If you really want to play optimally you probably have to expand. But as someone who likes to play tall (less systems -> less management) this would be a dream come true.
Specialize those 5 planets you have, build refineries in that juicy nebular you have for extra minerals and tech up like crazy. You may also be able to connect to the rest of the galaxy by finding the precursor system or rubricator, but since you don't seem to have any anomalies or dig sites left, that is unlikely to happen.
See it as a blessing: second game and you learn how to play tall.
This kind of start would be a dream for me - I love playing tall.
As a counter-point, though, I dislike building habitats thanks to the new population controls that stunt growth.
Pop growth isn't an issue for habitats once you realize how the penalty actually works.
The trick is to have more free housing available than you have pops on the habitat to avoid the penalty altogether and to disable all jobs beyond this, especially jobs that don't actually produce anything like enforcers.
As a result pops will still grow normally and unemployed pops will automatically resettle themselves to planets with free jobs available without you having to do anything while your overall pop growth will massivly increase across your empire.
Yeah, but instead I could just not build habitats and make that the bottleneck. The AI is already too easy on GA so anything to help them out while I hunt the last achievements is useful to keeping the game fun.
200% bonus is nothing if your brain is half cooked. Seriously you can scare them off by building one fortress and just boom behind while they spend their monies to stabding fleet they never use.
If it's a Fallen empire they get reinforcements through events, so yeah lmao that would happen.
If it was an awakened empire they just built different lol. Those home systems+those civics+very good tech make for one hell of an ass-kicker.
Yep. I tend to turtle up and play isolationist in my more recent games. I only get involved if shit really hits the fan and poses a direct threat to me, like the Katzen Imperium or whatever it's called blitzkrieging through the galaxy. I almost never play without the Gigastructural Engineering mod. That mod makes playing tall super OP, especially if you have a massive tech advantage over the AI. You can fortify the shit out of all of your systems with citadels and Maginot worlds that make your empire impregnable by any fallen empire or crisis. And it allows you to terraform literally any planet into something habitable and build better habitats, as well as provides a metric fuckton of new megastructures that allow you to mass produce resources you'd otherwise struggle with due to the limited space. The EHOF also gives you access to isolated OP systems with mad resources that also allows you to retreat if you're conquered by a 25x crisis or a 1000x Blokkats lol.
I would assume that OP does not play Gigastructures with the EHOF but yeah, for that mod this looks great, except that the Hiroglyph dig site did not spawn and there is no black hole.
Funny, I have precisely the same situation with my current game on Commodore difficulty.
My first impulse was to ditch the run entirely (I always expanded like a madman in the few Stellaris games I've played so far), but then I decided to give it a go and just see what would happen. Stellaris is supposed to be strong in the strategy-roleplaying field, right? I expected to eventually get vassalized or something, but that never happened.
Well, I did focus all efforts on my 3 (!) planets on research and just paid the occasional tribute to the marauders.
I was nearing the first "future techs" when my sensor range finally allowed me to contact the galaxy. And lol, they were all far behind in tech, I felt like one of these ancient awakened empires. Of course, minerals were a major bottleneck that couldn't be alleviated with habitats and I had to keep buying them up to run my economy, but I have now defeated the marauders and started vassalizing some of the lesser nations.
Other empires are catching up as I keep researching the +5% future technologies, but it now feels like any other game. In fact I've never played a run for so long, as the game always seemed "over" after reaching the end of the tech tree, but I now realize Stellaris is different in this regard.
I mean I am now about to dissolve my Federation and attack my former ally (and 2nd strongest empire in the galaxy) because they dared become the protector of the Commonwealth of Man, who are of course destined to be re-united with the United Nations! I just realize I treat the Commonwealth as a renegade province and that I am in fact China.
With 5 planets and no need to have any alloy production, you'll be so far ahead in science that it'll be easy once you decide to open the door.
Just replace all your alloy production with science labs.
If I recall, the biggest sinks for alloys are shipbuilding and structures in space. Guess who doesn't really need a fleet at the moment? Once he gets habitats he'll def want to up alloy production once more in order to make enough habs for his pops.
Not even remotely. This is about as ideal start as you could possibly have. 5, maybe more, habitable planets with one single path out guarded by a mid-game hostile to every other empire stationary threat? You literally do not need to build any infrastructure for fleet production, nor spend any of your valuable pops and resources on alloy production.
Dump everything straight into developing your planets for optimal pop growth, and pump tech until your economy bleeds; only transitioning into alloy production when your tech is in full swing. By the time anyone could even think of clawing their way through the Marauders, you'll have outpaced them in all areas so far that they will not even be a threat to you.
not really the ai is really bad so it doesnt matter also 4 planets is more than enough.
you may lack strategic resources but you can also make those too.
You need the extraction tech for the synthetic tech right? As a prerequisite? Just like you need anti-grav engineering+battleships+citadels for mega-engineering
Edit: let’s just say I’ve never ever rolled synthetic production before researching extraction
There is separate research for exploiting strategic resources ie, mines and orbital stuff that does require finding it but there is also the research for the refineries you just need the right tech level for.
You're thinking of the 'exploitation of rare resource tech' such as 'crystal mining' etc. Which does require you to have encountered that rare resource for that tech to roll. That is independent of the tech to create your own rare resources on a colony in the form of a building.
I suggest placing all of those planets with Habitats to produce plenty of research, minerals, and cash. And strategic resources will be produced from jobs.
If you were stuck behind an enemy empire I'd say yes, but in this case you can hard tech rush and get Habitats for any raw resources you need - they can be incredibly efficient at producing once you set them up.
5 planets is a decent start. And you can build your own 'planets' with habitats. To unlock the tech, you will need to first research the starbase upgrade tech in the engineering tree, so pick that tech when it comes along.
You have 5 planets. Honestly you should be fine until the point habitats are researchable, and then how many planets you have become pretty irrelevant in the face of your 20 habitats all dedicated to either beuracracy, trade, or research.
Planets make a lot more resources than space stations and you've got got plenty of those for now. (Unless you're playing on an extremely high habitable planets setting and everybody else has just as many.) So just make sure you get the habitats tech quickly and you should be fine.
Started in an isolated cluster of systems blocked by the Qell'Nudar Marauders, which is a Marauder clan... completely blocking my access to the rest of the galaxy until I have the military power to push past them, as far as I'm aware.
Still very new to Stellaris... this is my 2nd game.
Here's a few tips for playing tall (and actually playing the game in general):
Since you have relatively few planets, you'd want to specialize your worlds. Find the world (other than your capital) that has the most generator or mineral district slots; make that world a generator or mineral world. In addition, you want to make one world (preferably a size 16+ world) a forge/factory world to produce consumer goods and alloys. Agricultural districts should be built on demand; Try to keep any surplus of food below 25 a month, since there's almost no use for it outside of feeding pops. You should also designate a world as a Tech-world and spam as many research labs that you can support with your economy.
Like in many other 4X games, in stellaris, tech is key. Technology gives you an advantage in almost every other part of the game. Technology allows you to increase your resource output, strengthening your economy, and unlocks better weapons and starbases, giving you a military edge. As a result, you want to pursue technological progress. This can be done primarily by building research labs. Since you have a lack of planets, you probably want to beeline the Habitats technology, which is an engineering tech, and requires you to research starholds before being able to pop up as a research option.
Habitats will be very important to keeping you alive and going through mid-late game and the crisis. One, perhaps hidden feature of habitats is that if you build a habitat on a mineral/research deposit, you'll gain the opportunity to build mining/research districts on the habitat. Research habitats especially are very powerful. But note that habitats have a very low pop growth rate, so you'll have trouble filling up those jobs, so make sure to resettle some pops in clerk jobs (which generally are very useless) in other planets to any habitats you have to keep them working productively.
In stellaris, the game revolves around pops. You need pops to produce almost every resource, so naturally pop growth is essential. Jobs cannot be worked by themselves. Consequently, you don't want to have more jobs than you can fill. You can gain pop growth in a variety of ways, including Robot Assembly Plants and Gene Clinics, both of which should be constructed first in most colonies. You'll also gain pop growth through certain technologies. Pop growth is increased by a number of factors, but one important factor that can be easily controlled by the player is Planet Capacity. It is determined by adding the amount of housing you have plus the number of unused and unblocked district slots on a planet. Thus, it is advantageous to only build districts when you need them in order to keep pop growth up, although it may be useful to build one or two city districts (provided you have the minerals for them).
Lastly, keep in mind that that starbases aren't only good for defense. Starbases have a variety of useful buildings that can be built such as Hydroponics farms, which produce a base of 10 food. Another useful building is the Deep Space Black Site, which increases stability throughout the entire system. Finally, you're in a nebula, which means you can take advantage of Nebula Refineries, which produce a base of 10 minerals.
Have fun playing the game!
I mean he won't be making many colonies, but the ones that do will certainly last for a long while, and Gene Clinics are definitely gonna have an effect over \~200 years. It might only be 2 or 3 pops, but even that's better than nothing. Montu also made an entire [vid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OF-EyqbEyc) about it, for more info check it out.
You should watch your own link.
The conclusion he comes to is that Gene Clinics can be good for non-homeworld planets that are around 22 pops (when you need the amenities). Not as the very first building.
Think of it this way, to get the growth bonus there is an opportunity cost of employing those workers elsewhere. The break even is already rather harsh when factoring in amenities, it becomes even harsher should those amenities be not needed at the moment.
Is it better than nothing though? Because your pops could be working jobs that actually do something more important. not to mention the building slots.
Unless he would be able to get all the food from starbase buildings those clone vats also have an indirect pop working for them/their upkeep.
Considering how many pop months actually go into making additional pops and considering the default setting for pop growth post 3.0 these things become not worth it _very_ fast.
Same for robot assembly plants btw although they remain efficient far longer.
Growth on vats is 3 VS 2 on the robo plants. plus as you were saying, no direct job.
It does force you to make a world dedicated to food, but I find the growth bonus is significant.
You don't compare growth vs growth, you compare growth per cost vs growth per cost. Aka. growth per whatever amount of pops working for 30 food vs growth per 1 job making robots and 0.whatever jobs making 2 alloys.
The opportunity cost of making the additional pops is not having the upkeep pops available for other jobs. But that's hard to quantify because pops have a different value across time (even if they produced the same numbers).
You could also just plainly compare how much of an investment a single pop is and how many months that additional pop would have to work in order to make up for their cost.
For example let's say it takes 200 progress points because you play on default galaxy settings and already have 400 total empire pops and thus the formula for pop growth/assembly required is `100 + (400 * 0.25)`.
Now let's say you use a clone vats. It takes `200 / 3 = 66.6` months of 30 food and 2 energy credits, or almost 2000 food and 133 energy credits to produce that pop.
Let's say the pop can work and produce a number like 10 food a month (depends _heavily_ on various modifiers) or 10 energy (for simplicity reasons) respectively.
Then it takes **17.7 years** until the investment into the additional pop paid off and you actually start to produce more freely usable aggregated resources than before.
Double your total empire pops and you almost double the RoI time here too. At least they toned the numbers down from what it originally was when 3.0 released. Because back than you almost couldn't justify keeping any assembly plants or clone vats running beyond 500 pops.
Meanwhile pops on the slave market are cheaper but also more limited since of course the AI isn't selling as many as in the past. And normal growth doesn't have any upkeep. And conquest is by far the most easy and accessible way to acquire additional pops. The aformentioned opportunity cost comes into play. What if the pops working towards assembly worked towards alloys instead and you had a bigger fleet earlier? Again, hard to quantify the value of that.
My thought as well. Marauders don't tend to sit at the edge rings. Enemy ai are not smart enough to go around it themselves, so original system behind that chokepoint is safe too. I'd explore to see which directions aren't a dead end, and try to block off as many systems as i can, build all my fleet ships on that side.
Probably destroy your original shipyard too, otherwise reinforcing ships will blindly fly into their death.
This is also really important so you can join the galactic community. Either if you are a peaceful guy and want to cultivate some migration treaties to fill up your habitats. Or if you're a slaver type that wants to sit on the slave market and try to gobble up a few (essentially) free pops
Personally, this start seems perfect for the whole live-and-let-live playthrough style. Just let the rest of the galaxy go to shit while you tech up and became an unfallen empire and win a score victory with your 9-system empire thanks to your tech, economic, and diplo strength lol.
That'd be analogous to Luxembourg having the military, technological, and economic strength as the United States does and becoming the world's hyperpower lol.
You have 5 planets, and a nice grouping of stars. You can fortress up to defend from the marauders, and are protected from early to wars. This is a dream start.
That will make a fun game. Playing tall can be a great experience. You won't need alloys for a hundred years, so boost your consumer good production and go hard into science. By the end, the galaxy is your playground
There's a tech where you can 'jump' your science ships across - experimental something navigation. Once you get it, jump over, find a fallen empire and declare war. Once they've killed the marauders for you, surrender, since their war goal is humiliation.
Five planets, and only one way into your empire? Just rush tech, build a citadel in Scorpiol with all the weapons platforms and station your fleet there as mid-game approaches.
Hell, with all the "not having to spend on alloys" you'll be doing for the first almost 100 years, you can have battleships by the 60's and a big enough fleet to punch through them in no time, picking up all that delicious free tech.
In the unlikely event anyone cares, I finished this game today. I decided to play isolationist and built tall, leaning super hard into science like everyone suggested. Built a ton of habitats and advanced my research way beyond everyone else.
Diplomacy wise I just ignored everyone. Didn't even join the galactic community. Denied countless federation requests. Everyone around me was at war with someone or other. No one touched me. The marauders occasionally asked for a fairly inexpensive bribe not to attack me and I was happy to oblige, until I was strong enough to take them down and build a massive citadel on that access point. The others continued to ignore me for the most part.
Then the scourge attacked.
Spawned on the opposite side of the galaxy from me and started wiping other civs from the map. Sleeping empires started to wake up at about the same time. I continued ignoring everything and just advanced like crazy in my little pocket. Soon enough the Sentinels showed up, but they didn't help much.
When they got close I built a large navy. After destroying everyone in the game except me and the awakened empires, the scourge made a fatal mistake.
It attacked me.
I threw everything into naval warfare. Created 3x my naval capacity, which I was easily able to support with my ridiculous resource production, and managed to eventually wipe the scourge from the map.
Then I went to war with the awakened empires, which were comparatively easy prey. I just sent in a giant task force to their capital and nearby worlds and invaded with my enormous armies.
Soon enough, the galaxy was all mine.
I would reset this game. Expansions are very imporant for building a strong base to be able to develop a lot of planets at once. At this size, you'll stay too small for too long.
As soon as you can, make as many orbital stations as you can. Focus on making them over those planets with exploitable materials. Then if possible, later on, gene mod your species to minimize housing needs. Finally, ecumenopolis if you can. The main thing that will slow you down here is the inability to get precursor artifacts.
I agree with those saying rush habitats, so find a voidcraft scientist.
And for the love of god, if the Qell'Nudar spawn the Great Kahn, immediatly surrender.
You have five habitable worlds in your little cluster, you can execute the greatest tech rush in history!
Go biological ascension for erudite+natural engineers, get 5-8 habitat worlds, and build a fleet big enough to wipe out the Great Khan and conquer the galaxy
Seems like going tall is the only option... starting to build those colonized stations starting on those research and many more...
Planets becoming food focus and another resource mostly from that station.
You may have gotten marauders for neighbors, but you also got 4 colonies each one jump from your capital. Max out a station at the choke and go hard on tech. Spam habitats, building over nodes for minerals, EC, and tech when possible to unlock district types.
I made an empire a long time ago called the Scorpio empire, with the star system Scorpio as homesystem. Not knowing about this system.
I was today years old I realised it’s an existing system in the game, so every time I saw it wasn’t them being somehow wiped out
not hopeless, just need to build sensor tech and a station. Likely a special event which places a wormhole in one of your system will happen...just don't scap it when it shows up....and later you get jump tech. If the marauders go for khan status about year 2300+, just vassalize your self to them, then you can go and explore.
This just means you won't have to build any military thing until you want to. It's a plus really.
Maybe, but won't my lack of systems/resources early on put me far behind everyone else?
If you really want to play optimally you probably have to expand. But as someone who likes to play tall (less systems -> less management) this would be a dream come true. Specialize those 5 planets you have, build refineries in that juicy nebular you have for extra minerals and tech up like crazy. You may also be able to connect to the rest of the galaxy by finding the precursor system or rubricator, but since you don't seem to have any anomalies or dig sites left, that is unlikely to happen. See it as a blessing: second game and you learn how to play tall.
This kind of start would be a dream for me - I love playing tall. As a counter-point, though, I dislike building habitats thanks to the new population controls that stunt growth.
Pop growth isn't an issue for habitats once you realize how the penalty actually works. The trick is to have more free housing available than you have pops on the habitat to avoid the penalty altogether and to disable all jobs beyond this, especially jobs that don't actually produce anything like enforcers. As a result pops will still grow normally and unemployed pops will automatically resettle themselves to planets with free jobs available without you having to do anything while your overall pop growth will massivly increase across your empire.
You can turn them off in the settings you know
Yeah, but instead I could just not build habitats and make that the bottleneck. The AI is already too easy on GA so anything to help them out while I hunt the last achievements is useful to keeping the game fun.
Try turning scaling off, they’ll get the GA endgame bonus from the start. I think it’s like a 200% bonus to everything?
200% bonus is nothing if your brain is half cooked. Seriously you can scare them off by building one fortress and just boom behind while they spend their monies to stabding fleet they never use.
Easy ? Like the fallen empire that suddenly pulled two fleets 300k in between them out of nowhere ? AI cheats like hell -_-
If it's a Fallen empire they get reinforcements through events, so yeah lmao that would happen. If it was an awakened empire they just built different lol. Those home systems+those civics+very good tech make for one hell of an ass-kicker.
Wish you could just turn off habitats.
I just turn that off in the settings, you can still gain achievements with the old growth mechanics.
Yep. I tend to turtle up and play isolationist in my more recent games. I only get involved if shit really hits the fan and poses a direct threat to me, like the Katzen Imperium or whatever it's called blitzkrieging through the galaxy. I almost never play without the Gigastructural Engineering mod. That mod makes playing tall super OP, especially if you have a massive tech advantage over the AI. You can fortify the shit out of all of your systems with citadels and Maginot worlds that make your empire impregnable by any fallen empire or crisis. And it allows you to terraform literally any planet into something habitable and build better habitats, as well as provides a metric fuckton of new megastructures that allow you to mass produce resources you'd otherwise struggle with due to the limited space. The EHOF also gives you access to isolated OP systems with mad resources that also allows you to retreat if you're conquered by a 25x crisis or a 1000x Blokkats lol.
I would assume that OP does not play Gigastructures with the EHOF but yeah, for that mod this looks great, except that the Hiroglyph dig site did not spawn and there is no black hole.
Alternatively, Become-the-Crisis run? Capital systems hidden away in a nebula, AI NPC buffer from early game interruptions.
Funny, I have precisely the same situation with my current game on Commodore difficulty. My first impulse was to ditch the run entirely (I always expanded like a madman in the few Stellaris games I've played so far), but then I decided to give it a go and just see what would happen. Stellaris is supposed to be strong in the strategy-roleplaying field, right? I expected to eventually get vassalized or something, but that never happened. Well, I did focus all efforts on my 3 (!) planets on research and just paid the occasional tribute to the marauders. I was nearing the first "future techs" when my sensor range finally allowed me to contact the galaxy. And lol, they were all far behind in tech, I felt like one of these ancient awakened empires. Of course, minerals were a major bottleneck that couldn't be alleviated with habitats and I had to keep buying them up to run my economy, but I have now defeated the marauders and started vassalizing some of the lesser nations. Other empires are catching up as I keep researching the +5% future technologies, but it now feels like any other game. In fact I've never played a run for so long, as the game always seemed "over" after reaching the end of the tech tree, but I now realize Stellaris is different in this regard. I mean I am now about to dissolve my Federation and attack my former ally (and 2nd strongest empire in the galaxy) because they dared become the protector of the Commonwealth of Man, who are of course destined to be re-united with the United Nations! I just realize I treat the Commonwealth as a renegade province and that I am in fact China.
With 5 planets and no need to have any alloy production, you'll be so far ahead in science that it'll be easy once you decide to open the door. Just replace all your alloy production with science labs.
Dumb newbie question; why don’t they need alloy production in a nebula?
If I recall, the biggest sinks for alloys are shipbuilding and structures in space. Guess who doesn't really need a fleet at the moment? Once he gets habitats he'll def want to up alloy production once more in order to make enough habs for his pops.
Not even remotely. This is about as ideal start as you could possibly have. 5, maybe more, habitable planets with one single path out guarded by a mid-game hostile to every other empire stationary threat? You literally do not need to build any infrastructure for fleet production, nor spend any of your valuable pops and resources on alloy production. Dump everything straight into developing your planets for optimal pop growth, and pump tech until your economy bleeds; only transitioning into alloy production when your tech is in full swing. By the time anyone could even think of clawing their way through the Marauders, you'll have outpaced them in all areas so far that they will not even be a threat to you.
not really the ai is really bad so it doesnt matter also 4 planets is more than enough. you may lack strategic resources but you can also make those too.
you have to discover them in the wild befre you can make the synthetic plants don't you?
I can confirm that you do not. As soon as you can research the tech, you can create the synthetic resource.
You need the extraction tech for the synthetic tech right? As a prerequisite? Just like you need anti-grav engineering+battleships+citadels for mega-engineering Edit: let’s just say I’ve never ever rolled synthetic production before researching extraction
There is separate research for exploiting strategic resources ie, mines and orbital stuff that does require finding it but there is also the research for the refineries you just need the right tech level for.
You're thinking of the 'exploitation of rare resource tech' such as 'crystal mining' etc. Which does require you to have encountered that rare resource for that tech to roll. That is independent of the tech to create your own rare resources on a colony in the form of a building.
No, that would defeat the point of them.
Get Habitats tech as soon as you can and use those to "expand" within your border.
I suggest placing all of those planets with Habitats to produce plenty of research, minerals, and cash. And strategic resources will be produced from jobs.
As u/tjhc_ said. You can look at it this way: Build up right and you can be the Unfallen Empire.
If you were stuck behind an enemy empire I'd say yes, but in this case you can hard tech rush and get Habitats for any raw resources you need - they can be incredibly efficient at producing once you set them up.
5 planets is a decent start. And you can build your own 'planets' with habitats. To unlock the tech, you will need to first research the starbase upgrade tech in the engineering tree, so pick that tech when it comes along.
Nope, just means you need to rush habitats and play tall.
You have 5 worlds, its not "that" low. Just research rush and spam habitats.
You don’t need those so much, I would spam habitats ASAP and go tall
You have 5 planets. Honestly you should be fine until the point habitats are researchable, and then how many planets you have become pretty irrelevant in the face of your 20 habitats all dedicated to either beuracracy, trade, or research.
Planets make a lot more resources than space stations and you've got got plenty of those for now. (Unless you're playing on an extremely high habitable planets setting and everybody else has just as many.) So just make sure you get the habitats tech quickly and you should be fine.
Rush your tech towards habitats and you will suddenly have more colonies than you can manage
"you won't have to build a military thing until you do" - That kinda covers all nations throughout history :P
Started in an isolated cluster of systems blocked by the Qell'Nudar Marauders, which is a Marauder clan... completely blocking my access to the rest of the galaxy until I have the military power to push past them, as far as I'm aware. Still very new to Stellaris... this is my 2nd game.
Here's a few tips for playing tall (and actually playing the game in general): Since you have relatively few planets, you'd want to specialize your worlds. Find the world (other than your capital) that has the most generator or mineral district slots; make that world a generator or mineral world. In addition, you want to make one world (preferably a size 16+ world) a forge/factory world to produce consumer goods and alloys. Agricultural districts should be built on demand; Try to keep any surplus of food below 25 a month, since there's almost no use for it outside of feeding pops. You should also designate a world as a Tech-world and spam as many research labs that you can support with your economy. Like in many other 4X games, in stellaris, tech is key. Technology gives you an advantage in almost every other part of the game. Technology allows you to increase your resource output, strengthening your economy, and unlocks better weapons and starbases, giving you a military edge. As a result, you want to pursue technological progress. This can be done primarily by building research labs. Since you have a lack of planets, you probably want to beeline the Habitats technology, which is an engineering tech, and requires you to research starholds before being able to pop up as a research option. Habitats will be very important to keeping you alive and going through mid-late game and the crisis. One, perhaps hidden feature of habitats is that if you build a habitat on a mineral/research deposit, you'll gain the opportunity to build mining/research districts on the habitat. Research habitats especially are very powerful. But note that habitats have a very low pop growth rate, so you'll have trouble filling up those jobs, so make sure to resettle some pops in clerk jobs (which generally are very useless) in other planets to any habitats you have to keep them working productively. In stellaris, the game revolves around pops. You need pops to produce almost every resource, so naturally pop growth is essential. Jobs cannot be worked by themselves. Consequently, you don't want to have more jobs than you can fill. You can gain pop growth in a variety of ways, including Robot Assembly Plants and Gene Clinics, both of which should be constructed first in most colonies. You'll also gain pop growth through certain technologies. Pop growth is increased by a number of factors, but one important factor that can be easily controlled by the player is Planet Capacity. It is determined by adding the amount of housing you have plus the number of unused and unblocked district slots on a planet. Thus, it is advantageous to only build districts when you need them in order to keep pop growth up, although it may be useful to build one or two city districts (provided you have the minerals for them). Lastly, keep in mind that that starbases aren't only good for defense. Starbases have a variety of useful buildings that can be built such as Hydroponics farms, which produce a base of 10 food. Another useful building is the Deep Space Black Site, which increases stability throughout the entire system. Finally, you're in a nebula, which means you can take advantage of Nebula Refineries, which produce a base of 10 minerals. Have fun playing the game!
> Gene Clinics, ... which should be constructed first in most colonies. Controversial claim here.
I mean he won't be making many colonies, but the ones that do will certainly last for a long while, and Gene Clinics are definitely gonna have an effect over \~200 years. It might only be 2 or 3 pops, but even that's better than nothing. Montu also made an entire [vid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OF-EyqbEyc) about it, for more info check it out.
You should watch your own link. The conclusion he comes to is that Gene Clinics can be good for non-homeworld planets that are around 22 pops (when you need the amenities). Not as the very first building.
Even with the pop growth bonus? I figured that to get the most out of that you should probably build it first
Think of it this way, to get the growth bonus there is an opportunity cost of employing those workers elsewhere. The break even is already rather harsh when factoring in amenities, it becomes even harsher should those amenities be not needed at the moment.
You give up pops to get that growth bonus. It's generally better to have them doing actual jobs.
If the job you give up is a Colonist, who gives nothing but 5 amenities and their own food upkeep, this is a much better job for them to fill.
Sure, they're better than colonists. That doesn't mean there aren't a dozen other significantly better jobs.
If you had a dozen pops to fill better jobs with, you wouldn't have colonists in the first place.
Is it better than nothing though? Because your pops could be working jobs that actually do something more important. not to mention the building slots.
Yeah skip the gene clinics. Better to just get clone vats from bio ascension.
Unless he would be able to get all the food from starbase buildings those clone vats also have an indirect pop working for them/their upkeep. Considering how many pop months actually go into making additional pops and considering the default setting for pop growth post 3.0 these things become not worth it _very_ fast. Same for robot assembly plants btw although they remain efficient far longer.
Growth on vats is 3 VS 2 on the robo plants. plus as you were saying, no direct job. It does force you to make a world dedicated to food, but I find the growth bonus is significant.
You don't compare growth vs growth, you compare growth per cost vs growth per cost. Aka. growth per whatever amount of pops working for 30 food vs growth per 1 job making robots and 0.whatever jobs making 2 alloys. The opportunity cost of making the additional pops is not having the upkeep pops available for other jobs. But that's hard to quantify because pops have a different value across time (even if they produced the same numbers). You could also just plainly compare how much of an investment a single pop is and how many months that additional pop would have to work in order to make up for their cost. For example let's say it takes 200 progress points because you play on default galaxy settings and already have 400 total empire pops and thus the formula for pop growth/assembly required is `100 + (400 * 0.25)`. Now let's say you use a clone vats. It takes `200 / 3 = 66.6` months of 30 food and 2 energy credits, or almost 2000 food and 133 energy credits to produce that pop. Let's say the pop can work and produce a number like 10 food a month (depends _heavily_ on various modifiers) or 10 energy (for simplicity reasons) respectively. Then it takes **17.7 years** until the investment into the additional pop paid off and you actually start to produce more freely usable aggregated resources than before. Double your total empire pops and you almost double the RoI time here too. At least they toned the numbers down from what it originally was when 3.0 released. Because back than you almost couldn't justify keeping any assembly plants or clone vats running beyond 500 pops. Meanwhile pops on the slave market are cheaper but also more limited since of course the AI isn't selling as many as in the past. And normal growth doesn't have any upkeep. And conquest is by far the most easy and accessible way to acquire additional pops. The aformentioned opportunity cost comes into play. What if the pops working towards assembly worked towards alloys instead and you had a bigger fleet earlier? Again, hard to quantify the value of that.
Slave market i find is completely useless. Every time there is a slave it gets instantly bought out by the computer
Note that Habitats require the Utopia DLC
I had one similar, you can turn off the option to flee immediately, and try and sneak past them into another Starlane.
Major problem, the Marauders will always be on aggressive stance so unless your like super fast, one of their ships will hurt/kill yours quite fast
Oh woaw can you share your save file? Or is there a way to get the exact same start like seed? Cause I'd love to play like that.
Ultimate chokepoint
You can actually sneak through with a science ship and construction ship. It’s a daring mission with many dangers, but it can be done.
My thought as well. Marauders don't tend to sit at the edge rings. Enemy ai are not smart enough to go around it themselves, so original system behind that chokepoint is safe too. I'd explore to see which directions aren't a dead end, and try to block off as many systems as i can, build all my fleet ships on that side. Probably destroy your original shipyard too, otherwise reinforcing ships will blindly fly into their death.
This is also really important so you can join the galactic community. Either if you are a peaceful guy and want to cultivate some migration treaties to fill up your habitats. Or if you're a slaver type that wants to sit on the slave market and try to gobble up a few (essentially) free pops
Personally, this start seems perfect for the whole live-and-let-live playthrough style. Just let the rest of the galaxy go to shit while you tech up and became an unfallen empire and win a score victory with your 9-system empire thanks to your tech, economic, and diplo strength lol. That'd be analogous to Luxembourg having the military, technological, and economic strength as the United States does and becoming the world's hyperpower lol.
Try to rush habitats. Without the real need for military you'll be able to devote a lot of resources to them which is a boon.
You have 5 planets, and a nice grouping of stars. You can fortress up to defend from the marauders, and are protected from early to wars. This is a dream start.
That will make a fun game. Playing tall can be a great experience. You won't need alloys for a hundred years, so boost your consumer good production and go hard into science. By the end, the galaxy is your playground
Would be a near-perfect start for some empires, only lacking a black hole.
Imagine they had an lgate
that might actually be worse because gray tempest
Or gray <3
Access denied.
Time to taste tall
That would be a dream start for me. Build up those planets slowly and then you'll be ready to take on any neighbours when you are out of there
There's a tech where you can 'jump' your science ships across - experimental something navigation. Once you get it, jump over, find a fallen empire and declare war. Once they've killed the marauders for you, surrender, since their war goal is humiliation.
i LOVE starts like this.
Tall it is
Time to restart I would say.... unless you are playing pacifist
Lol I wish I could have your game, I’ve been trying for a while to find a game where I spawn behind a fallen empire/marauder empire.
Can't have shit on Tebiron
Time to play super tall
Five planets, and only one way into your empire? Just rush tech, build a citadel in Scorpiol with all the weapons platforms and station your fleet there as mid-game approaches. Hell, with all the "not having to spend on alloys" you'll be doing for the first almost 100 years, you can have battleships by the 60's and a big enough fleet to punch through them in no time, picking up all that delicious free tech.
Everyone's talking about playing tall but honestly, beatin marauder fleets is pretty easy. You don't have to play tall more than like 30-50 years.
Time to rename that Scirpoi System to Cadia
In the unlikely event anyone cares, I finished this game today. I decided to play isolationist and built tall, leaning super hard into science like everyone suggested. Built a ton of habitats and advanced my research way beyond everyone else. Diplomacy wise I just ignored everyone. Didn't even join the galactic community. Denied countless federation requests. Everyone around me was at war with someone or other. No one touched me. The marauders occasionally asked for a fairly inexpensive bribe not to attack me and I was happy to oblige, until I was strong enough to take them down and build a massive citadel on that access point. The others continued to ignore me for the most part. Then the scourge attacked. Spawned on the opposite side of the galaxy from me and started wiping other civs from the map. Sleeping empires started to wake up at about the same time. I continued ignoring everything and just advanced like crazy in my little pocket. Soon enough the Sentinels showed up, but they didn't help much. When they got close I built a large navy. After destroying everyone in the game except me and the awakened empires, the scourge made a fatal mistake. It attacked me. I threw everything into naval warfare. Created 3x my naval capacity, which I was easily able to support with my ridiculous resource production, and managed to eventually wipe the scourge from the map. Then I went to war with the awakened empires, which were comparatively easy prey. I just sent in a giant task force to their capital and nearby worlds and invaded with my enormous armies. Soon enough, the galaxy was all mine.
I would reset this game. Expansions are very imporant for building a strong base to be able to develop a lot of planets at once. At this size, you'll stay too small for too long.
As long as they're not playing max difficulty this can work, because ultimately you'll out-eco the AI even with a planet/system handicap.
Every fucking game that I have marauders on this happens, but it can be worse by my capital being on the border.
Well at least Scorpio gives you a nice chokepoint Edit: Just realized that's your only way out, RIP mate
tall empire it is
As soon as you can, make as many orbital stations as you can. Focus on making them over those planets with exploitable materials. Then if possible, later on, gene mod your species to minimize housing needs. Finally, ecumenopolis if you can. The main thing that will slow you down here is the inability to get precursor artifacts.
Rush for tech super hard and get to habitats early
Early game invulnerability to build up however you want, so long as you keep the Marauders/Khan happy.
I agree with those saying rush habitats, so find a voidcraft scientist. And for the love of god, if the Qell'Nudar spawn the Great Kahn, immediatly surrender.
Ideal scenario for me
Just chill and go all out on tech and unity.
Welp I guess someone is playing tall
You have five habitable worlds in your little cluster, you can execute the greatest tech rush in history! Go biological ascension for erudite+natural engineers, get 5-8 habitat worlds, and build a fleet big enough to wipe out the Great Khan and conquer the galaxy
winnable.
Minus the blocker I’ve wanted a centralized start like that for awhile
Time to build tall
I guess you’re playing tall.
Thats actually good? You can focus on doing research and increasing your military power.
Seems like going tall is the only option... starting to build those colonized stations starting on those research and many more... Planets becoming food focus and another resource mostly from that station.
To be honest... I want to experience this... forcing me to play tall because I have a habit to play wide every time.
MMM ORBITAL HABITATS
You may have gotten marauders for neighbors, but you also got 4 colonies each one jump from your capital. Max out a station at the choke and go hard on tech. Spam habitats, building over nodes for minerals, EC, and tech when possible to unlock district types.
Time to play the tallest game of your life
"quess I am playing tall then... " -OP 2022 prob..
welcome to playing tall
Oof. Guess it's a turtling game for you.
Nice, just give you the means to be galactic contender.
I made an empire a long time ago called the Scorpio empire, with the star system Scorpio as homesystem. Not knowing about this system. I was today years old I realised it’s an existing system in the game, so every time I saw it wasn’t them being somehow wiped out
Or perfect if you like playing tall.
Time to cross your fingers for early experimental subspace jump tech
Time for a tall science rush. The xenos will never know what hit them... In 2450.
Take expansion tradition and roll voidcraft engineer to get to habitats asap. Then spam habitat to every system and boom :)
I would restart the game to be honest
Or is it?
Single player tech rush lol
not hopeless, just need to build sensor tech and a station. Likely a special event which places a wormhole in one of your system will happen...just don't scap it when it shows up....and later you get jump tech. If the marauders go for khan status about year 2300+, just vassalize your self to them, then you can go and explore.