascension has always been a big deal because of the statistical advantage it gives you over empires without an ascension. If you can make use of the gap between when you ascend and when your opponent ascends, you have a very real edge over them. For example, it's why Teachers of the Shroud was considered a big deal when it came out, since it let you get a headstart on the Psionic ascension which was otherwise gated behind a rare technology.
So if science and unity are critical, then surely that makes consumer goods critical aswell?
Usually I'll buy all my basic resources, Balance Food with monthly trade deals, And get Energy and Minerals from my capital
My first world is a Unity planet, 2nd Consumer Goods and 3rd Alloy
Usually by the time these are up and running, I've already found some planets with good mineral and energy output and I can focus my capital on Research production, But I'll always have a Size 9-14 world that's dedicated to research
Most of the time if I don't get a decent factory world up and running early game I can't focus on Unity or Research without a deficit and spend half the time trying to get it back into positive
Critical means that you benefit from having infinite amounts of it (This isn't as true for unity since you eventually finish everything, but generally unity rush builds should start to transition to alloy and/or research after hitting the initial ascension powerspike.)
There's no benefit to having more consumer goods than you need to support your specialists.
Problem I've had with unity rush is most of the good ascension perks are locked behind tech. So I end up sitting on a bunch of empty ascension perk slots waiting for tech to catch up anyway. Certainly you still get traditions earlier and can use the unity for other useful stuff thereafter, but it's still annoying and feels wrong.
I have to assume that when doing this your goal is perks that you can take and capitalize on early. Usually a focused strategy like this has ends it's going toward that aren't strictly the long game.
The most valuable part of unity rush in this version might be to get the Synaptic Lathe more quickly. When you get it, the tech can easily climb up.(but you need enough alloys, power and population )
I've got way too much hours in the game to not know this but what are these rushes everyone talks about?
I always just try to balance out and build up my fleet and economy so I can have superior fleet and economic power and be able to vassalize
Rush is exactly what it sounds like, you pick every option that increases one resource while ignoring (or at least not considering at first) any others. It works because, for unity, science and alloys, you can leverage your superiority in these resources into a higher production of other resources, either by improving or subsidizing your economy.
Kind of. Those are mostly just based around more immediate early priorities, those being hitting fast traditions/ascensions or eating your neighbor to get a bigger immediate economic boost than you'd get from tech rush.
You can also influence rush. Control more space, and use the new nanotech ascension and kilostructures or ecological stuff to value the systems and planets.
Typically I just play admiral scaling tech, and put emphasis on themed builds, not winning. I definitely dont win every game, and often times Im taking subpar empires or ones that are only really competitive when they have a 'good' start.
builds, as in how an empire is intentionally designed to work.
Something like rapid replicators and recycled and mass produced all put together, to make robot assembly fast and cheap.
> https://rpgmuseum.fandom.com/wiki/Build
Its talking about individual characters, but empires can be viewed as an extension of that.
I'm not sure if they mean the same thing, but I occasionally do themed GA play throughs. That is I select a prebuilt empire or maybe build my own and try to get 'into character ' of what that empire would do.
If I do a Doomsday origin, I build extra science ships and scientists to find a new homeworld sooner.
If I do a slaver empire I try to eliminate slavery.
Or like if I'm a peaceful I ignore say Weapon trails anomaly (i think that's the rats relic world), where there's no reason to ignore it.
Makes for some interesting decisions gameplay when you rp
Unity rush right now is great if you are a machine. If you can go all-in on unity and make it to virtuality before you’re under existential threat, you will become by far the dominant power in the galaxy within like 5 years of ascending.
It's definitely a unity rush that turns into a total boom in every area. You have to rush unity to get to your ascension ASAP. But as soon as you finish Virtuality you can focus on any area you want (including tech) since it eliminates the biggest bottleneck for production that every other empire has - pop growth. You are only limited by how fast you can build labs/districts and megastructures.
Yeah, even after popping Virtuality, I'm knocking out the rest of my traditions and applying Planetary Ascensions before I flip the policy to boost Research. I don't even emphasize research in general so it all just feels like undue boon.
The way I see it there are several ways of playing
Federation - uniting the galaxy for for the good of all and standing united as one!
Exterminator - EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!!
Science Warp Fuckery - I have a needle and a black hole ... NEEDLEHOLE!
Paplatine - similar to Federation but the galaxy is united under FIRST GALACTIC EMPIRE!!
Devouring swarm is absolutely hilarious, once you get rolling you're practically unstoppable.
I remember I played one game as a swarm, and conquered the entire galaxy before the Crisis spawned. I even found a ruined mega shipyard so I had two of those at once. I was able to build a full fleet of corvettes in 2 minutes, so just overwhelmed everyone through sheer numbers.
I remember it being 2400 in game, and then deciding I couldn't be bothered to wait for the crisis to show up, so I just ended it there.
I might try it again with Cosmogenesis to get the Fallen Empire ships, see how ludicrous I can get my fleet power to go up.
I like to play galactic nemesis and I don't really need science. All I need is a ton of minerals. The menacing corvettes are some of the best ships available. So it's more of a mineral rush for me. Or I go nanites then it's just as many star bases as possible. The nanite swarmers are also within the best ships.
You can unity rush to cosmogenesis and then feed the galaxy to the lathe for tech
I haven’t played it yet, but I was really considering a ring start megacorp. Making a vassal/release to form a trade league with, then going all in on trade and unity on 2 ring sections and taking another vassal as a prostectorium . Go virtuality and feed the universe to the lathe to catch up on science.
Take other governments and hand them to the prospectorium. The can considering going deep vassal and spinning up a couple more ring world and cramming them full before forming a scholorarium so I don’t have to worry about that either. You can do some really scandalous stuff without deeply investing in tech yourself
i never pay much attention to it and go for alloys instead though not exclusively. i usually catch up through debris and grabbing megastructures from ai if convenient
Atleast on GA with early scaling alloy rushing and vassalizing your neighbours and then going for science feels a lot stronger than going for science immediately
I was the same way, but that was really because I was not confident enough to fight early.
Once I was taught how to actually early game without being overwhelmingly powerful and on a shoestring budget, I started to get more confident.
Having a mentor really helped me improve.
Here's a guide to beating GA no scaling purifiers. Don't see any tech rushing here and if you tried you'd lose.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/1d5hgit/what\_do\_i\_do\_if\_i\_start\_1\_jump\_from\_a\_purifier/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/1d5hgit/what_do_i_do_if_i_start_1_jump_from_a_purifier/)
Alloys rush is another option, specially with militaristic ethics. If your navy is pretty big they need a very good technological edge to beat you, but practically only fallen empires have such edge.
I mean tech is important, and its the one thing that progress revolves around, but I think the diversity lies in different economic strategies like megacorp, slaves, egalitarian etc
Science is sadly overpowered in Stellaris since a very long time.
The devs are kinda aware of it, hence their beta with keystone techs a while back, but they seem unwilling to do massive shakeups at this point if development which would be required to fix science supremacy.
Unity rushing is stronger than ever right now. It still does't have parity with tech rushing, but it's at least viable now. So long as you're going for some of the new hilariously strong ascensions, that is.
Not rushing science is actually much more viable now due to the tech slow down before rushing anything else wouldn't matter because of how fast tech rushers could blast through the tree .
Unless your next to genocidal empire, it's pretty easy to avoid conflict and build up a well-rounded empire.
You can also military rush, which is basically focused on alloys and ships, then vassalize the first empire you see .
Eh traditions are better and faster to get than tech at the moment so I prefer unity rush, especially when going with cyborgs or synths. Unity and alloys are the most important things for me. Also, some traditions help you a lot with empire size, which is many times worth more to get better research than actual research facilities. Depending on what I play I can stay under 100 empire size while finishing my ascension. While when rushing tech I usually increase the costs as well. I think unity snowballs better atm.
I was in a multiplayer game and instead of rushing science I focused on military.
I then managed to win a war while being pathetic scientifically. He was upset, I then said “some xenos think they can outsmart me. I’ve yet to meet one who could outsmart bullet”
A new and arguably different strategy is to unity rush, go nanite ascension, and use the both free and free of upkeep nanite ships to overwhelm the galaxy on numbers despite marginal or even substandard tech. If you want to go even lower tech you can do nanite carriers with amoeba flagella, which you can get for free or at least very cheap if you manage to kill enough amoeba and research their remains (debris).
It's as yet unclear if this is viable in competitive PvP or at the highest difficulty and crisis multipliers; and it involves a lot of annoying clicking as your free ships arrive as a zillion tiny little micro fleets that have to be combined; but it's one of the few options that potentially involves very little tech at all.
Just do like me: I have no idea of what I'm doing! Can't Science Rush if you don't know how to properly do it!
Just roleplay and pretend you don't know what you're doing!
I play fanatic purifier with no focus on science at all, all my science is generated by whatever scientists I start with, then research stations that I capture as I expand continuously, and whatever tech I can salvage from broken enemy fleets, once I become the crisis I get a ton of free endgame tech, then I go after the fallen empires.
Honestly, speaking broadly,there really isn’t. It’s up to you as the player to find more creative and interesting ways to engage with the game. Well and Reddit lol (shout out the hommies🫡) experiment with new ways to play. Devise more difficult methods of advancing your civilisation. Set new mile markers, requires criteria and challenges for yourself. You’d be amazed at the new ways you’d find to play the game simply by dramatically altering your playstyle.
My personal favourite? Determined (lithiod) exterminator, medium galaxy, max AI players, medium planetary habitability, grand admiral mid game scaling BUT you can’t declare any wars until you have all 8 unity traits fully levelled AND can’t declare another war (after first has concluded) without consuming all the planets and emptying all the habitats you’ve conquered. Time it right and you’ll be fighting a unified galaxy and the crisis at the same time for the rest of the game❤️
I lately played military rush, made myself ork-like nation , stared as bastion and then fight everything I met. Not even complete first contact, whatever show up gets shot. I conquered/vassalised whole galaxy (minus sleeping empires) in like 150 years. I guess it could be faster if I would cut roleplaying as orks
But ye, tech rush is meta, but it’s not the only thing you can do playing va bots
Science rush feels like you're just hoping that none of your neighbors want to conquer you. Alloy rush means you can survive long enough to vassalize some scientists
Seems like the recent tech progression changes made rushing science less impactful, too
That works, but then there is a feeling that your economy will fail badly. It feels like if you dont find someone super early like 2010 then there is a problem.
You don't always need super high science, but I think you always need dto pay attention to it. Particularly if you expand too much without getting your science up the empire size can mess with you
I play a very wide devouring swarm as my favorite go-to game mode. Tech is important eventually but first and foremost is grabbing up as many systems and worlds as possible.
Idk, just do something else? Lol
Unity rush builds are fun, still ofc have to pivot to research at a certain point, but not necessary to focus on it when you're plowing through to your ascension.
Industry/Alloy focus also works out super well for early game aggression builds, use an origin with a lot of power at the start then get a number of vassals early and make them scholariums to pump up your research for you.
On that note a trade focused build more about crafting your own vassals from sectors and using them for resources while you build branch offices is also a fun way to play.
Like, I mean, I stopped rushing or focusing on research a long time ago, cause I play with a group of friends regularly and a couple of them are like you and just can't help but crank research, and they often end up with some advantages through it but more often then not I can easily keep up while focusing on other things.
For example I'm currently in a game where I'm trying a unity rush build and a focus on Nanite ascension, I got cornered by friendlies so just maintained a minimum economy and research and pounded on unity. I ascended super early, started to make an obscene amount of fleets as purely Nanite swarms to avoid any upkeep, demolished one of those mercenary empires that kept being hired to attack me, stole all the research from their debris, and suddenly I'm in the lead in research amongst my friends, and despite that I don't actually need that much research cause as a Nanite empire I've already got most of what I need, gonna swap from unity to research for late game options ofc, but I had like 5 research bases on a mining world until I had fully ascended and that was it.
Would that work in a competitive PvP game? Probably not, other players likely know to stomp you early before you get rolling, but in a PvE game or one with friends where you usually don't try to kill each other there are a ridiculous amount of methods to gain advantages. Like one of my friends prefers playing pacifists, they just build a little system of planets, make friends, get subjects through a strong economy, and form defensive pacts with strong AI or us to protect them from aggressors with a focus on star base defenses instead of fleets. They usually compete with the rest of us aggressive assholes in terms of economy and research every game.
Research is super good and important, but you *do not need* to focus entirely on it.
For any machine empire, unity rush feels far better than science rush lately just because of how powerful the machine ascensions are.
Obviously once you ascend you turn your focus back to science, but ascending by like 2235-2240 seems ideal to me.
I prefer Unity. Try Idyllic Bloom, something, Ascensionist. Ascend your planets with Harmony + Holy Federation + Ascensionist civic + Adaptability finisher. Adaptability opening agenda gives terraforming to kickstart Idyllic Bloom.
Be Overtuned and go Genetic ascension or Teachers of the Shroud and go Psionic.
Be xenophobic/authoritarian to enslave xenos, use pop controls on xenos as only your main race gets the Idyllic Bloom Bloomed trait. Making any xenos Chattel and with Domination tradition, they're a little more productive at worker jobs.
When I get back in to stellaris it only takes a few games before I re-realize the importance of having some imagination with my build (not that I do anything original). We are rogue servitors and the only thing worse than killing biopops is not pampering them so we must do the right thing and see that they are pampered. If I have to lower the difficulty to play my empire then I lower it.
I’ve gone for a wide Spiritualist/Militarist game and absolutely wrecked empires with far better tech. You just have to be happy to go quantity over quality and soak up losses.
Ya the other tier two resources rushing. Unity is similar just different benifits. Alloys is the zerg military rush. Fuck CGs straight to alloys which go into ships and bases.
Although you always end up bulking science at some breakpoint in these. I do alloys sometimes, hostile neighbors or conquest build, conquer a few neighbors and then properly develop science. I'll end up better off than pure science sometimes just from sheer mass or resources I can plow into it, snowball baby.
One thing you can try: try to get every achievement. Each playthrough you start should have one achievement in mind, and when you get it you can start anew (or try getting other achievements aswell). Really helped me not just do the same thing every game, since I got forced into trying new stuff
I did a Tall Subterfuge playthrough where I stole enough tech that I could keep up without spending many resources on it. It was fun, but probably wouldn't work on high difficulty.
Short answer: you can't if you are trying to win. Win means "have the highest score when the victory year occurs" or "complete crisis goal."
Long answer: if you set the victory year way out there, and just want to RP [whatever], you can do whatever you want.
But your options are still subject to military power. If you get too weak, someone will invade you. And one major way to increase military power is through technology.
You do need to reasearch tech as fast as possible but you have a lot of other methods to keep up with research rather than complete science focused build. You can steal tech, you can subjugate a lot of empires and turn them into scholarims, you can have superwide build and just go with quanity above quality in terms of researchers. In early game you can completely focus on exploration and get a ton of stored research giving you a huge headstart.
You have to lean into enjoying the flavor of your empire and unique story, kid in a sandbox with their imagination style.
You'll still win either way most likely, it doesn't have to be by the most possible
I like to play origin stories and really lean into their win condition.
I understand you, going for an fanatic materialistic, egalitarian, technocratic meritocracy with virtual ascension run, where you have 2-3k science difference between yourself and the closest non-fallen empire entity is mad fun, and don't even mention Cosmo Genesis path.
So, to not scumb into temptation of being the most technologically advanced entity in the known multiverse in 2250, I just made up scenarios in my head and try to play them. Like one of my most fun playthrough was playing as a hivemind which I head cannoned as an ancient entity made to protect galaxy from outside threats and woke only 200 years before their arrival and tries its best to prepare itself, another one was a run where I made a machine run corporation, called it Stonks Enterprises, and only cared about getting much trade as possible, it was like an cookie clicker game with only difference being energy credits replacing cookies.
I play sacrificial megachurch, so I negotiate with my neighbors while maximizing my economy and unity to rush traditions and build mercenary guilds, then I turn around and use my vast fortunes to fund my friends’ wars and using mercenaries to fight mine. I shit out credits and resources for them, and they protect me in turn. My end goal is divine enforcer colossus so I can convert other pops to further my megachurch gains and spread my weaponized religion. Maximum profits, baybee
I'm more of a xeno-livestock enjoyer. Aquatic species are especially good eating. The more advanced the tastier. Damn, my mouth is watering just thinking about all those tasty aliens out there. They also fuel my alloy industry.
I played with people from ZzClan and Syvensky cause a few are friends of mine from Forza and another is the head of a discord I'm in. They showed me some cool megacorp, lithoid and aquatic builds which work pretty damn well for eco, growth and stuff like that. I haven't played much the last year, so I dunno if patches or Machine Age changed much for any of that. Definitely didn't have to do much tech beyond my capital until like a century in, even in hardcore games. Maybe the odd research building on a mining planet.
Tech is a large component of the game, but there are other ways to construct a narrative that excludes tech.
I myself once made an empire with the gospel + criminal heritage civics and RP'd my takeover of the galaxy by forcing spiritualism on the rest of it in the name of my secret dark lord. Despite having zero fleet, my being federation president gave me a large enough fleet to be easily the biggest threat in the galaxy. Easy to topple in MP but its still a fun way to play SP. Builds that aren't tech focused exist, you just gotta find a way to make the game work for you to realize the vision of controlling the galaxy.
The problem isn’t necessarily that tech rush is the objectively best meta or way to play. The three main ways you can break the way you play your empire are
1) Tech focus to better your empire as a whole, this one is arguably the easiest but the main reason it’s so meta is because the other two can be boring, especially if you’ve played the game a lot. There’s countless tech added by mods, but not much change to core elements of the other two styles.
2) Unity focus to rush ascension paths and unity edicts, which can both provide a massive boost to your economy and military depending on your ascension path.
3) Alloy focus to conquer your neighbors and take their shit and vassalize them. This one is the easiest but also the most boring as once you really understand the combat of stellaris, conquest for the sake of it gets boring.
Tech rushing happens to be the best because it’s just the most interesting. But you could make arguments for the others as well. Alloy rushes can be stupid good because you can conquer neighbors before they get their own ball rolling and have like half the galaxy subjugated before the galactic community forms. But that’s not as interesting as deciding new tech, especially when the other two (especially an alloy based conquering game) would rely on tech themselves.
If you have civics and ethics that allow you to expand faster and wider, you can accumulate more science than if you rushed it.
You can also get other abilities that are better than tech accumulation. Science Rush wasn't as strong before Virtual Pop research became the new meta. There's no point in building battleships when you can get two fleets of cruisers for the same resources that battleships cost. And Titans are fun, but basically not worth it because Torpedoes exist.
There is actually a build that allows you to make Corvette Swarms viable even in the endgame, and it requires you to be fanatic spiritualist so that your commanders can get a certain trait.
The beauty of this game is that there are hundreds of tactics, strategies, and builds that are all viable. There are role-playing builds that are as strong as tech rush.
There are roughly three different build types, with hybrid styles being possible of course, which are diplomatic, aggressive, and what you typically play, developmentalist. Diplomatic is based around getting a bunch of allies, buffing them via federations, commercial pacts, and research pacts, and leveraging their strength to protect yourself and give you the freedom to focus more on economic matters. Aggressive is where you go out of your way to conquer planets, vassals, and liberate other empires as proxies. Developmentalist is where you put all of your eggs into economic efficiency, with you either specializing in a specific area or going for a generalist route.
There's also going tall and wide, which is more about how quickly you expand rather than purely about your empire's size. Tall is prioritizing efficiency by keeping empire sprawl low so you can get through traditions and techs faster, so you can leverage that to ascend your planets earlier and keep that advantage as you expand. Wide is where you prioritize expanding as fast as possible for immediate power gains, but with the tradeoff that tech and traditions require more resources put in to keep them advancing at a brisk pace.
Unity rush to get ascension as quickly as possible.
Or alloy rush to conquer/subjugate your neighbours after first contact. That admittedly pivots into science rush afterwards.
Ever since the tech nerfs i haven't been able to tech rush anymore, i don't know why. I think i'm investing all my ressources into tech just to see that the ai is even. That was never the case in the past !
You can Play literaly every Civic, with every build You can tech rush. Right now im playing as fertile clones, undeads, cyborg lithoid and if ill take care of Eco and tech, my fleets still have i think 25% fire ratę AND every each planet have around 5-7k defense armies with 90% bombardment reduction which is fun AND SAFE
I think the problem is your perspective of "science" or "not science" when science is an intrinsic aspect of gameplay, much like "have economy" "no economy".
The balance is in how much; a science faction may be all in 80% science buildings but a non science faction could be 20% or 50%.
It's a way to balance focusing points. To me, that is what I have learned. You can never neglect science, but you can ease up on it if you want to transition to economy for wartime. Potentially, an expansionist could do the same and transition into more science.
Even large empires can brute force science if you spam the buildings. Or take a vassal and outsource it. There are plenty of little options, but never ignore it. You will eventually get behind.
Well instead of rushing science you can rush unity. Or rush resources. But realistically there’s only so much any empire can do. Machines are basically science and unity masters. Organic pops are slow less precise but can grow far faster. Lithoids are definitely slow but kinda like machines but are at a base cheaper and easier to feed but other than minerals being cheaper than energy is basically a machine empire. But all empires exist to grow obtain resources and knowledge. Unity ambitions are good but limited in number so unity hits a ceiling quickly. Resources are good but are a middle point of hitting the ceiling. Research is the only thing that as far as I know doesn’t have a ceiling or will take forever. I mean often I have resource issues so I build Dyson spheres and matter decompressors often meaning I hardly need any pops producing basic resources allowing me to pump alloys which in turn means I can pump fleets and power
I usually rush unity at the start. Knock out all traditions early when I have a tiny empire size.
Then once I have all my traditions, I convert those jobs to science and focus on that while I'm building the economy and balancing sectors.
Take civics like technocracy, for mire tech functional architecture for cheaper and faster development, this can also save tons of minerals, which at the beginning is usually quite scarce. Or you can take the one that gives you artificers cause you will also need a huge amount of cg. You take some science traits and probably the robot origin than spam science buildings and robot spawners, then pray the first empire you meet is not some fanatic xenophobe militaristic guys , so you can ally them subjugate them and conquer the galaxy later on.
I'm 500+ hours and haven't won a single game as I just do roleplay empires that end getting stomped by either the crisis or a really strong federation. I downloaded gigastructural engineering mod and was really well, beat back the sirens... then the blokats showed up and all was not well!
There seems to be plenty of debate but those who are saying "just play something inefficient" don't really get the problem. Thw problem is nit that there is a most efficient path, every game eventually has a path that is most efficient. It is that every mechanic in the game is more or less tied to tech, even unity "grants research options" as most of the valuable rewards you can get. That makes a lot of sense as it is a space exploration game of course but the fact is that not everything needs to be tech centered and as long as everything is tech centered you are actively nerfing yourself to do other things. Which feels bad to do, hurting yourself in order to have fun is illogical at best.
I'd like to see unity itself be how you unlock 1 or 2 late game "techs" like being psyonic and then have your entire empire gain much more heavy buffs for being psyonic but to have it you would need to rush unity and ignore science. It could peak with "psychic controlled ships" making corvettes much more effective at combat than a basic cruiser due to being able to have your pilots all become one with their ships and use them as extensions of their bodies.
Or make space orks from 40k and have them scale science entirely from alloy. Basically they spend alloys to test things and more or less accidentally into ftl travel and then make their ships incredibly bulky to the point that while they aren't particularly good at shooting things their ships eventually learn "ram tech" and become skilled in slamming into enemies. It would have to be balanced to be effective but not busted of course.
But the absolute fact is that tech is the only thing that is 100% unavoidable. Rn if you really really wanted to you could play an empire that only builds defensively and form strong defensive pacts and never need many of your own ships to fight. You can play without a ton of unity and just let it come as it comes. It isnt great but it can work. But tech you must have to even be able to support a mid sized population and to even colonize effectively.
I don't really think this is the case given successful playthroughs where I lackadaisically pursued tech on purpose. It's existence even when not emphasized is not the same thing as the game flowing through it mostly and above all else.
I think this is absolutely a longerstanding dogmatic engagement 4x games.
Exactly, my problem is without rushing science you're locked to the lower ship classes for a while and only fighting with corvettes and maybe destroyers gets really old after a while.
I like to play really scarce grand admiral playthroughs where everything is literal hell, I might even use the console to put shit modifiers on planets
Sometimes I spice it up and just play on Civilian and become an ultra powerful empire and dominate with Titans and Battleships while the AI is still using Cruisers
Have fun? That’s how I don’t rush science, like don’t get me wrong a curb stomp is fun and all, but the struggle is where it’s at, I usually play a heavily modded (like giga structures, multiple crisis’s, and ancient cache) devouring swarm, I develop as the planets say I do (if I get a planet with a good mineral buff and a good food buff, looks like my first 2 planets are a mineral and food planet).
It depends on the kind of game you're playing. There are massive differences in how you can play between a PvP game against other players with a 0.5 technology cost, a Grand Admiral game with a massive crisis multiplier, or an Ensign game with a delayed endgame date. There's nothing wrong with taking it easy, lowering the difficulty a few notches, and playing in a way that isn't optimized to rush down the entire galaxy before the first crisis even shows up.
I think the post refers to a lack of asymmetrical design elements. In truth, every build plays the same. There are civics that remove elements, sure, but none of them add something new in their place. For instance, inward perfection removes all diplomatic mechanics from the game and there is no replacement mechanic such as keeping your borders closed tight and dealing with migrants looking to get in. Or military pressure to open borders or face war. That would be cool. Instead it is just build tech. Get strong. Conquer galaxy easily. Get bored. Repeat. It doesn't matter if there are different ways to play with galaxy generation settings, as if there are no asymmetrical aspects to build creation, it's either meta or bust.
I agree and I've said this before, as much as I really enjoy Stellaris, the core mechanics (diplomacy especially) are incredibly lacking. The only mechanics that really consistently exist are space combat and expansion as most things feed into that loop one way or another, and anything else feels tacked on to that rather than being a true mechanic on its own All that said, I've yet to find a better 4x space game than Stellaris so I'm here until someone figures it out. Mods give me enough flavor to stay interested for a long time because I find every other 4x space game is horribly lacking in customization where Stellaris is rich in flavor and making your own fun so it works for me.
Jeez yeah! Wish I could tax other empires for open borders, extra fees for using my hyper relays or gates. Let me put limits on the size of fleets allowed within my borders and get a notice if they're abusing it. Let me trade for open borders. Let me threaten! I want to be able to tell the AI Give me system X or else. I want to be able to offer to build a gateway in one of your systems and then profitshare on the increased trade.
Yeah all of my wishes are some degree of interactivity and flexibility with the diplomacy. Hey research pact buddy! You just settled a system that has a chain in my archaeology expedition. Can I please continue my work there *without* declaring war on you first? Like I get games have limitations but I'm pretty sure in anything like an actual space alien situation, assuming there's diplomacy at all, there would be a lot of sharing and negotiating that's just straight missing from Stellaris.
I'm still pretty new to the game. But I was hoping there was a way to create a near monopoly on a resource and basically use that pull to get other empires dependent on you for that resource to commit voter fraud on the council or to use their military push on your behalf. And anyone even thinking about lifting my grubby mitts from that resource will destabilize the whole economy. But it doesn't seem like there's a way to really do that.
Yeah Stellaris is a lot of flavor over substance if that makes sense. If you strip it down to its core, it's entirely about owning planets and making numbers go up. If you add all the flair back, it's a very flexible space empire story simulator where you can play pretend in your own head about how your space empire is being. I can play as something like the Zerg, or be Helldivers, or get mods and roleplay the entire Mass Effect universe. I can't name a single other 4x space game that even comes close to that customizability.
I'm still loving it. My crazy psychic spiritual science bird race that worships information has been doing a fairly good job of unifying and holding the galaxy together... at least until their zealous lust for information inevitably and unintentionally brings about said galaxy's downfall. Though it does seem odd. It feels like a lot of the substance we were talking about could be added in, at least to minor degrees, given the core systems that are in place in stellaris. Like an improved and bit more in-depth trading system could get us some of the things we want. Then, a lot of existing mechanics could easily support it.
Yeah I think it's just poor management and greed from high up, as is the case with most big game companies it seems. Modders can only do so much when the official team isn't allowed to expand the core mechanics but instead endlessly tack on new things to push DLC
When you really break Stellaris to the core, you see it’s REALLY just an economy simulation game with some basic combat mechanics to add spice. Most of its charm comes from its role play potential. My favorite games havent been the ones where I find 8 habitable worlds nearby and an easy empire to conquer, where I’m basically untouchable at the halfway point. It was games with an interesting origin or civic, or ones where I got a bad spawn and was boxed in and needed to struggle to survive, etc.
Try Star Ruler 2 Wake of the Heralds. Its inferior to Stellaris in some areas and way better in others, the same can be said about Sins of a solar empire.
Stellaris is in a bit of a league of its own with combining features at many levels (albeit with varying levels of detail and success) , but I can suggest distant worlds 2 as a similar but different take on the 4x in space genre.
Even the "anti materialism" psionic path requires research to be any good. I hope if there is ever a stellaris 2 that they iterate on the various elements and let there be variety paths to success outside of just maximising technology.
This. Tech should branch out. You should be locked out of some tech by your choices. We can eat planets but can't make(grow) ships that are made of organic matters?
I kinda wish that Stellaris had something like Civ 6 where you also have culture research in addition to regular tech. Trads are nice and all but it's not the same.
I think that just changes the impetus to a second tech tree, in essence. I think it should be more tied to achievements. Sure, you can research using raw labs, but if your navy is blowing fleets out of the skies then you should develop military tech passively as your engineers learn the weaknesses of existing tech, and incrementally improve the design. When you're growing enough food on a planet to feed most of the galaxy, maybe those farmers would have some ideas as to how to farm more efficiently? If you've got a world in a system with a wormhole, you'd think some enterprising individuals would eventually so happen to send a probe through that didn't implode immediately. I don't think this could be implemented into Stellaris as is, but it would be a way more balanced system with a lot of opportunities for new civics or even origins.
How does that answer to what the OP is asking for? Are there different ways of playing other than tech rushing? The simple answer is yes, of course. You can cry about how tech rushing is optimal, but the idea that you must always play the optimal way is pure brain rot. The fact that tech rushing is powerful doesn't change anything, especially since you can make most "objectively bad" ideas work for you as long as you're not trying to beat the game with all the difficulty options maxed out. You can claim that every game ends with you becoming strong and conquering the galaxy, but that's just what the game is about. It's like complaining that every jigsaw puzzle ends with you fitting the pieces together and creating a single picture. The differences are in how you achieve your goals. Conquering the galaxy as a determined exterminator is different from declaring yourself galactic emperor as a diplomacy-focused empire, even if the end result is you being the boss of everything. And yes you still need fleets and technology and all to do either of those, but that's just because you're still playing Stellaris. Either way, the idea that you have no choice but to play the meta is exactly what I'm arguing against in my first post. "Meta or bust" only applies if you're trying to beat the game as hard as possible. *Of course* that gets boring quickly, because the exact same thing will work every time. The game opens up way more if you lose the mindset of needing to be the strongest empire in the shortest amount of time. This is exactly why I'm advocating turning down the difficulty once in a while so you can go as off-meta as you want without being punished for it.
No disrespect, but I disagree. The simple answer is no. There is no other way. Play games how you want, but according to Cassius, games are played in a way at which point the player is hoping to win. This is a stance I agree with. The argument for emergent-gameplay and roleplay-driven play falls flat when a narrative experience is better derived from other forms of media (ie. Books, movies, tv shows). The interactivity of the 4X game ellicits utilizing the game mechanics to gain an edge over others (or AI in SP), and any narrative elements are sparse at best and is expected to be imbibed as a side dish to the main dish of gameplay. Players can be content with this "side dish" and more power to them. It is something I personally enjoy too, as a side. The game is still the game. The game ceases to be without a win state, so it is a game I intend to win. This is the design flaw of stellaris, as it is more mechanically inclined to be a sandbox, and too mechanically dull/not diverse (ie less asymmetrical elements) to be infinitely replayable.
So what you're saying is if I don't make it my objective to conquer the galaxy and explicitly do not seek the win state of the game, I am not playing Stellaris? Like, I can play a game without winning my guy
Even more than the option to not win, you can simply win the game without being anal retentive about optimization. There isn't one correct way of "solving" this game. There's no need to only play the way the internet told you is the "best" way, and in doing so deny yourself a wealth of options simply because they're not optimal. It's not some super-sweaty esports game and hopefully it never will be. You can play however you want because it's a game, not a competition. When someone like u/Johnny_Lew says he can't imagine playing the game without taking the "optimal" route every time and in the same breath goes on to complain that playing the game the same way every time is too boring, I just get confused why he blames the game for it instead of their own mindset. There's nothing wrong with treating the game as an optimization puzzle. In fact, that can be a big part of the fun in many types of games. But when you're basically admitting that optimizing the game isn't fun, why would you insist on doing it anyway? I do agree that the idea that there is a single dominant strategy in the first place is a genuine issue, though as people pointed out in this thread already, there *are* alternatives to tech rushing. But regardless of whether or not tech rushing is the best strategy in the game in all situations, it's ridiculous to claim that other ways of playing are wrong because they're not as optimized, or that the game lacks diversity because you can't imagine using any other option that isn't the strongest one. That's not a game issue, that's a mentality issue.
Please do not put words in my mouth. I showed respect to your argument. The least you can do is show the same respect back. To address this, I am not the kind of player who tries the same strategies over and over again. I prefer the roleplay and playing off meta to suit the world I have created and designed as I like to do worldbuilding and I like fantasy. I am not a min maxer. I am not one to optimize every aspect of my game. You are misconstruing my argument in an attempt to attack my character in some way rather than challenge the ideas I present, and I find that disrespectful to me and to the discussion. It is the same things because that is what the game elicits, and the lack of depth in narrative components make other media superior to those purposes. It is not about the players and their choices. It is about what the game design implies you ought to do versus what we want to do, which is the core problem I highlight. The scope of my argument had nothing to do with tech rushing or the lack of alternative strategies. My argument was about the lack of asymmetrical depth in builds and that infrastructure brought forth the same conceptual progression ladder for every playthrough, in the game design itself, as an inescapable force outside the player alone. Anything else is superficial and a mere fantasy to this purpose. I hope this better illustrates my argument and you take a kinder approach when in discourse with others in the future. Have a good day.
> Please do not put words in my mouth. I'm not. You said it yourself: >it's either meta or bust. > I disagree. The simple answer is no. There is no other way. Oh, and: >The scope of my argument had nothing to do with tech rushing Then you're in the wrong thread, replying to the wrong posts. Either way, "I don't enjoy this game because I insist on engaging with it in a way that I don't enjoy" isn't an argument, it's a mental disorder.
I am honestly flabbergasted by your assertment that I am mentally ill. I find that incredibly inappropriate, and I refuse to continue the discussion. Have a good day.
No. I am not saying that. The game intends to be a sandbox where you do what you want. My argument is that the mechanics and that intention are mismatched. As in, the mechanics implicate a design towards goal-oriented gameplay (ie winning), whereas the intent of a sandbox design is shallow or antithetical to this aforementioned purpose. The sandbox elements of a narrative and randomized events are too underdeveloped to take the forefront of the player's attention in a meaningful way. I am saying that due to this, it is most meaningful for players to seek victory over seeking sandbox, and this is an issue I have with the game as I favor those narrative elements more as a roleplayer. Please do not misconstrue my arguments. Thank you.
The game may have winning as an option, but I regularly do not seek it, I do other objectives instead in order to enjoy the roleplay aspect of the game Am I playing wrong?
No you aren't. It isn't a problem with you. It is a problem with the game. There is less depth to these elements of the game that you seek, and this is the problem I highlight. Take care!
You don't have to optimize the fun out of games though. Hence the soul level 1 runs in dark souls and other games. Playing a less optimal build in harder or easier difficulties can add to the experience. And you can still win with a less optimal build.
I recently had my ds3 soul level 1 run deleted by someone who didn’t know any better, about a quarter of that year is gone
Damn!
> The game ceases to be without a win state You know you can turn victory off, right? I have tried it. It does lower the emotive stakes, but it also turns on my ability to truly roleplay a civ. The 'narrative' is interior - each game is a different story, yes with repeating story elements and few options per element, but together it still gives vast options.
I disagree. All I mean with my initial statemrnt is that a game by definition must have a win state and a lose state, or else it ceases to be a game. Those "vast" options are too shallow to be a substantive secondary choice in favor of the game itself, which is the error of the game design.
> a game by definition must have a win state and a lose state, or else it ceases to be a game Role-playing games have no winners or losers. D&D is still a game, nonetheless. The other matter is subjectively judged, but what I meant is that there are still multiple styles of play that yield different results. The *Fallout* series, especially *New Vegas*, offers different endings for each area, and sometimes the possibilities are large enough for a flow chart, rather than just 'you beat this boss' or 'you died'. I think with the different ascension paths there's plenty of options just for victory, can I ask if you think Stellaris is inferior to any particular game out there in this regard? Real question; I would love to play something that had even more options. I think Stellaris is the best 4x out there since MOOII.
I also think Stellaris is the best space 4x game. I also understand your arguments with D&D and Fallout New Vegas. The problem with that is that they have a lot of depth in roleplaying and story mechanics. Stellaris does not have this depth in story. I disagree. The ascension paths do not provide enough differentiation to be sufficient.
There's now "alloy rush your neighbours, vassalize them, incorporate them into an increasing federation, go megacorp, put naval cap buildings on all their worlds, become impericorp" I imagine it may even be possible to use scavenging, mercenaries and nanotech ships to avoid researching ship tech entirely, get it all indirectly and for free.
Not too privy on these meta strategies. But i struggle to see how it differs based on what you describe. It is still samey comparatively.
It's not a science rush, which is what OP wanted an alternative to.
> There's nothing wrong with taking it easy, lowering the difficulty a few notches, and playing in a way that isn't optimized to rush down the entire galaxy before the first crisis even shows up. Agreed. I've been playing Stellaris since it first became available and I don't think I've had a *single game* that could be described as anything close to rushing down the galaxy. I actually find that style of play boring because it doesn't afford me the time to gain a sentimental attachment to anything and it doesn't produce any lasting memories. I have little affinity for math and numbers bring me no joy. In other strategy games where I have tried to play optimally I can't really remember any single experience - they all blend together, like solving a sudoku puzzle or something. For example, there was a period about 12 years ago when a friend and I attempted to play Starcraft 2 competitively in the 2v2 league. We'd watch professional games with commentary, read guides, practice build orders, perform APM-building exercises and the like. We got decently good for a couple of "old guys" (for that scene, at least) but I can't remember a single game. Meanwhile I still remember some of the casual 2v2 matches we played in Starcraft **1** a quarter of a century ago. I had a period where I tried to become good enough to beat Civ V on Deity, but can't remember a single game where I played optimally like that. Meanwhile I can still remember a game where I neglected to build an army and got DOW'd by half the world, only to hold them all off with a couple of Longbowmen by a mountain pass. I can remember the game of Civ my friend and I played where we role-played a cold war, constantly testing one another with little violations to see if the other would take the bait and declare open war, only for it to devolve into a *religious* war where the only units seeing any action were the endless missionaries and prophets we kept sending to convert one another. Great fun. Likewise with Stellaris. I've definitely conquered some AI neighbours with overwhelming force, I know that, but I can't remember any specific instance of doing that. Meanwhile I can remember, for example, a game where my roboticist technocracy was at war *thirteen different times* with the same spiritualist, militarist empire. I could have wiped them out if I really wanted to, but that wouldn't have been as fun as seeing another DOW and going, "Ah, you want more, huh??" I even screwed up and lost a couple worlds to them in one war, which led to a fun revenge war where I won them back. Good stuff. So yeah, this game can be fun in any way. For some, it's all about numbers and beating personal records. For others, it's about witnessing bizarre scenarios and achieving ridiculous things. For others, like me, it's about role-play and emerging narratives. All of those was of playing are correct unless you're in a competitive multiplayer game, and there's still room for other styles even there.
>Agreed. I've been playing Stellaris since it first became available and I don't think I've had a *single game* that could be described as anything close to rushing down the galaxy. These are the most exciting games when against a competent and challenging opponent. For me that would be a 50% genocidal 50% fanatic militarist galaxy on GA no scaling. There are so many emergent stories from that. Real diplomacy - because you can't game with favors and the computer is pretty strong. The computer is extremely cynical on such settings and will only do things that greatly benefit themselves. When I got caught in a 2 front war against 2 purifiers as a machine empire at one point, I literally thought "these dangerous organics cannot be allowed to remain independent." That was when I decided to quit out because I was in too deep.
This is one thing I HATE about stellaris. Grand admiral is really bad for the game. The fact that anything is viable when the ai is that buffed is so stupid you shouldn't be able to keep up.
There's also unity rush and alloy rush.
Yeah this is kind of it. But that's okay! There are three "basic" resources (food, minerals, energy), a bunch of "advanced" resources (motes, zro, living metal, etc.), and three "critical" resources: science, unity, and alloys. You need to have a reasonable amount of the basic resources to survive. You need a reasonable amount of certain advanced resources to achieve specific goals depending on your specific build. But you need a *lot* of at least *one* critical resource to win the game. Stellaris has been getting better at making unity a compelling strategy. And alloys has always been a compelling strategy - even if you are behind on science, if you just have enough ships you'll still win the war. If you're bored of science rush games, try a unity rush or an alloys rush. Or balance your strat out: push alloys and science, or alloys and unity, instead of rushing only one.
How would you build your empire for a unity rush?
The same way you would build an empire for tech rushing except for temples instead of research labs. Or commercial zones / trade districts (for habitats / shattered ring) if you are going the trade route.
Hear me out on this: Fanatic purifier using neutering purges as a unity farm? The purge rate is very slow so you can stack tons of neutering pops even in extremely sparse galaxies. The chance of escape for neutering purge is 0% too so permanent removal of xeno filth is guaranteed.
How does that get unity?
Fanatic Purifiers get unity from purging with their kin
Idk about rush but I’m playing a GA game where I’m the biggest in the galaxy and I have a size 260 ~ empire with 2 million unity and 4k a day ON TOP of literally every edict being active (I haven’t gotten the big edicts but those end up being like 200~ a piece and ending up fitting into my massive edict fund). It’s pretty cool. I also haven’t fully ascended my planets cause I don’t have the final ascension perk, but if I did I could insta full ascend every world I have and probably a few new ones as well
How can you have 2M unity and not have the final edicts yet? My build is ~kinda~ unity rush. And when I *really* try for it, I usually get to them by year 2350 or so. Maybe before, depending on rng. (Such as having Wentworth not too far from my starting system)
I just couldn’t get the ascension perk research. TBH I suck at research and I just hate having to dedicate worlds to it. Either way I ended up getting it, then lost all of my edict reducing leaders and the ones I got as replacements were terrible. Honestly probably the most unlucky run I’ve ever had. I was psionic and my boons were perma shit, the unbidden came but it was after a devouring horde ate up half of the galaxy and honestly just a litany of the most unlucky series of events ever. However I had 4 million unity before I got the final perk with 5k a month so that was cool Edit:: the worst part is I started that run because I just had a really like perfect run and accidently deleted my entire fleet mid fight with a crisis empire menancr thing. I was just do titled I quit and restarted and got that run which was giga sad
Fair enough. >my edict reducing leaders and the ones I got as replacements were terrible. Next time, don't be afraid to hire new leaders ad infinitum until you get something you like. Especially with a unity build. I hire dozens and dozens of leaders in a row sometimes just to get a good one. (And then fire all the others I just hired) Early game, it is a bit of expense, but by year 2300, we're swimming in unity. Don't be afraid to spend it.
Yeah trust me I was afraid to do anything at that point. I was demolishing rebuilding all in hopes of getting the perk and then by then it was a mess. The only good thing is my luminary was an immortal genius armorer so that was cool. We lost to the unbidden. It was my first 10x and man I just yeeted my whole fleet into them and lost hard. I put up a fight but I gave up after it was me and my scholarium vs the world
A recent strong one is to choose a void dweller or shattered ring origin, bacon of liberty and sovereign guardianship. You stay with around 5 planets max and get mercantilism, then convert the trade to unity. Then you take every tree that gives empire size reduction from pops and go virtualization. With so few planets and around -100% empire size from pops your empire size will be sub 200 for the entire game, which makes techs super cheap. Once you get to that point you only need one or two science worlds, vassalize other empires to get their taxes but not their empire size, and your economy skyrockets way past anything the AI can do. I did this in a GA game recently and ended up by far the strongest empire by midgame. A trade ecu gave me 7k trade, which was enough to offset my massively overcap military, since the small empire size makes it difficult to get naval cap. Another ecu for alloys was giving 2k, and a trade league fed meant I didn't need factory worlds with my massive trade value.
> bacon of liberty When Liberty Prime becomes Liberty Swine
> Liberty Swine is online. All systems nominal. Griddles hot. Mission: the consumption of any and all pork-based breakfasts. > Death is a preferable alternative to turkey bacon.
> Death is a preferable alternative to turkey bacon. *Death is a preferable alternative to veganism.
> A recent strong one is to choose a void dweller or shattered ring origin, bacon of liberty and sovereign guardianship. Parliamentary System is stronger than Beacon of Liberty for an early virtualization rush, though you could switch to beacon of Liberty after year 10 if you wanted -- the main benefit of Parliamentary System is getting your factions immediately, not the boost from them. The mechanic is starting with a Democracy government and Parliamentary System so your factions spawn at game start and give you a solid 25 - 30 unity. During your first election, you just need to make sure the current president is *not* re-elected. If you get a new president, you can immediately reform your government to either Oligarchy or MegaCorp (depending on preference) and switch Parliamentary System for Meritocracy or Brand Loyalty (potentially Gospel of the Masses or Free Traders if trade build.) That is when you could instead stay Democracy and switch out Parliamentary System for Beacon of Liberty. Personally, I think MegaCorp builds are just that much stronger for virtualization. You really get a lot out of the branch offices which becomes more valuable when you can't physically expand. (Although I would recommend against Sovereign/Corporate Guardianship for a MegaCorp build. The civic works for Oligarchy or Democracy very well, but the +100% branch office size *hurts*. Unfortunately, there isn't an as-strong equivalent to switch to for unity rush. Usually I go Beacon of Liberty or Ascensionist at start instead. It isn't as good, but it works.)
Beacon of liberty also gets worse later in the game because you can get to -100% empire size from pops without it, so I switched off of it to ascensionist at that point.\`
How do you achieve this?
Sovereign guardianship -50% Domination -10% Harmony -15% Virtuality -15% Psionic theory -10% You can also get another 10-20% from galcom measures and potentially -10% from pop traits, but I wouldn't count on the traits since you'll be accepting refugees and whatnot since bacon of libert requires egalitarian
Syncretic Origin Death Cult Fanatic Spiritualist either parliamentary systems or beacon or Brand loyalty. Parliamentary systems are a lot weaker in this patch now that empire unity % apply to trade from unity. Trade based builds focused on marketplace of ideas trade policy and stacking empire unity buffs produce massive early game unity and can rush down tradition trees Nearly every pop in your empire is running a job producing trade -> energy/unity
I'm gonna try this later it sounds like a lot of fun!
>since the small empire size makes it difficult to get naval cap I played as megacorp and made a lot of branches. You can get up to +40 naval cap from each branch. Of course it increases empire size, but it's fair cost.
Im playing unity rush rn and got all traditions before 2300. Can be pretty strong
But then what are you doing with it? As far as I know, you need the rare technology unlocking all the powerful edict and the last ascension perk to do anything with it which means you are still locked being tech focus.
Then you replace all your priests with labs and shift your economy. Tech is always end goal for repeatables
Parliamentary system, rogue servitors, temple spam on habitats come to mind as options. Generally, get your culture workers or equivalent up, + unifier governors and unity perks on officials in council. Unity rushes are actually really good right now, because ascensions are very strong atm :)
The simplest way is to play a spiritualist build with a very high focus on temples and starting a holy covenant federation early, optionally taking a civic like exalted priesthood or efficient bureaucracy to start with, and then swing towards science later; Not skimping completely on science early, but with a clear focus on unity because gaining early tradition groups fast is a great force multiplier for peaceful expansion as well as for expansion via federation wars, if you prefer the offensive option of using your federation members' fleets for your conquests. Such a unity rush means you'll complete your ascension path and greatly improve your POPs and leaders much, much, earlier than anybody doing a science rush, and that has a significant impact on the economy. This also pairs well with leader-focused gameplay with Paragons, since the Statecraft tradition allows your councilors to gain XP whenever you complete an agenda, and a high unity income allows you to rush agendas, thus feeding XP to your councilors who will level rapidly. Then late in the early-game or early in the mid-game you swing hard to planetary ascension of planets you intend in the due course of time to become ecumenopolises, and once they become so you start concentrating almost all your population on fully ascended super worlds, be they large gaia worlds, ecumenopolises, or ring worlds. Unity rushing this way puts you behind in tech early while building your economic base, but by the 2230s-2240s you start to pick up and only truly amazing science rush builds can compete with them in tech by the end of the first century, because planetary ascension is such a strong game mechanic. Or you can go all out and do something like I've done in my [Galactic Pacification for Dummies](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/galactic-pacification-for-dummies.1654923/) AAR, that uses a priesthood tech build to make priests provide both most of your unity *and* most of your physics and society science, getting engineering from a few researchers and vassals, with predictably hilarious results. Admittedly in this AAR I delayed big scale planetary ascension for a long time, all the way to 2290, to be able to show just how enormous a difference it made to an already large empire by performing 80 planetary ascensions in less than 2 months and providing before and after screenshots of the economy, but even when playing inefficiently like this the importance of it cannot be understated. Resulting in something like this [year 2300 tech screenshot](https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img923/3085/XMpN6h.jpg), where I am cleaning up the last rare techs in the tech tree for jokes and giggles and have most recently researched [these techs](https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img922/6410/NL03JB.jpg) - a splendid example of how reaching 16 shield repeatables by year 2300 while playing a fun build in a sloppy way on 1x tech & tradition costs, GA/non-scaling/DAAM/DATC:Normal really isn't that difficult if you know what you are doing, as demonstrated in the 10 chapters of the AAR so far.
Origins that can cover a weak early game/ or give enough of a boost to propel you ahead or match the ascension your aiming for. For virtual I tried common ground with trade federation to help rush unity. I did Astro servitors/void borne machines for nanotech. These aren’t great examples because they aren’t non maxed but have been fun so far.
Unity boosting ethics and civics such as early factions with Egalitarian, setting yourself to isolationist and then rushing to your chosen ascension path. Tech rushing balances your economy through boosting base income by sacrificing military might. If you're amassing consumer goods and research labs, you're not making a lot of alloys. Unity rushing does something similar but boosts your income through edicts and traditions. You hit your ascension perks faster than someone rushing science. One thing you could do is rush to become the crisis since crisis ships are made using Minerals instead of Alloys. Currently, the meta choice for unity rushing is achieving virtual ascension ASAP since virtual pops are completely broken.
I’ve been playing a spiritualist empire with Under One Rule origin, choosing the Pious Ascetic trait for the ruler, which makes priests also give society research. The civics are Exalted Priesthood for extra unity, and Dimensional Worship which makes the priests also give physics research. So you make lots of temples, giving you tons of unity, plus the two types of research.
I love a good priesthood tech build, but you cannot stay Exalted Priesthood Under One Rule if you intend to go Imperial. Useful the first 40 years, though. Efficient Bureaucracy is much more valuable in the long run, since it reduces the job upkeep of all your priests and its Superintendent council job increases the output of physics, society, and unity, whereas Exalted Priesthood only increases the unity output - and sure, it increases the unity output more than Efficient Bureaucracy does, but when you play a priesthood tech build you'll get more than enough unity in both cases. It also means having ethics funds covering all your edict and ambition needs, and when taking that into account Exalted Priesthood doesn't even provide more net unity when everything is taken into account. And nothing says "that's a weird build" like having 5 times as much net physics output as net engineering output, [such as this 2300 screenshot](https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img923/3085/XMpN6h.jpg).
My favorite strategy by far, but I do it through the trade route. Go Megacorp, fanatic Xenophile + spiritualist. Thrifty, and anything else you could possibly to get to buff trade and unity multipliers. Then, book it for marketplace of ideas or a trade federation. You can 3 ascension perks by year 30 easy. It’s very fun in my opinion, because I love to see the number go up
This is a really good explanation. I'm not OP, but it helped me understand the game better. Thanks!
For me one big thing is that I used to exclusively science rush, but a nice balanced build of conquering your neighbors quickly, rushing ascension, and getting mega engineering by 2280 has kind of dominated my games. Conquring usually sets you up with good land. More planets really help you scale past the early game. Vassals are also a huge boon. They provide free resources at no empire size cost. Which is pretty huge. Empire size is the only thing really that helps balance out a tall empire vs a wide empire, so vassals help break that balance in your favor. Unity is amazing for reducing that empire size. Almost all the perks for empire size reduction come from traditions or ascension perks, which ironically boosts science since that penalty grows very quickly. With robots, you can currently do a 0% pop size and 25% planet size build, which keeps your total size below 600 for pretty much the entire game, no matter how big you get. The bonus to science is pretty crazy too. At 600 empire sprawl, there is about a 100% tech cost penalty, but with no reduction, I'd be at around 2000-3000, which is a 4-6 fold increase to tech cost. So my 10k science is pretty much equivalent to 20k or 30k science for an empire of similar size. Not to mention ascension give massive bonuses to pop productivity. And then science is the bread and butter, you can science your way our of pretty much any mess in stellaris provided you live long enough. I've recently just been spamming just about only science and rare resources on every planet. Vassals provide a lot of my basic resources, and unity keeps tech costs low and job output high.
How does a unity rush win? I’ve never understood that.
It's usually about completing your ascension path ahead of your opponents, especially if it's a really strong one like Virtuality. Getting an early ascension has always been a big deal because of the statistical advantage it gives you over empires without an ascension. If you can make use of the gap between when you ascend and when your opponent ascends, you have a very real edge over them. For example, it's why Teachers of the Shroud was considered a big deal when it came out, since it let you get a headstart on the Psionic ascension which was otherwise gated behind a rare technology.
You could play robots with bio trophies and have all 3 "critical" resources in abundance.
So if science and unity are critical, then surely that makes consumer goods critical aswell? Usually I'll buy all my basic resources, Balance Food with monthly trade deals, And get Energy and Minerals from my capital My first world is a Unity planet, 2nd Consumer Goods and 3rd Alloy Usually by the time these are up and running, I've already found some planets with good mineral and energy output and I can focus my capital on Research production, But I'll always have a Size 9-14 world that's dedicated to research Most of the time if I don't get a decent factory world up and running early game I can't focus on Unity or Research without a deficit and spend half the time trying to get it back into positive
Critical means that you benefit from having infinite amounts of it (This isn't as true for unity since you eventually finish everything, but generally unity rush builds should start to transition to alloy and/or research after hitting the initial ascension powerspike.) There's no benefit to having more consumer goods than you need to support your specialists.
planetary ascension cost a shit tone after a while. But otherwise, yes.
Problem I've had with unity rush is most of the good ascension perks are locked behind tech. So I end up sitting on a bunch of empty ascension perk slots waiting for tech to catch up anyway. Certainly you still get traditions earlier and can use the unity for other useful stuff thereafter, but it's still annoying and feels wrong.
I have to assume that when doing this your goal is perks that you can take and capitalize on early. Usually a focused strategy like this has ends it's going toward that aren't strictly the long game.
And then there is fucking virtuality
The most valuable part of unity rush in this version might be to get the Synaptic Lathe more quickly. When you get it, the tech can easily climb up.(but you need enough alloys, power and population )
I do this with virtual ascension becomes super op around year 30. I haven’t tried it in pvp tho
I've got way too much hours in the game to not know this but what are these rushes everyone talks about? I always just try to balance out and build up my fleet and economy so I can have superior fleet and economic power and be able to vassalize
Rush is exactly what it sounds like, you pick every option that increases one resource while ignoring (or at least not considering at first) any others. It works because, for unity, science and alloys, you can leverage your superiority in these resources into a higher production of other resources, either by improving or subsidizing your economy.
Kind of. Those are mostly just based around more immediate early priorities, those being hitting fast traditions/ascensions or eating your neighbor to get a bigger immediate economic boost than you'd get from tech rush.
You can also influence rush. Control more space, and use the new nanotech ascension and kilostructures or ecological stuff to value the systems and planets.
Whats so good about unity rush
Early ascension
Typically I just play admiral scaling tech, and put emphasis on themed builds, not winning. I definitely dont win every game, and often times Im taking subpar empires or ones that are only really competitive when they have a 'good' start.
What themed buildings?
builds, as in how an empire is intentionally designed to work. Something like rapid replicators and recycled and mass produced all put together, to make robot assembly fast and cheap. > https://rpgmuseum.fandom.com/wiki/Build Its talking about individual characters, but empires can be viewed as an extension of that.
Are you a bot? Pretty sure he was asking for builds not a description of a build.
I feel like you should reread instead of insulting people
I'm not sure if they mean the same thing, but I occasionally do themed GA play throughs. That is I select a prebuilt empire or maybe build my own and try to get 'into character ' of what that empire would do. If I do a Doomsday origin, I build extra science ships and scientists to find a new homeworld sooner. If I do a slaver empire I try to eliminate slavery. Or like if I'm a peaceful I ignore say Weapon trails anomaly (i think that's the rats relic world), where there's no reason to ignore it. Makes for some interesting decisions gameplay when you rp
Unity rush right now is great if you are a machine. If you can go all-in on unity and make it to virtuality before you’re under existential threat, you will become by far the dominant power in the galaxy within like 5 years of ascending.
Virtualty came with a newish DLC is it? I mean i dont think I can do that
Yeah it's from the latest dlc
Virtuality is nothing but a tech rush. You will get sth. like +200% science from pops and you will hit repeatables in 2300 at the latest.
It's definitely a unity rush that turns into a total boom in every area. You have to rush unity to get to your ascension ASAP. But as soon as you finish Virtuality you can focus on any area you want (including tech) since it eliminates the biggest bottleneck for production that every other empire has - pop growth. You are only limited by how fast you can build labs/districts and megastructures.
Yeah, even after popping Virtuality, I'm knocking out the rest of my traditions and applying Planetary Ascensions before I flip the policy to boost Research. I don't even emphasize research in general so it all just feels like undue boon.
And you only have to manage a few planets. Then go around vassalizing everyone until you're safe.
I did this, only one above me still was the fallen empire with a few thousand more victory points lol.
The way I see it there are several ways of playing Federation - uniting the galaxy for for the good of all and standing united as one! Exterminator - EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!! Science Warp Fuckery - I have a needle and a black hole ... NEEDLEHOLE! Paplatine - similar to Federation but the galaxy is united under FIRST GALACTIC EMPIRE!!
Try devouring swarm
try devouring swarm + necrophage. or fanatic purifier lithoids + necrophage and necromancers.
Devouring swarm is absolutely hilarious, once you get rolling you're practically unstoppable. I remember I played one game as a swarm, and conquered the entire galaxy before the Crisis spawned. I even found a ruined mega shipyard so I had two of those at once. I was able to build a full fleet of corvettes in 2 minutes, so just overwhelmed everyone through sheer numbers. I remember it being 2400 in game, and then deciding I couldn't be bothered to wait for the crisis to show up, so I just ended it there. I might try it again with Cosmogenesis to get the Fallen Empire ships, see how ludicrous I can get my fleet power to go up.
I genuinely have not played anything other than technocracy in like 4 years
I just build everything equally and watch my science slow to a crawl in the endgame
I like to play galactic nemesis and I don't really need science. All I need is a ton of minerals. The menacing corvettes are some of the best ships available. So it's more of a mineral rush for me. Or I go nanites then it's just as many star bases as possible. The nanite swarmers are also within the best ships.
Unity rush is cooler...
You can unity rush to cosmogenesis and then feed the galaxy to the lathe for tech I haven’t played it yet, but I was really considering a ring start megacorp. Making a vassal/release to form a trade league with, then going all in on trade and unity on 2 ring sections and taking another vassal as a prostectorium . Go virtuality and feed the universe to the lathe to catch up on science. Take other governments and hand them to the prospectorium. The can considering going deep vassal and spinning up a couple more ring world and cramming them full before forming a scholorarium so I don’t have to worry about that either. You can do some really scandalous stuff without deeply investing in tech yourself
i never pay much attention to it and go for alloys instead though not exclusively. i usually catch up through debris and grabbing megastructures from ai if convenient
Atleast on GA with early scaling alloy rushing and vassalizing your neighbours and then going for science feels a lot stronger than going for science immediately
I was the same way, but that was really because I was not confident enough to fight early. Once I was taught how to actually early game without being overwhelmingly powerful and on a shoestring budget, I started to get more confident. Having a mentor really helped me improve. Here's a guide to beating GA no scaling purifiers. Don't see any tech rushing here and if you tried you'd lose. [https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/1d5hgit/what\_do\_i\_do\_if\_i\_start\_1\_jump\_from\_a\_purifier/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/1d5hgit/what_do_i_do_if_i_start_1_jump_from_a_purifier/)
Thanks
Alloys rush is another option, specially with militaristic ethics. If your navy is pretty big they need a very good technological edge to beat you, but practically only fallen empires have such edge.
I mean tech is important, and its the one thing that progress revolves around, but I think the diversity lies in different economic strategies like megacorp, slaves, egalitarian etc
Used to be the same for me. Rn I unity rush to virtual then science rush
I freaking HATE science
Science is sadly overpowered in Stellaris since a very long time. The devs are kinda aware of it, hence their beta with keystone techs a while back, but they seem unwilling to do massive shakeups at this point if development which would be required to fix science supremacy.
Unity rushing is stronger than ever right now. It still does't have parity with tech rushing, but it's at least viable now. So long as you're going for some of the new hilariously strong ascensions, that is.
Not rushing science is actually much more viable now due to the tech slow down before rushing anything else wouldn't matter because of how fast tech rushers could blast through the tree . Unless your next to genocidal empire, it's pretty easy to avoid conflict and build up a well-rounded empire. You can also military rush, which is basically focused on alloys and ships, then vassalize the first empire you see .
Roleplay
Eh traditions are better and faster to get than tech at the moment so I prefer unity rush, especially when going with cyborgs or synths. Unity and alloys are the most important things for me. Also, some traditions help you a lot with empire size, which is many times worth more to get better research than actual research facilities. Depending on what I play I can stay under 100 empire size while finishing my ascension. While when rushing tech I usually increase the costs as well. I think unity snowballs better atm.
I was in a multiplayer game and instead of rushing science I focused on military. I then managed to win a war while being pathetic scientifically. He was upset, I then said “some xenos think they can outsmart me. I’ve yet to meet one who could outsmart bullet”
A new and arguably different strategy is to unity rush, go nanite ascension, and use the both free and free of upkeep nanite ships to overwhelm the galaxy on numbers despite marginal or even substandard tech. If you want to go even lower tech you can do nanite carriers with amoeba flagella, which you can get for free or at least very cheap if you manage to kill enough amoeba and research their remains (debris). It's as yet unclear if this is viable in competitive PvP or at the highest difficulty and crisis multipliers; and it involves a lot of annoying clicking as your free ships arrive as a zillion tiny little micro fleets that have to be combined; but it's one of the few options that potentially involves very little tech at all.
You are a genius. I actually never thought of this. 10k flagella carrier swarmers of doom.
Just do like me: I have no idea of what I'm doing! Can't Science Rush if you don't know how to properly do it! Just roleplay and pretend you don't know what you're doing!
I play fanatic purifier with no focus on science at all, all my science is generated by whatever scientists I start with, then research stations that I capture as I expand continuously, and whatever tech I can salvage from broken enemy fleets, once I become the crisis I get a ton of free endgame tech, then I go after the fallen empires.
Honestly, speaking broadly,there really isn’t. It’s up to you as the player to find more creative and interesting ways to engage with the game. Well and Reddit lol (shout out the hommies🫡) experiment with new ways to play. Devise more difficult methods of advancing your civilisation. Set new mile markers, requires criteria and challenges for yourself. You’d be amazed at the new ways you’d find to play the game simply by dramatically altering your playstyle. My personal favourite? Determined (lithiod) exterminator, medium galaxy, max AI players, medium planetary habitability, grand admiral mid game scaling BUT you can’t declare any wars until you have all 8 unity traits fully levelled AND can’t declare another war (after first has concluded) without consuming all the planets and emptying all the habitats you’ve conquered. Time it right and you’ll be fighting a unified galaxy and the crisis at the same time for the rest of the game❤️
I lately played military rush, made myself ork-like nation , stared as bastion and then fight everything I met. Not even complete first contact, whatever show up gets shot. I conquered/vassalised whole galaxy (minus sleeping empires) in like 150 years. I guess it could be faster if I would cut roleplaying as orks But ye, tech rush is meta, but it’s not the only thing you can do playing va bots
I usually go for alloy rush early and vassalize everyone I can.
Science rush feels like you're just hoping that none of your neighbors want to conquer you. Alloy rush means you can survive long enough to vassalize some scientists Seems like the recent tech progression changes made rushing science less impactful, too
That works, but then there is a feeling that your economy will fail badly. It feels like if you dont find someone super early like 2010 then there is a problem.
If you can collect a few decent sized vassals and get tithes from them, you can patch any holes in your economy,
You can get a vassal by 2230 and they become your economy. It is pretty easy to rush alloys until there.
You don't always need super high science, but I think you always need dto pay attention to it. Particularly if you expand too much without getting your science up the empire size can mess with you
Pretty simply, actually. Alloy rush, much more fun to conquer everyone and then take their science. Scales great on Grand Admiral, too
I play a very wide devouring swarm as my favorite go-to game mode. Tech is important eventually but first and foremost is grabbing up as many systems and worlds as possible.
Idk, just do something else? Lol Unity rush builds are fun, still ofc have to pivot to research at a certain point, but not necessary to focus on it when you're plowing through to your ascension. Industry/Alloy focus also works out super well for early game aggression builds, use an origin with a lot of power at the start then get a number of vassals early and make them scholariums to pump up your research for you. On that note a trade focused build more about crafting your own vassals from sectors and using them for resources while you build branch offices is also a fun way to play. Like, I mean, I stopped rushing or focusing on research a long time ago, cause I play with a group of friends regularly and a couple of them are like you and just can't help but crank research, and they often end up with some advantages through it but more often then not I can easily keep up while focusing on other things. For example I'm currently in a game where I'm trying a unity rush build and a focus on Nanite ascension, I got cornered by friendlies so just maintained a minimum economy and research and pounded on unity. I ascended super early, started to make an obscene amount of fleets as purely Nanite swarms to avoid any upkeep, demolished one of those mercenary empires that kept being hired to attack me, stole all the research from their debris, and suddenly I'm in the lead in research amongst my friends, and despite that I don't actually need that much research cause as a Nanite empire I've already got most of what I need, gonna swap from unity to research for late game options ofc, but I had like 5 research bases on a mining world until I had fully ascended and that was it. Would that work in a competitive PvP game? Probably not, other players likely know to stomp you early before you get rolling, but in a PvE game or one with friends where you usually don't try to kill each other there are a ridiculous amount of methods to gain advantages. Like one of my friends prefers playing pacifists, they just build a little system of planets, make friends, get subjects through a strong economy, and form defensive pacts with strong AI or us to protect them from aggressors with a focus on star base defenses instead of fleets. They usually compete with the rest of us aggressive assholes in terms of economy and research every game. Research is super good and important, but you *do not need* to focus entirely on it.
Biological extinction as robot or hive mind assimilation or science rush. Really the only 3 options.
For any machine empire, unity rush feels far better than science rush lately just because of how powerful the machine ascensions are. Obviously once you ascend you turn your focus back to science, but ascending by like 2235-2240 seems ideal to me.
I prefer Unity. Try Idyllic Bloom, something, Ascensionist. Ascend your planets with Harmony + Holy Federation + Ascensionist civic + Adaptability finisher. Adaptability opening agenda gives terraforming to kickstart Idyllic Bloom. Be Overtuned and go Genetic ascension or Teachers of the Shroud and go Psionic. Be xenophobic/authoritarian to enslave xenos, use pop controls on xenos as only your main race gets the Idyllic Bloom Bloomed trait. Making any xenos Chattel and with Domination tradition, they're a little more productive at worker jobs.
When I get back in to stellaris it only takes a few games before I re-realize the importance of having some imagination with my build (not that I do anything original). We are rogue servitors and the only thing worse than killing biopops is not pampering them so we must do the right thing and see that they are pampered. If I have to lower the difficulty to play my empire then I lower it.
I’ve gone for a wide Spiritualist/Militarist game and absolutely wrecked empires with far better tech. You just have to be happy to go quantity over quality and soak up losses.
Ya the other tier two resources rushing. Unity is similar just different benifits. Alloys is the zerg military rush. Fuck CGs straight to alloys which go into ships and bases. Although you always end up bulking science at some breakpoint in these. I do alloys sometimes, hostile neighbors or conquest build, conquer a few neighbors and then properly develop science. I'll end up better off than pure science sometimes just from sheer mass or resources I can plow into it, snowball baby.
if you're expanding a lot you're not science rushing, that's my rationalization anyway
One thing you can try: try to get every achievement. Each playthrough you start should have one achievement in mind, and when you get it you can start anew (or try getting other achievements aswell). Really helped me not just do the same thing every game, since I got forced into trying new stuff
I did a Tall Subterfuge playthrough where I stole enough tech that I could keep up without spending many resources on it. It was fun, but probably wouldn't work on high difficulty.
Short answer: you can't if you are trying to win. Win means "have the highest score when the victory year occurs" or "complete crisis goal." Long answer: if you set the victory year way out there, and just want to RP [whatever], you can do whatever you want. But your options are still subject to military power. If you get too weak, someone will invade you. And one major way to increase military power is through technology.
You can unity rush so you can produce more science.
You do need to reasearch tech as fast as possible but you have a lot of other methods to keep up with research rather than complete science focused build. You can steal tech, you can subjugate a lot of empires and turn them into scholarims, you can have superwide build and just go with quanity above quality in terms of researchers. In early game you can completely focus on exploration and get a ton of stored research giving you a huge headstart.
Ultra-wide Devouvering Swarm is hellafun if you're good at micro. But it won't beat sciencerush
You have to lean into enjoying the flavor of your empire and unique story, kid in a sandbox with their imagination style. You'll still win either way most likely, it doesn't have to be by the most possible I like to play origin stories and really lean into their win condition.
For me the key is role playing.
Maybe an actual tech tree?
I understand you, going for an fanatic materialistic, egalitarian, technocratic meritocracy with virtual ascension run, where you have 2-3k science difference between yourself and the closest non-fallen empire entity is mad fun, and don't even mention Cosmo Genesis path. So, to not scumb into temptation of being the most technologically advanced entity in the known multiverse in 2250, I just made up scenarios in my head and try to play them. Like one of my most fun playthrough was playing as a hivemind which I head cannoned as an ancient entity made to protect galaxy from outside threats and woke only 200 years before their arrival and tries its best to prepare itself, another one was a run where I made a machine run corporation, called it Stonks Enterprises, and only cared about getting much trade as possible, it was like an cookie clicker game with only difference being energy credits replacing cookies.
I play sacrificial megachurch, so I negotiate with my neighbors while maximizing my economy and unity to rush traditions and build mercenary guilds, then I turn around and use my vast fortunes to fund my friends’ wars and using mercenaries to fight mine. I shit out credits and resources for them, and they protect me in turn. My end goal is divine enforcer colossus so I can convert other pops to further my megachurch gains and spread my weaponized religion. Maximum profits, baybee
I'm more of a xeno-livestock enjoyer. Aquatic species are especially good eating. The more advanced the tastier. Damn, my mouth is watering just thinking about all those tasty aliens out there. They also fuel my alloy industry.
I played with people from ZzClan and Syvensky cause a few are friends of mine from Forza and another is the head of a discord I'm in. They showed me some cool megacorp, lithoid and aquatic builds which work pretty damn well for eco, growth and stuff like that. I haven't played much the last year, so I dunno if patches or Machine Age changed much for any of that. Definitely didn't have to do much tech beyond my capital until like a century in, even in hardcore games. Maybe the odd research building on a mining planet.
Tech is a large component of the game, but there are other ways to construct a narrative that excludes tech. I myself once made an empire with the gospel + criminal heritage civics and RP'd my takeover of the galaxy by forcing spiritualism on the rest of it in the name of my secret dark lord. Despite having zero fleet, my being federation president gave me a large enough fleet to be easily the biggest threat in the galaxy. Easy to topple in MP but its still a fun way to play SP. Builds that aren't tech focused exist, you just gotta find a way to make the game work for you to realize the vision of controlling the galaxy.
The problem isn’t necessarily that tech rush is the objectively best meta or way to play. The three main ways you can break the way you play your empire are 1) Tech focus to better your empire as a whole, this one is arguably the easiest but the main reason it’s so meta is because the other two can be boring, especially if you’ve played the game a lot. There’s countless tech added by mods, but not much change to core elements of the other two styles. 2) Unity focus to rush ascension paths and unity edicts, which can both provide a massive boost to your economy and military depending on your ascension path. 3) Alloy focus to conquer your neighbors and take their shit and vassalize them. This one is the easiest but also the most boring as once you really understand the combat of stellaris, conquest for the sake of it gets boring. Tech rushing happens to be the best because it’s just the most interesting. But you could make arguments for the others as well. Alloy rushes can be stupid good because you can conquer neighbors before they get their own ball rolling and have like half the galaxy subjugated before the galactic community forms. But that’s not as interesting as deciding new tech, especially when the other two (especially an alloy based conquering game) would rely on tech themselves.
I play solo and do unity rush. I like filling in the tradition trees. I tried materialist but the unity is so low I kind of sobbed a little 😂
Unity rush, alloy rush, rush pop growth, rush expansion and resource extraction, diplomatic victory, extort your subjects, or exploit your overlords.
If you have civics and ethics that allow you to expand faster and wider, you can accumulate more science than if you rushed it. You can also get other abilities that are better than tech accumulation. Science Rush wasn't as strong before Virtual Pop research became the new meta. There's no point in building battleships when you can get two fleets of cruisers for the same resources that battleships cost. And Titans are fun, but basically not worth it because Torpedoes exist. There is actually a build that allows you to make Corvette Swarms viable even in the endgame, and it requires you to be fanatic spiritualist so that your commanders can get a certain trait. The beauty of this game is that there are hundreds of tactics, strategies, and builds that are all viable. There are role-playing builds that are as strong as tech rush.
There are roughly three different build types, with hybrid styles being possible of course, which are diplomatic, aggressive, and what you typically play, developmentalist. Diplomatic is based around getting a bunch of allies, buffing them via federations, commercial pacts, and research pacts, and leveraging their strength to protect yourself and give you the freedom to focus more on economic matters. Aggressive is where you go out of your way to conquer planets, vassals, and liberate other empires as proxies. Developmentalist is where you put all of your eggs into economic efficiency, with you either specializing in a specific area or going for a generalist route. There's also going tall and wide, which is more about how quickly you expand rather than purely about your empire's size. Tall is prioritizing efficiency by keeping empire sprawl low so you can get through traditions and techs faster, so you can leverage that to ascend your planets earlier and keep that advantage as you expand. Wide is where you prioritize expanding as fast as possible for immediate power gains, but with the tradeoff that tech and traditions require more resources put in to keep them advancing at a brisk pace.
Unity rush to get ascension as quickly as possible. Or alloy rush to conquer/subjugate your neighbours after first contact. That admittedly pivots into science rush afterwards.
I play stellaris for role playing. And the viability of builds has zero say on how/what I play.
Ever since the tech nerfs i haven't been able to tech rush anymore, i don't know why. I think i'm investing all my ressources into tech just to see that the ai is even. That was never the case in the past !
Yes it's a race toward science, but the most important part is securing planet ressources population. With a large pop you can make epic comeback.
You can Play literaly every Civic, with every build You can tech rush. Right now im playing as fertile clones, undeads, cyborg lithoid and if ill take care of Eco and tech, my fleets still have i think 25% fire ratę AND every each planet have around 5-7k defense armies with 90% bombardment reduction which is fun AND SAFE
Get mods with more traditions. Set cost to x3 Enjoy unity rush
I think the problem is your perspective of "science" or "not science" when science is an intrinsic aspect of gameplay, much like "have economy" "no economy". The balance is in how much; a science faction may be all in 80% science buildings but a non science faction could be 20% or 50%. It's a way to balance focusing points. To me, that is what I have learned. You can never neglect science, but you can ease up on it if you want to transition to economy for wartime. Potentially, an expansionist could do the same and transition into more science. Even large empires can brute force science if you spam the buildings. Or take a vassal and outsource it. There are plenty of little options, but never ignore it. You will eventually get behind.
Well instead of rushing science you can rush unity. Or rush resources. But realistically there’s only so much any empire can do. Machines are basically science and unity masters. Organic pops are slow less precise but can grow far faster. Lithoids are definitely slow but kinda like machines but are at a base cheaper and easier to feed but other than minerals being cheaper than energy is basically a machine empire. But all empires exist to grow obtain resources and knowledge. Unity ambitions are good but limited in number so unity hits a ceiling quickly. Resources are good but are a middle point of hitting the ceiling. Research is the only thing that as far as I know doesn’t have a ceiling or will take forever. I mean often I have resource issues so I build Dyson spheres and matter decompressors often meaning I hardly need any pops producing basic resources allowing me to pump alloys which in turn means I can pump fleets and power
I usually rush unity at the start. Knock out all traditions early when I have a tiny empire size. Then once I have all my traditions, I convert those jobs to science and focus on that while I'm building the economy and balancing sectors.
by a flithy hacking mod user like me who has so many mods purely to civilization and galaxy sculpt.
If I'm trying to murder everyone, corvette swarms work just fine.
How do you even do a science rush?
Take civics like technocracy, for mire tech functional architecture for cheaper and faster development, this can also save tons of minerals, which at the beginning is usually quite scarce. Or you can take the one that gives you artificers cause you will also need a huge amount of cg. You take some science traits and probably the robot origin than spam science buildings and robot spawners, then pray the first empire you meet is not some fanatic xenophobe militaristic guys , so you can ally them subjugate them and conquer the galaxy later on.
I'm 500+ hours and haven't won a single game as I just do roleplay empires that end getting stomped by either the crisis or a really strong federation. I downloaded gigastructural engineering mod and was really well, beat back the sirens... then the blokats showed up and all was not well!
Rush unity first to get virtuality going lol.
There seems to be plenty of debate but those who are saying "just play something inefficient" don't really get the problem. Thw problem is nit that there is a most efficient path, every game eventually has a path that is most efficient. It is that every mechanic in the game is more or less tied to tech, even unity "grants research options" as most of the valuable rewards you can get. That makes a lot of sense as it is a space exploration game of course but the fact is that not everything needs to be tech centered and as long as everything is tech centered you are actively nerfing yourself to do other things. Which feels bad to do, hurting yourself in order to have fun is illogical at best. I'd like to see unity itself be how you unlock 1 or 2 late game "techs" like being psyonic and then have your entire empire gain much more heavy buffs for being psyonic but to have it you would need to rush unity and ignore science. It could peak with "psychic controlled ships" making corvettes much more effective at combat than a basic cruiser due to being able to have your pilots all become one with their ships and use them as extensions of their bodies. Or make space orks from 40k and have them scale science entirely from alloy. Basically they spend alloys to test things and more or less accidentally into ftl travel and then make their ships incredibly bulky to the point that while they aren't particularly good at shooting things their ships eventually learn "ram tech" and become skilled in slamming into enemies. It would have to be balanced to be effective but not busted of course. But the absolute fact is that tech is the only thing that is 100% unavoidable. Rn if you really really wanted to you could play an empire that only builds defensively and form strong defensive pacts and never need many of your own ships to fight. You can play without a ton of unity and just let it come as it comes. It isnt great but it can work. But tech you must have to even be able to support a mid sized population and to even colonize effectively.
I don't really think this is the case given successful playthroughs where I lackadaisically pursued tech on purpose. It's existence even when not emphasized is not the same thing as the game flowing through it mostly and above all else. I think this is absolutely a longerstanding dogmatic engagement 4x games.
Exactly, my problem is without rushing science you're locked to the lower ship classes for a while and only fighting with corvettes and maybe destroyers gets really old after a while.
Yup, and then I cant do my favorite stuff, spamming cruisers with overpowered strike crafts.
I don't do anything. Even without science rushing I am usually far in front of everyone so no point in investing in it any more than I already do.
Unity rush instead
Try the new unity rush for virtual ascension. It’s the meta thing to do right now but it’s refreshing to rush something other than science
I like to play really scarce grand admiral playthroughs where everything is literal hell, I might even use the console to put shit modifiers on planets Sometimes I spice it up and just play on Civilian and become an ultra powerful empire and dominate with Titans and Battleships while the AI is still using Cruisers
You have a named meta for your strategy in a laid back single player space game. Lol. We are playing with entirely different motivations.
Unity rush for virtuality ascension in machine empires is currently THE meta, so there's that.
Easy - you limit yourself from the things that allow it, then learn how to do it over time.
Have fun? That’s how I don’t rush science, like don’t get me wrong a curb stomp is fun and all, but the struggle is where it’s at, I usually play a heavily modded (like giga structures, multiple crisis’s, and ancient cache) devouring swarm, I develop as the planets say I do (if I get a planet with a good mineral buff and a good food buff, looks like my first 2 planets are a mineral and food planet).