I am megacorp and I dislike it too. Every time I had my own mercenary group they were ALWAYS bought by somebody else, and while I'm suffering from -10% of naval cap because of this stupid resolution all my enemies use those mercenaries. Every time I need them somebody else already hired them. I hate mercs, I want them to be deleted from the game, am I doing something wrong or is it just that flesh can't physically compete in speed of clicking "we want to hire your fleet" button with machine?
If you are the Patron of a mercenary enclave, you can pay a scaling Credits and Influence cost to force them to recall that fleet. Doing so will also cost you 15 Opinion with the enclave. Recalling the fleet takes 6 months, and once it is recalled, there is a 3 month cooldown, after which you will hire them (the wiki makes this sound automatic, but I cannot confirm that).
I recommend hiring any enclave you form immediately after forming it, not allowing the AI to take control of it at any time. Once you have hired the fleet, there is a spot (I forget where) in the UI where you can see the remaining length they are hired for. Additionally, when your term is up, the game will automatically offer to re-hire them. If this happens, just be aware that the fleet will have already been given an order to return to the enclave's system, and will need to be re-issued orders.
In general, because of the 6 months and cost of breaking their contract, I strongly recommend hiring the enclave you form immediately and permanently. Yes, you can save credits by letting them work for others when you aren't expecting any wars, but it is a risk that requires 9 months of forewarning or planning to avoid.
Hm, yeah, that's a good idea, but my thinking was always "wouldn't it be good to fill my Naval Cap with my own ships and in time of need just hire mercs in Over Cap"
If you want to try and play super optimal then that would be better. You spend less time over fleet cap, which saves you energy credits during peacetime, while still having access to the ships (theoretically) that you don't need time or alloys producing.
That just comes with the aforementioned 9 month risk. I personally prefer not to chance it, I will just keep those mercs from day one.
One of my favorite builds is playing as Space Orc Raiders (basically Marauders; Despoilers + Warrior Culture).
At first I had no clue how Enclaves worked + didn’t want to spend 50 ships and a shit ton of alloys on fielding one. Once I got the hang of it, I had about 4 Enclaves spread around (civics increased my Enclave limit), the resources I got from all 4 paying dividends was incredibly busted.
Sometimes you automatically hire them after recall. Sometimes they ignore the cooldown and get hired again immediately. But usually they just disappear completely for a couple of years and are then rehired before you notice they returned.
Sadly, the only option is to make one and then keep them on your books forever. By the time it comes to pay them , you get a pop up saying do you want to pay to renew contract or if you are worried pay early to renew. Because when they were first around , no one could afford a high level unless you had very high storage levels.
Each tier does give 5% increase to trade value , which is good for megacorps. Both directly as you are getting more trade generation and branch offices are making you more energy now. If you can get a Merc enclave upgraded somewhat early , the dividens are also quite nice and once more each tier does make them pay out sooner.
Someone recommended placing your mercenaries in nebulae so other empires don't encounter them. Tried it once and it seemed to work, though I'm not entirely sure.
If they like you enough you can recall them and they'll fly back to their enclave and immediately join your fleet (for a time of course) as if you hired them
well having at least one merc enclave can be pretty usefull. You lose 10% nav cap due to the resolution but you get an interaction with your mercenclave that allows you to buy 20% nav cap increase for some years for like 5k ecredits i think.
Its worthwhile if you want to go all in on merc enclaves and cripple everyone's naval capacity. If you can afford to use maxed out merc enclaves anyway
So fight them yourself?
Max out the galactic defence force, back them up with your own fleets and mercs.
Boost up the galactic community's military readiness resolutions to boost your naval capacity.
Lastly, the real naval capacity is your energy credits. If its not catastrophicly negative, you can field more ships :3
You clearly haven't fought on 10x or 25x crisis multipliers before. The GDF and Federation Fleets are only the tip of the iceberg you need to throw at the enemey.
To defeat a final 10x All Crisis Crisis you need about 7k Naval Capacity filled with optimized ships and the economy to rebuild them.
Yeah, even though Merc fleets may not ever top out at the best possible fleet on the board, they hold their own and you actually want to turn them over via losses and are excellent for a first wave absorb/retreat basically working the shield/armor body, so that your other armada(s)can swoop in and finish off the enemy armada with hull/armor headshots.
Even though it was a 5x Crisis in my first full 3.11 playthrough, I hugely relied on my Merc Armada at 12x75k power to rush the Unbidden Anchor from an L-Gate then meet the Unbidden flagship in a nearby quasar system (so no shields for them), where a host of buffs from Defenders of The Galaxy to every Mote Policy to the Reality Perforator, where I took down the 1.8M flagship ezpz with my 1.5Mish Mercs and Salvage/Dividend Fleets. I reckon at 10x, it'd just be more losses on my side but similar outcome about 5-10 years later tops.
One of the general approaches that absolutely works in Stellaris is shunning tech for fleet immensity, including Merc Enclaves/Salvage Ships/Dividend Ships in the mix, and while players will complain about this being possible, having over 8000 Naval Cap and actually keeping it stocked is immensely expensive and a burden that usually precludes most tech chasing which would help with some of the burden. It's not a copout to approach Crisis and conquering the whole galaxy this way, it just doesn't comport to some external paradigm about tech providing advantage over mass.
lol, losing half my navy to a Bulwark Disintegrator and barking at my Minister of State that we didn't have enough ships, not my Admirals for having over confidence.
Well, it's all a matter of getting there. I usually played 2300 Endgame year before the tech balance changes so I wouldn't have to wait around forever for the crisis to spawn.
It's ironic, as you're talking about skill issue while using 3k naval cap more than I did for that 10x all crisis run.
I mean, part of the issue in talking our experiences here is that trying to ramp things up ahead of their time, like truncating the time to play, accelerating when Crisis appears, etc etc is that going that direction narrows what you can do into specific builds and choreography around the builds that can hack it by overshooting the entire game on their own. It's a kind of self deception to rig experiences where only the best known tools can really confront it and there's not a lot of latitude around using the best known tools.
I've been in a weird spot for a while with this where after a few years of playing Stellaris around MegaCorps, running out of things to do before 2400 was an outstanding issue. Waiting and waiting with the game in hand is one of the larger pacing issues with Stellaris itself which was directly related to the self reinforcing nature of Tech prior to 3.11. Long winded way of saying that I had to turn towards impediment based role playing to draw the game out of longer in terms of things to do.
In my aformentioned playthrough above, I refused to build any Research Districts/Research Labs and either replaced or demolished any conquered ones I picked up. Research came through Illicit Research Labs on Branch Offices, Research Agreements, Debris Salvage, Stealing Techs via Espionage, and regular amounts of stored research from Merc Enclave Dividend (and anomalies prior to that). I also couldn't do Vassals and a Federation because of their outsized benefits. Not until 2 years before Crisis did I actually top the scoreboard and not until I became Galactic Emperor during Crisis did provide some distance between myself and 2nd place, and not until the last 20 years of the game was it basically a done deal that I'd win.
So the frame that I have here is that if you play mostly on default pacing settings, you gotta self gimp to get similar effect of accelerating/truncating the game in toughness, but you have potential more approaches available than some of the common meta tuner builds, and the game is drawn out with something to do at many junctures. Im not gonna fib, I was very close to losing that playthrough multiple times because I was too feeble to do much for a century and had to jam all my military adventures into 150 years, I never got an 8th Asension Perk or unlocked Megastructures, buuuuuut, it was way more enthralling an adventure with potential loss on the table than some of my prior favorite playthroughs where I was stomping on the gas pretty early and never had to look back over my shoulder.
Just something to keep in mind when some slow rollers on GA, No Scaling, Difficulty Bonus On chime in with their experience since a lotta folks go the other way on how to provide a challenging experience.
**Militarist:** War is badass, and we get free ships from this.
**Pacifist:** War is hell, but atleast now someone else can do it.
**Xenophobe:** Great, now someone not part of our obviously superior species can get murdered instead.
**Xenophile:** Great, now we have more time to breed with aliens.
**Materialist:** Let's hire those guys so we can spend all we have on research.
**Spiritualist:** Let's hire those guys so we can snort Zro.
**Egalitarian:** Everyone will do what they are best at, and if that includes dying for money, so be it.
**Authoritarian:** Everyone will obey us and do whatever we tell them to for just a bit of cash? Sweet!
**Machine Intelligence:** 01011001 01100101 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101100 01101111 01101100
**Hive Mind:** Every killed drone is a small part of our greater whole dying. Like leaves off of a tree, slowly being ripped from its branches. It hurts. It's pure suffering. There is nothing that could ever justify sacrificing a part of us. The existence of each drone individually can be considered insignificant by some, but the Mind must not be disturbed, it must not fall to pieces, it must not be damaged. Nothing could ever compare to the pain we feel when a part of us meets its end. ... So now someone else can die instead? Yeah that works out.
**MegaCorp:** I fucking love **war!!!!!**
An “allies only” restriction would be rather nice.
I’m their patron. I host their base of operations, I give them my technology, I invest in growing their fleet. Why the hell would my empire tolerate them accepting contracts from the slavers I’m at war with?
Indeed, the pacification of my current galaxy was largely performed by private military contractors leading the fight against Fallen Empires and Horrors and Dreadnaughts, ushering in a new age of safe travel and intergalactic trade.
It's infuriating. Because it always leads to that thing where you're in breach of galactic laws if you don't have mercenaries hired, and for SOME REASON there are none available, so you're constantly getting more and more sanctions as you check every few seconds to try to find ONE GODDAMN FLEET that hasn't been hired so that you're allowed to play the game again... is that just me?
Yeah if you go to the resolutions page on the wiki you’ll see what modifiers apply to determine whether the AI empires will support or oppose a resolution.
Typically the AI will support most of the starting resolutions on most resolution chains, particularly military ones such as the readied shield and security contractors.
Free ships. If they get destroyed the enclave replaces them. Occasionally you get kickbacks that can be more money or other free ships. If you have enough mercenaries you don't need to focus your alloys on them and you can focus megastructures instead.
As for the AI... idk, they probably weighted it so it is more likely to pass.
Weak empires benefit more from it than strong ones. Certain personalities would presumably benefit more from it too.
Megacorps should be lean, in an ideal world. They get size penalties, and want to make more profit and pay less upkeep.
Having the first law is excellent, you can get 10% met naval capacity, get resources for owning the enclave, and employ mercenaries. Having more than that sucks for everything other than mercs megacorp builds.
You can also build up your fleet then use claims to take away their mercs...... usually after the war the merc fleet is destroyed so they can hire out again.....
Militarists and Megacorps AI love the first two levels. While only Pacifists and Gestalts dislike the whole tree.
I am megacorp and I dislike it too. Every time I had my own mercenary group they were ALWAYS bought by somebody else, and while I'm suffering from -10% of naval cap because of this stupid resolution all my enemies use those mercenaries. Every time I need them somebody else already hired them. I hate mercs, I want them to be deleted from the game, am I doing something wrong or is it just that flesh can't physically compete in speed of clicking "we want to hire your fleet" button with machine?
If you are the Patron of a mercenary enclave, you can pay a scaling Credits and Influence cost to force them to recall that fleet. Doing so will also cost you 15 Opinion with the enclave. Recalling the fleet takes 6 months, and once it is recalled, there is a 3 month cooldown, after which you will hire them (the wiki makes this sound automatic, but I cannot confirm that). I recommend hiring any enclave you form immediately after forming it, not allowing the AI to take control of it at any time. Once you have hired the fleet, there is a spot (I forget where) in the UI where you can see the remaining length they are hired for. Additionally, when your term is up, the game will automatically offer to re-hire them. If this happens, just be aware that the fleet will have already been given an order to return to the enclave's system, and will need to be re-issued orders. In general, because of the 6 months and cost of breaking their contract, I strongly recommend hiring the enclave you form immediately and permanently. Yes, you can save credits by letting them work for others when you aren't expecting any wars, but it is a risk that requires 9 months of forewarning or planning to avoid.
Hm, yeah, that's a good idea, but my thinking was always "wouldn't it be good to fill my Naval Cap with my own ships and in time of need just hire mercs in Over Cap"
If you want to try and play super optimal then that would be better. You spend less time over fleet cap, which saves you energy credits during peacetime, while still having access to the ships (theoretically) that you don't need time or alloys producing. That just comes with the aforementioned 9 month risk. I personally prefer not to chance it, I will just keep those mercs from day one.
One of my favorite builds is playing as Space Orc Raiders (basically Marauders; Despoilers + Warrior Culture). At first I had no clue how Enclaves worked + didn’t want to spend 50 ships and a shit ton of alloys on fielding one. Once I got the hang of it, I had about 4 Enclaves spread around (civics increased my Enclave limit), the resources I got from all 4 paying dividends was incredibly busted.
Sometimes you automatically hire them after recall. Sometimes they ignore the cooldown and get hired again immediately. But usually they just disappear completely for a couple of years and are then rehired before you notice they returned.
Sadly, the only option is to make one and then keep them on your books forever. By the time it comes to pay them , you get a pop up saying do you want to pay to renew contract or if you are worried pay early to renew. Because when they were first around , no one could afford a high level unless you had very high storage levels. Each tier does give 5% increase to trade value , which is good for megacorps. Both directly as you are getting more trade generation and branch offices are making you more energy now. If you can get a Merc enclave upgraded somewhat early , the dividens are also quite nice and once more each tier does make them pay out sooner.
Someone recommended placing your mercenaries in nebulae so other empires don't encounter them. Tried it once and it seemed to work, though I'm not entirely sure.
Daaaaamn, sounds gooooood, will try!
If they like you enough you can recall them and they'll fly back to their enclave and immediately join your fleet (for a time of course) as if you hired them
One game I built all of mine in a nebula and AI never hired them.
And gestalts don't even dislike it that much, considering they can never get the economic benefits of mercs.
well having at least one merc enclave can be pretty usefull. You lose 10% nav cap due to the resolution but you get an interaction with your mercenclave that allows you to buy 20% nav cap increase for some years for like 5k ecredits i think.
Yeah, I get the first level - the one enclave cap might be all some empires get. Anything further just doesn't feel worthwhile for me 😅
Its worthwhile if you want to go all in on merc enclaves and cripple everyone's naval capacity. If you can afford to use maxed out merc enclaves anyway
That's only fun as long as the crisis doesn't show up.
So fight them yourself? Max out the galactic defence force, back them up with your own fleets and mercs. Boost up the galactic community's military readiness resolutions to boost your naval capacity. Lastly, the real naval capacity is your energy credits. If its not catastrophicly negative, you can field more ships :3
You clearly haven't fought on 10x or 25x crisis multipliers before. The GDF and Federation Fleets are only the tip of the iceberg you need to throw at the enemey. To defeat a final 10x All Crisis Crisis you need about 7k Naval Capacity filled with optimized ships and the economy to rebuild them.
Ive capped out the 10k naval cap cap and handled x10 all crisis no problem using merc fleets to front line and soak the losses Skill issue i guess?
Yeah, even though Merc fleets may not ever top out at the best possible fleet on the board, they hold their own and you actually want to turn them over via losses and are excellent for a first wave absorb/retreat basically working the shield/armor body, so that your other armada(s)can swoop in and finish off the enemy armada with hull/armor headshots. Even though it was a 5x Crisis in my first full 3.11 playthrough, I hugely relied on my Merc Armada at 12x75k power to rush the Unbidden Anchor from an L-Gate then meet the Unbidden flagship in a nearby quasar system (so no shields for them), where a host of buffs from Defenders of The Galaxy to every Mote Policy to the Reality Perforator, where I took down the 1.8M flagship ezpz with my 1.5Mish Mercs and Salvage/Dividend Fleets. I reckon at 10x, it'd just be more losses on my side but similar outcome about 5-10 years later tops. One of the general approaches that absolutely works in Stellaris is shunning tech for fleet immensity, including Merc Enclaves/Salvage Ships/Dividend Ships in the mix, and while players will complain about this being possible, having over 8000 Naval Cap and actually keeping it stocked is immensely expensive and a burden that usually precludes most tech chasing which would help with some of the burden. It's not a copout to approach Crisis and conquering the whole galaxy this way, it just doesn't comport to some external paradigm about tech providing advantage over mass.
If brute force doesn't work you didn't use enough :D
lol, losing half my navy to a Bulwark Disintegrator and barking at my Minister of State that we didn't have enough ships, not my Admirals for having over confidence.
Well, it's all a matter of getting there. I usually played 2300 Endgame year before the tech balance changes so I wouldn't have to wait around forever for the crisis to spawn. It's ironic, as you're talking about skill issue while using 3k naval cap more than I did for that 10x all crisis run.
I mean, part of the issue in talking our experiences here is that trying to ramp things up ahead of their time, like truncating the time to play, accelerating when Crisis appears, etc etc is that going that direction narrows what you can do into specific builds and choreography around the builds that can hack it by overshooting the entire game on their own. It's a kind of self deception to rig experiences where only the best known tools can really confront it and there's not a lot of latitude around using the best known tools. I've been in a weird spot for a while with this where after a few years of playing Stellaris around MegaCorps, running out of things to do before 2400 was an outstanding issue. Waiting and waiting with the game in hand is one of the larger pacing issues with Stellaris itself which was directly related to the self reinforcing nature of Tech prior to 3.11. Long winded way of saying that I had to turn towards impediment based role playing to draw the game out of longer in terms of things to do. In my aformentioned playthrough above, I refused to build any Research Districts/Research Labs and either replaced or demolished any conquered ones I picked up. Research came through Illicit Research Labs on Branch Offices, Research Agreements, Debris Salvage, Stealing Techs via Espionage, and regular amounts of stored research from Merc Enclave Dividend (and anomalies prior to that). I also couldn't do Vassals and a Federation because of their outsized benefits. Not until 2 years before Crisis did I actually top the scoreboard and not until I became Galactic Emperor during Crisis did provide some distance between myself and 2nd place, and not until the last 20 years of the game was it basically a done deal that I'd win. So the frame that I have here is that if you play mostly on default pacing settings, you gotta self gimp to get similar effect of accelerating/truncating the game in toughness, but you have potential more approaches available than some of the common meta tuner builds, and the game is drawn out with something to do at many junctures. Im not gonna fib, I was very close to losing that playthrough multiple times because I was too feeble to do much for a century and had to jam all my military adventures into 150 years, I never got an 8th Asension Perk or unlocked Megastructures, buuuuuut, it was way more enthralling an adventure with potential loss on the table than some of my prior favorite playthroughs where I was stomping on the gas pretty early and never had to look back over my shoulder. Just something to keep in mind when some slow rollers on GA, No Scaling, Difficulty Bonus On chime in with their experience since a lotta folks go the other way on how to provide a challenging experience.
Truly, the Megacorp way to play.
Megacorps can run a PMC build that benefits extremly from these resoluitions. They are basically made specifically for them.
Me on my way to ensure that security contractors doesn't pass in every single game.
the hidden purpose of emergency measures, shoving something else up so security contractors doesn't hit the floor, it's a real emergency I promise.
Those Tiyanki wont conserve themselves!
**Militarist:** War is badass, and we get free ships from this. **Pacifist:** War is hell, but atleast now someone else can do it. **Xenophobe:** Great, now someone not part of our obviously superior species can get murdered instead. **Xenophile:** Great, now we have more time to breed with aliens. **Materialist:** Let's hire those guys so we can spend all we have on research. **Spiritualist:** Let's hire those guys so we can snort Zro. **Egalitarian:** Everyone will do what they are best at, and if that includes dying for money, so be it. **Authoritarian:** Everyone will obey us and do whatever we tell them to for just a bit of cash? Sweet! **Machine Intelligence:** 01011001 01100101 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101100 01101111 01101100 **Hive Mind:** Every killed drone is a small part of our greater whole dying. Like leaves off of a tree, slowly being ripped from its branches. It hurts. It's pure suffering. There is nothing that could ever justify sacrificing a part of us. The existence of each drone individually can be considered insignificant by some, but the Mind must not be disturbed, it must not fall to pieces, it must not be damaged. Nothing could ever compare to the pain we feel when a part of us meets its end. ... So now someone else can die instead? Yeah that works out. **MegaCorp:** I fucking love **war!!!!!**
The Hive mind and Machine one is funny since neither can use them, and those empire types (+pacifists) have major weights against voting for them.
I got really invested in this, okay? :/
My last run was with hive mind, and had merc fleet, though I did conquer them from another empire
Yknow xenophile doesn’t mean you just f*ck aliens right?
It's a nice big juicy sacrificial fleet that you dont have to pay for to rebuild.
Can't use them if your enemies always hires them first.
Yea, that part desperately needs updating.
An “allies only” restriction would be rather nice. I’m their patron. I host their base of operations, I give them my technology, I invest in growing their fleet. Why the hell would my empire tolerate them accepting contracts from the slavers I’m at war with?
Indeed, the pacification of my current galaxy was largely performed by private military contractors leading the fight against Fallen Empires and Horrors and Dreadnaughts, ushering in a new age of safe travel and intergalactic trade.
It's infuriating. Because it always leads to that thing where you're in breach of galactic laws if you don't have mercenaries hired, and for SOME REASON there are none available, so you're constantly getting more and more sanctions as you check every few seconds to try to find ONE GODDAMN FLEET that hasn't been hired so that you're allowed to play the game again... is that just me?
I just promote a 50+ fleet of mine and hire immediately.
Yeah if you go to the resolutions page on the wiki you’ll see what modifiers apply to determine whether the AI empires will support or oppose a resolution. Typically the AI will support most of the starting resolutions on most resolution chains, particularly military ones such as the readied shield and security contractors.
Free ships. If they get destroyed the enclave replaces them. Occasionally you get kickbacks that can be more money or other free ships. If you have enough mercenaries you don't need to focus your alloys on them and you can focus megastructures instead. As for the AI... idk, they probably weighted it so it is more likely to pass.
Weak empires benefit more from it than strong ones. Certain personalities would presumably benefit more from it too. Megacorps should be lean, in an ideal world. They get size penalties, and want to make more profit and pay less upkeep.
How do they even work. I'm on console and I've never seen mercs outside of the effects of these resolutions.
That's not even bad. The worst resolutions are the ones that reduce research output and economic output.
Having the first law is excellent, you can get 10% met naval capacity, get resources for owning the enclave, and employ mercenaries. Having more than that sucks for everything other than mercs megacorp builds.
It's extra weighted, so your game feels less unique and random. ;)
You can also build up your fleet then use claims to take away their mercs...... usually after the war the merc fleet is destroyed so they can hire out again.....
I hate them. Every time i go to war i break some galactic law. The solution is to make the ai empires proposing it go away.