GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
This is the sort of advice that’s really helpful. The game makes it sound like settling on low habitability worlds is just going to tank whatever you do, but if that’s not the case, then that’s fine. Especially if I can turn it into a trade planet, because trade is awesome.
Queued up two habitats over gas resources so I’ll be rolling in credits. And the enigmatic fortress is in my territory so that’s going to be fun.
This is the sort of advice that’s really helpful. The game makes it sound like settling on low habitability worlds is just going to tank whatever you do, but if that’s not the case, then that’s fine. Especially if I can turn it into a trade planet, because trade is awesome.
Queued up two habitats over gas resources so I’ll be rolling in credits. And the enigmatic fortress is in my territory so that’s going to be fun.
Terraforming is also a thing, and a lot more important for single-species empires. And robots! I knew that droids could colonize planets, but it wasn't until yesterday I had to try it (Voidbourne start), and it turns out you also have to enable it in their species rights because its turned off by default. Note: has to be droids, not just robots.
Is there a way to keep other species out of my Habitats? Ideally I'd like those to be inhabited purely by my Penguin people who have to live there, but I keep having other species move in.
All this talk makes me really want my custom empires to spawn in game, but for some reason they never do. And I definitely have them set to show up.
Yeah I used to have that issue too, and I'm not sure what fixed it. It might be worth starting a "trial game" with the settings you want, i.e, start the game, open the console (`), type "observe" and check that all of the empires you expect to be there are there. I was having a problem with Fallen Empires not spawning and that was how I debugged it. Turns out FEs are spawned last after everything else on the map, and they respect the "no advanced neighbors" setting, which also applies to other empires. So if you have more than the default amount of empires for your map size and/or you have "no advanced neighbors" on, there might not be room for the Fallen Empires, and they just won't spawn. Which is dumb, but there you go.
I'm finding my current game a lot more interesting than the last, partly because I went "Voidborne" and its forcing me to play a bit differently, partly because the FEs are actually there so there's the ever-present threat that they'll wake up and start getting all murdery, and partly because I force-spawned some custom empires to make sure that I wouldn't end up with a big pacifist love fest. Specifically, I force-spawned some determined exterminators, only to discover that two other determined exterminators have also randomly spawned. Fortunately they spawned next to each other, but once they're done exterminating each other they might actually become a threat.
If you go to the population tab for a planet, you can set it so that only one species is allowed to grow. I know it'll reduce the current pop being grown by 10%, so if you want only kickass space dwarfs on a habitat and not shifty free loading smurfs. You can tell it only space dwarfs and if you currently have a smurf pop at 90%, I'm pretty sure it replaces it with a space dwarf pop at 81%. I do know that you have to have population control enabled which will make some factions cross with you.
Also for single species empires. On top of terraforming, which you should be able to afford. You also have the option to gene mod our species to have sub-species that prefer other planet types. I wouldn't waste resources having pops on zero habitability worlds for them. Yes, if you get your economy rolling well enough you can brute force it, so it's only an issue early and midgame, but still a massive drag on your economy. If you have to drag it down, do so with either ships for your fleet or starports over your startbase capacity that act as both anchorages and a cheesy way to check piracy because a starbase in a system reduces all piracy in that system to zero. Not mention, I do believe zero habitability does actually reduce growth to almost zero in the current game because the devs really did want that cheese tactic to totally not be worth your time. So it's double upkeep for everything, you need to spam amenities out the ass, stability is low, output for resources is low and it's not helping you get more pops to fill more jobs.
Voidborne is an awesome origin. The changes for it will help a ton, no more cheesing housing problems with fortresses because we get proper housing building enabled for them. Though I don't think gestalts ever had to do that shit because their housing always worked. One aspect that I would love to see brought for voidborne to every other empire, is making it so that colonizing a planet requires an influence cost. That would actually better train people to deal with the idea that you have to balance your influence usage. Currently, outside of voidborne, the game strongly trains people to paint the map and that mindset is pretty out odds with how influence usage changes past the initial expansion stage. Voidborne really does force to think long and hard about influence spending, so you think carefully about how you want to expand and don't just nearly mindlessly throw starhubs up to grab the best systems and get the best choke point furthest away from your homeworld to box people in. Sure you can do it, but that means less alloys and influence for your next habitat, possibly putting it off till later. If they did a similar thing with colonizing worlds, maybe not 200 influence, you'd get a similar impact where someone decides, "hmm, it's not a bad system, but I do want to get my next colony up and running. So take the gamble on not getting this system with 3 each of energy and minerals."
Adding more influence costs without changing the rate of earning it is crazy y’all.
To be fair, prior to this patch influence became fairly meaningless after a certain point so we probably needed more things to spend it on in order to make spending it an actual choice, but they certainly do seem to have pushed the needle pretty far in the other direction for some strategies.
If nothing else, it's making the Domination tree a lot more tempting than it used to be.
Haha yeah, in my recent Scion run (still not strong enough to throw off the shackles of my overlord) every non-fallen empire is Inferior or Pathetic but I can still only take 4-6 systems at a time, then I need to wait a good long while to get another couple hundred Influence, and that's with Supremacy finished and a bunch of techs to reduce influence costs. My plan in that game at least is to finish the war I'm currently in, build up a big fleet and defeat my overlord then call it a day.
Nah, I'd say if anything, there are some points in the game where there needs to be more influence costs because you're pretty much only using it to expand territory and that's creating an issue where people get upset once they hit a point where all of a sudden they have to balance how they spend that influence. An influence cost on planet colonization would probably do the trick and would probably actually be a good way to ensure that stuff that can colonize anything or most planet types are somewhat kept in check without the devs having to carefully figure out how to nerf them when they do end up being too good.
That said, there is an argument that a fair number of things that cost influence are due for a re-evaluation because some of that stuff either costs too much influence or shouldn't cost any. This doesn't mean we don't have enough influence, it just means they aren't worth the influence costs they currently have. From what I understand all the edicts that cost influence are suppose to be influence sinks, so they aren't exactly working when there is hardly a time to spare influence on them. In fact, could be a case that not only do they need to be cheaper, but maybe have their effects reduce as well. Then you get shit like mastery of nature, it's probably a very weak perk option now because there better choices for that influence, one those being just build more habitats. I'd also say it's incredibly weak because if you pop mastery of nature on a planet, someone can then invade and essentially get the full bounty of your choice without out wasting either influence or a perk slot. It really needs a benefit that is both exclusive to those that peak it up, in a way that can't be obtained by invasion that actually is worthwhile. 33% cost reduction to blockers isn't that great and honestly, if they did do a change, that would be a great way to make it better, while also killing the way that people can exploit calamitous birth to get free pops.
GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
Things got pretty out of control in my materialist xenophobe run. I had conquered so many planets and converted everyone to slaves that it was like playing whack-a-mole trying to keep stability and order in a reasonable rate. I think I had 3-4 rebellions until I started keeping standing armies on every planet. Not 100% sure how I'm supposed to manage a slave empire, though it's something I want to learn just because it seems more challenging than a straight diplomacy run.
I think I'll call that one a loss. I converted my entire species into robots, but it put me soooo far behind the engineering curve. The big empires had mega engineering way before me and the awakened empire just kind of rampaged all over the map and stomped out the crisis event in like 10 years.
Things got pretty out of control in my materialist xenophobe run. I had conquered so many planets and converted everyone to slaves that it was like playing whack-a-mole trying to keep stability and order in a reasonable rate. I think I had 3-4 rebellions until I started keeping standing armies on every planet. Not 100% sure how I'm supposed to manage a slave empire, though it's something I want to learn just because it seems more challenging than a straight diplomacy run.
I think I'll call that one a loss. I converted my entire species into robots, but it put me soooo far behind the engineering curve. The big empires had mega engineering way before me and the awakened empire just kind of rampaged all over the map and stomped out the crisis event in like 10 years.
That's ok. Time to try a different origin!
Keeping order in a slaver empire is mostly about seeking out direct stability bonuses and manipulating the relative political power of rulers/specialists/workers [IE, finding ways to get more ruler jobs on a planet so that your happy rulers can offset your unhappy workers and drag stability upwards]. The Aristocratic Elite civic does both things at once and is probably the simplest cure-all for stability problems, but you can also get stability from places that don't actually look like stability increases - building a Galactic Stock Exchange, for example, adds two ruler jobs to the planet and will probably drag that planet's stability noticeably upwards as long as you don't end up with unhappy pops filling them somehow.
My fallen empire game is going well so far (a little too well). I added in 2 advance start empires alongside the 8 fallen empires, although I'm thinking I should have done at least three for reasons I'll get into.) I'm playing my first Authoritarian empire (Authoritarian Materialist, because I almost always play materialists.. when I'm not playing hiveminds) and am having a little difficulty getting into character as asshole scientists. Although my aggressive probing of primative species seems to be having less of a negative effect than my passive probing from my last game.
Started on the western edge of the galaxy, with a Materialist Fallen empire to the north, a Xenophobic FE to the southeast, and one of the two advance start empires to my immediate east. Thankfully they weren't expanding quickly so I was able to take the relevant systems to avoid getting boxed in, even if I have to delicately manuever around the Xenophobes.
Turns out this advanced start empire are Fanatical Authoritarian... pacifists and it was incredibly easy to get htem on my side, and we somehow quickly discoverd the OTHER advance start empire (Some form of egalitarian) who are literally on the other side of the Galaxy. Having found all of the relevant empires, we got access to the Galactic Senate and this is where only having three empires has started to be an issue, as me and my authoritarian buddy basically run the table here. But because those two other empires basically disagree on everything, it makes me the deciding vote, so I basically get my way all of the time. I've already caught up in poltiical power even though I'm not #1 in anything except tech. I think if I do this again, I'll have 3-4 advance start empires, just so the Senate has some play in it.
Still, it's been pretty fun and maneruvering around Fallen Empires to continue to expand my territory has been fun. Glad they added administrative buildings so I can compensate for the ridiculous amount of space my empire is taking up.
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GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
I started a corporate diplomacy run and immediately started cozying up to two empires, one of which is much smaller and located insider the larger one. Might be a scion. Anyway they start getting real friendly and before I know it they’re demanding I become a vassal. (I have done virtually nothing with fleet power and they were both Overwhelming to me immediately). I’m only 35 years into the game or so.
I thought about it for a minute then went “lol nah” and proceeded about my business, expecting them to come knocking on my door at any moment. So far they haven’t seem bothered by it because shortly after they invited me to a federation. I’ve got a bunch of corporate branch offices and with my three migration treaties I’ve already colonized four planets. I’m making absolute bank from trade.
This feels like something that could get out of control really fast if I play my cards right. The one negative is that my influence is climbing very slowly. I’ll probably need to break some of my treaties soon so I can expand a bit more.
I’m really surprised I’m still stuck on this game, it’s really got me good. I’ve played so many different runs since federations launched, mostly to get my bearings but I’ve just been having a blast.
Decided for shits an giggles to do a game where I take advantage of the AI's idiocy in regards to trading favors before they fix it. So either hiveminds are loath to trade alloys for favors or they partially fixed it. I did find the AI is quite willing to trade food and minerals. So first empire the megacorp of cat girls ran into, the Cat Pyramid Enterprises, has now had their economy destroyed because they we unable to continue the monthly trades. I'll probably do another round because I can always sell food and mineral I don't need, once I exceed the storage limit. I'll see if machine, megacorps or normal empires are more willing to part with their alloys. If not, then they didn't fix it. If so, they didn't do a good enough if I can just trash the AI's economy by getting them to give me most of their food and minerals. Sure my void dwelling scam artist cat girls cat build new habitats any faster, but on the other hand not having to worry about food and minerals makes it easier to focus on other things. Will also see if the AI does anything with all the favors they get, that I can probably ignore for the must part. My next door hivemind should be really worried because by hampering their economy won't be hard to get a fleet up and running that can mop the floor with them and I do have Irassian Concord as my precursor, so I could always bust out the Javarian Pox when I get the relic to kill them all off despite being xenophile and egalitarian. A hivemind is like the most useless thing to a megacorp.
GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
They didn’t fix it. To test it out without going too far overboard I cheesed three empires with 10 favors for ~8 alloys/month for 10 years. I probably could have done the pause thing and asked them each 5-6 times but I more wanted to test it rather than run away with the whole game. Spiffing Brit just did a vod on it the other day.
Yeah, so guessing the AI for hivemind values alloys the same wave that normal and biocorp empires value consumer goods. It's amusing enough concept that I want to run with it before it gets fixed for shits and giggles. I did the whole nihilistic acquisition build in both it's flavors. The first one being the purge world and I want to say they killed that by making it no longer possible to do purges as egalitarian. The other one was pretty much the one world to rule them all, only there is no food, consumer goods and you cheese stability with martial law and fortresses. Both builds abused utopian abundance and just took everyone else's pops to generate the science because you didn't bother with researchers, when you had armies of hobo philosophers that gave you free research and unity. I want to say they did finally fix it so that you needed consumer goods to get the benefit of utopian abundance. The one world to rule them all one, also picked up spiritualist because you only had one planet, so might as well consecrate max number of habitable worlds for free amenities. It also had the weird quirk that that your founder species could still grow despite having no food and it took forever for pops to decline, so really easy to add in more at a far faster rate than you could purge or have them decline.
I made some mistakes today. First I made slightly xenophobic materialistic space dwarves. Then I played them till 4 in the morning. I ended up with the zro precursor race for the first time ever and I just couldn't put it down. My space dwarves are going to be psychic materialists.
I've been playing a United Nations of Earth game and accidentally turned into the Culture - synth ascension, AI ships, megastructures everywhere, profoundly despised by anyone vaguely authoritarian..
This was my favorite space jam until the jobs patch skewed everything. I've been waiting for months for them to fix the AI to be able to handle that and the mid-late game better. I'm probably going to finally remove the game to make room for others, because I just don't see them buckling down and making the AI actually work like it's supposed to because they keep changing core systems. It's like a car with a crap engine but they keep adding badass spoilers and seat warmers and cup holders.
I've been playing a United Nations of Earth game and accidentally turned into the Culture - synth ascension, AI ships, megastructures everywhere, profoundly despised by anyone vaguely authoritarian..
I always play as humans of different flavors. I prefer the potential future of "us" than so made up race. I must be in a really small minority with that, but it's how I enjoy the game.
I've been playing a United Nations of Earth game and accidentally turned into the Culture - synth ascension, AI ships, megastructures everywhere, profoundly despised by anyone vaguely authoritarian..
I always play as humans of different flavors. I prefer the potential future of "us" than so made up race. I must be in a really small minority with that, but it's how I enjoy the game.
I occasionally play Humans, though never any of the two default ones. I have three main flavours of Humans: Post-Apocalyptic Communist Humans (who only got their shit together after World War 3), Space Roman Empire Humans (because I gotta use that SPQR name list for something, right?), and Driven Assimilated Humans.
Somewhat materialistic imperialist war elves trying to forcibly unite with all the other elves and drow, complete with a custom leader portrait from an old heavy metal fantasy comedy manga.
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GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
I have made a number of animal based civs. My favorite is called Temple of the Dog.
I have made a number of animal based civs. My favorite is called Temple of the Dog.
You should make a spiritual lithoid species. Stone Temple Pilots.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
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GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
Has anyone else noticed that Empires aren't upgrading their starbases?
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GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
I’m not crazy about the mid/late game playing whack a mole with my planets as I try to manage what they’re doing. This planet has -12 amenities, this one too little housing, another with 3 specialists who are unemployed for some reason. I also don’t know why I bother to occupy habitats. I keep thinking that I need somewhere for my pops to go when I run out of planets but they have never been worth it’s. I run out of jobs and housing well before any building slots make up for it. I guess I’m doing something wrong for how powerful they are considered to be even specialized habitats are pretty meh.
But the underlying problem is still juggling pops around to where they need to be. There's probably a better way to do it but I haven’t figured it out.
I’m not crazy about the mid/late game playing whack a mole with my planets as I try to manage what they’re doing. This planet has -12 amenities, this one too little housing, another with 3 specialists who are unemployed for some reason. I also don’t know why I bother to occupy habitats. I keep thinking that I need somewhere for my pops to go when I run out of planets but they have never been worth it’s. I run out of jobs and housing well before any building slots make up for it. I guess I’m doing something wrong for how powerful they are considered to be even specialized habitats are pretty meh.
But the underlying problem is still juggling pops around to where they need to be. There's probably a better way to do it but I haven’t figured it out.
Resettlement is the blunt tool for this. Aside from that there's not much you CAN actively do to move pops around - there's an edict you can unlock through the galactic community, but I don't know exactly what the mechanics are or how well it works.
Suddenly-unemployed specialists usually mean that a pop from another species showed up on the planet and was better-suited to the unemployed pop's old job (an Intelligent pop arriving on a planet with a Researcher job occupied by a non-Intelligent pop, for example). When that happens the new pop takes the job, which is good since it makes you stuff more efficient, but if it's a ruler or specialist job and there's no other jobs of that tier, the displaced pop ends up unemployed for a while until it demotes to a level with a job available. It's basically frictional unemployment, and is resolved either by resettling the pop to another world with an available high-tier job or just waiting for a while until they finish demoting.
Habitats have housing problems (although I think the upcoming patch is supposed to change that) but they're powerful because they let you fill space much more densely with less sprawl by jamming more colonies into already-colonized systems (which also indirectly increases your pop growth, since you get a fixed amount of growth per colony). Also keep in mind that while you can throw habs up almost anywhere, they're significantly better if you can put them on top of an exploitable resource deposit. The default habitat districts aren't especially strong because they just get you clerk jobs (Clerks being basically the lowest-tier 'it's better than being unemployed' job a pop can occupy) and entertainer jobs, but if you put a hab up on top of a mineral deposit, for example, you'll be able to build mining districts in that hab, which are much stronger and let you expand a 3 mineral deposit into a 200-mineral mining colony if you've got the excess pops it takes to fill it. Habs that aren't on deposits of some kind can still be good, but the powerful thing to do with those is mostly fill them with housing districts and alloy plants/factories - you basically want to fill them with buildings that give better jobs than the job-giving hab districts, and then use the district slots for housing only. Habitats often end up overcrowded eventually, but that doesn't actually matter very much as long as you can keep stability high; overcrowding mostly just penalizes pop growth on that colony, which is still way stronger than not having the colony at all.
The other thing that makes habitat stacking in a system, is how that can make a blacksite incredibly efficient. Sure it doesn't boost the unity output, but every colony in that system gets 5% stability and that shit adds up. A void dweller origin empire that completely ignores planets can easily get all their pops in a handful of systems and make very efficient use of their limited starbases as well. Any system with a starbase, not an outpost, will get zero piracy. So if each inhabited system is adjacent, with a starbase, you pretty much won't have issues with piracy for awhile. I don't know if it completely negates it because I'm not entirely sure how trade between empires interacts with piracy, I want to say it's non-existent, but I haven't quite don't a super population dense empire like what void dweller would allow to see how things go. Void dweller is also good for giving some value to the hydroponics bay on starbases. You'll still need a habitat that farms, but early on if you aren't using that starbase build for something more useful, the extra food helps.
GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
Yeah I always focus on habitats on resources or research nodes, but if I take over another civ I'll repopulate their habs because, like you guys said, it's a great way to keep pop growth up. But unless I've already got the tech I can't rebuild them.
Just remember if you conquer some that goes all in on habitats or has a shit ton of them and you invest in a Colossus. Check to see how things work because according to the official wiki, it'll make that deposit inaccessible if you use a planet cracker on the habitat. So if you actually care about a node, you probably want to look into neutron sweep instead. I suppose the driven assimilator would be a better option if you are driven assimilator because I want to say they had a colossus component that just lets you instantly assimilate the pops on the colony it hits.
GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
I see these games where people have like 23K research and 300k fleets before even 2400 and I cannot even fathom how that happens. I know I’ve lamented it before, but I just can’t figure it out! I don’t even have to be good enough to do it, I just want to know how other people do!
Don't think I've ever pulled it off myself. I have some hunches though, assuming they aren't using the console.
-Knowing how to tech. Big mistake a ton of people make and I've done it until recently myself, is falling into the trap of prioritizing all research boosts above stuff that isn't directly or indirectly related to pop growth. For instance the first 20% to society research, actually isn't that good because you have so few researchers. A ton of people will get something like that tech, tech to boost farms and tech for armies. Then they boost research, not realizing that they'd get better returns from boosting farms now and waiting till later when they have more research to boost tech research.
-Knowing how to grow pops and get jobs filled quickly. Know when you can boost pop growth and how to do it. Also know which jobs to sack early on because they are currently unneeded. Bureaucrats and enforcers are the big one.
-Cheese stability, a big one here is abusing the crime lord deal. Sack the enforcer, let crime get high enough that you can make said deal, then reopen the enforcer jobs. Grats you have 10% more stability, which means more research output on that world.
-They might also be aggressively rushing neighbors to get more pops and systems for less influence.
-They might be playing with tech and traditions costs being lower than the default.
-The obvious grabbing civics, traits and origins that massively boost their research output early on.
-I think there is some sort of bullshit, where you have setups with tons of factories and administration buildings on a world and the player shifts between the pops all be specialists that make them a massive pile of consumer goods, while they are way over admin cap. Then once they have enough, they close all the civilian industries and open the bureaucratic jobs to get under admin capacity and pump out a shit ton of research until they deplete consumer goods enough that they have to care. I expect the devs will kneecap this probably in the max update because it's bullshit.
-Being really fucking lucky on some of the shit they draw. Leaders that boost research, hitting shit that gives them tons of research, hitting shit that gives them tons of resources for expansion (influence and minerals), being in a spot where maybe research grants are worth using. Same deal with the research edict that uses nanites.
YoshisummonsYou have to let the dead vote, otherwise you'd just kill people you disagree with!Registered Userregular
Because they ignore alloys for fleets for 80 years and go ham on researchers focusing on tech and population growth because only on the most aggressive setting with advanced starts on grand admiral the ai might declare war. Everything else is just tiny tricks and tips to ekk out the snowball scenario just a little bit faster.
I know some people try to conquer just one ai as soon as possible before going research heavy but your mileage may vary on difficulty.
So because I have to sit here and wait an hour here are some of my tips and tricks.
Early on you will want to do your best to keep people off of enforcer jobs and amenities(why waste having 4 clerks for the 8 amenities for single digit additive % in stability bonus when you have> 30 pops). Go for entertainer buildings but since they give 2 jobs and you only really the one early on just before its done building force one specialist to be unemployed the month before and once its done switch it around.
The game is absolutely loaded with additive % bonuses which makes the traits like thrifty and intelligent compratively useless to traits like fertile growth speed. However because the base resource of a farmer job is 6 and a electrician is 4 you can sell 100 food for 70 energy on the market effectively getting 4.2 energy per farmer compared to the base 4 of an electrician the farmer trait is the trait to get. for this trick to work you need to sell food 100 at a time. Wait for the market to reset and sell again.
Research prioritiesis not something to stress about as much because if you're going through it all in >80 years then 12 months isn't that big of a difference. But my research hierarchy is
Growth (the 5% mineral job tech gates robots so that is #1 priority even sometimes buying a industrial scientist if you are lucky in relic fragments.
Pop job efficiency(the 20% ones)
Unlocks buildings
The rest
Weapons tech(except armor 3 which gates the metallurgist efficiency techs but since you are looking at less than 25 alloy production this is a luxury tech.)
I see these games where people have like 23K research and 300k fleets before even 2400 and I cannot even fathom how that happens. I know I’ve lamented it before, but I just can’t figure it out! I don’t even have to be good enough to do it, I just want to know how other people do!
I usually get impatient waiting for the crisis and call my games 'done' once I'm over 1-2 million fleet power and it's been a long time since I've seen the year 2400 before hitting that point; it's all a question of pops (or, more specifically, it's a question of alloys and research, but mostly alloys - which are gated by pops). Everything you want to do is a question of how many pops you can have doing it and how many pops you have to have working the jobs that support those pops. There are things you can do to streamline your economy, and weird system trickery you can engage in to cheese the process if you want, but mostly it's just about finding ways to Get More Pops as fast as you possibly can.
In terms of specific advice:
-Take good species traits: Virtually every race I build has Rapid Breeders and most have Nomadic. Every other bonus you can get is subordinate to pop growth because you can always get better, more flexible results by just having more pops than by having pops who are better at producing a specific resource, especially in the early game where you don't have as much opportunity to specialize.
-Colonize everything you possibly can, as early as you possibly can: Fuck habitability. Colonize high-hab stuff first, but if there's a planet in your territory with 0% habitability, don't just stare at that red icon the whole game, put a colony on it. It'll have half the normal population growth, which is still more than none, and its pops will have high upkeep, but A)if you can resettle you can just move them to a good planet where their net production will be higher and B)even if you can't, their net production will still be more than zero so having them is still better than not. This was true when admin cap was a real cost, and it's even more true now that it isn't.
-Build the good pop growth buildings, don't build the bad ones: Notably, this means do not build gene clinics/hospitals. Yes, they give pop growth and pop growth is the most important thing in the universe, but they also cost pops because you have to staff them and give only small bonuses per staff. This makes them bad except on a pointlessly long timeline. There's no reason to even waste time researching the tech until you're doing repeatables. But do build robot factories everywhere, ideally with your first building slot. It's a huge amount of free pop growth and will get you to the 10 pops you need to lose the colony growth penalty faster. Also, don't forget to template your bots as soon as you're able, to give them +assembly speed - that perk adds the same amount of growth to each planet with a robot factory as a +10% growth bonus does.
-Sign every migration treaty you can IF you can generate enough migration pull to make it worth it: Migration treaties are powerful because they let you siphon OTHER peoples' growth for yourself. Take Free Haven, build some ecumenopoli, turn your colonies into black holes of immigration pull so that every piece of growth anybody loses to emigration push anywhere ends up in your empire and not somebody else's. If you can't generate that kind of pull - for example, if you're playing Void Dwellers - don't sign treaties with anybody or your growth will end up benefitting them instead.
-Take good ascension perks: Again, pop growth. Genemod ascension offers some massive bonuses in this area - even just the first tier lets you slap down Clone Vats on all your planets for +33% growth, and the second lets you mod your pops to be Fertile for another +20% over the Rapid Breeders they should already have. If you've got immigration treaties, Xenocompatibility is another huge +20%. Having your 2nd, 3rd, and 4th perks be Engineered Evolution->Xenocompatibility->Evolutionary Mastery will vault you massively ahead on the growth curve.
-Buy slaves from the slave market: Even if you've outlawed slavery, that just makes them more expensive, but they're still staggeringly cheap compared to the value of having extra pops appear from nowhere. Dump your excess income into clearing out the slave market from the moment it gets founded until nobody else in the galaxy is willing to sell you any more of them. get more pops.
-Don't forget food bonuses: It's a hassle to micromanage once you have a lot of colonies, but you should have Encourage Growth running on all your planets as much as you can, even if you gotta buy food from the market to do it, especially in the early game. Once you've got a reasonable number of colonies to forward the bonus to, you should switch to the Nutritional Plenitude policy for the growth bonus (plus free happiness!).
-Neglect your military early-game as much as you can get away with: This got a lot easier with Federations, but in the early game every resource you spend on your fleets is a resource you can't spend on growth. You want to be sinking all your influence and alloys into claiming as much territory as possible and putting down as many colonies as possible. Any excess alloys left after you become influence-limited should be spent on throwing starbases up at chokepoints before you start spending it on ships unless you have to. Usually having an armed starbase blocking their only paths into your territory is enough to keep a neighbor at bay for a while even if they have way more fleet power than you, because starbases are pretty strong compared to fleets for the first couple decades of the game. You can also achieve this by sending envoys to improve relations with all your neighbors, or by making friends with one or two large neighbors and signing a defensive pact (although this costs influence), or just by taking one of the origins that lets you start in a federation - but regardless of how you do it, the longer you can skate with no fleets before you start having to spend resources on defense, the better-positioned you'll be in the late game.
-Steal other peoples' pops if you can: Once you can afford a fleet without giving up pop growth to do it, take pops from the rest of the galaxy, too, either by claiming and conquering their systems or just via Raiding bombardment. More people means more resources means more everything.
-Take ethics and civics that are compatible with your plan: There's more flexibility here than in other places, but again: Pop growth first, pop efficiency second. Both Xenophobe and Xenophile are powerful right now depending on your plan; Xenophobe gives a flat growth bonus if you don't want migration treaties, and Xenophile gives you Land of Opportunity plus extra envoys for keeping the neighbors pacified and a trade value bonus that can be substantial. If you go Xenophobe and can stand being Pacifist, Inward Perfection is huge; if you go Xenophile, Free Haven and Merchant Guilds are both very strong - there is, for example, a pretty potent set of synergies between Fanatic Xenophile+Free Haven+Merchant Guilds+Ringworld origin in which you make friends easily, sign immigration treaties with all of them, have colonies with 100% habitability for all pops where it's easy to stack up immigration pull, generate a bunch of extra Merchant job slots via ringworld commerce districts which give trade value and free bonus unity, rack up a large bonus to that trade value from Xenophile, and then use that extra unity generation to finish the diplomacy tree early and qualify via Merchant Guilds to found a Trade League federation, which gives you the Trade League trade policy that stacks another big bonus on your already-boosted trade value by effectively letting you run Consumer Benefits and Marketplace of Ideas at the same time.
Just as a run-through example of strategy decisions and the reasons behind them, my current game's strategy is underperforming a fair amount because I missed a lot of opportunities experimenting and got boxed in by the Enigmatic Fortress on a small map with max empires, but I still have 250k fleet power and 1500 alloys/month at year 2350 and the strategy was roughly this:
Try out Void Dwellers and seek to maximize the benefit. Since Void Dwellers has housing problems, migration treaties are off the table, so: Fanatic Xenophobe (+20% pop growth)/Pacifist (just to unlock Inward Perfection; pacifist is otherwise a pretty substantial drawback). Inward Perfection (another +20% growth) and Aristocratic Elite (this was to manage stability from low housing, but I'm not sure it was the best investment - Corvee System would probably have served me better). Species was Rapid Breeders+Nomadic for growth, plus Communal to minimize the housing problem (worth it? unclear so far, might never find out since hab housing is getting changed), paid for with Nonadaptive (because it doesn't matter almost at all for Void Dwellers anyway). Built 4 science ships and set them exploring as soon as possible (gotta know what directions to expand in, plus better odds of firing Precursor freebies sooner), expanded as quickly as possible until I butted up against neighbors, with priority going towards valuable systems and chokepoints. Boxed neighbors out with starbases, invested enough in research to keep the starbases strong enough to beat their fleets until I could afford to build a fleet of my own; invested first in some additional habitats as soon as I could scrape the alloys together (Void Dwellers has a pop growth advantage because it starts with 3 colonies, but once everyone else ALSO has 3-4 colonies you're falling behind until you can start building more; you wanna keep that window as small as possible). Genemod ascension, all the megastructure ascension perks. Tech ascendancy perk 1 (Interstellar Dominion probably better on large maps, especially if you plan to shed Pacifist by going Psionic ascension and taking the option to turn your Chosen One into a god-emperor, but small map+pacifist means minimal influence saved from Dominion). Eventually take Nihilistic Acquisition to game my Pacifism - I can't claim systems to expand my population, but I CAN declare Liberation Wars and just kidnap whole planets until I've stolen all their pops. Start going to war with the neighbors and taking all their people (probably should have done this earlier, but like I said: first time trying this plan); minerals income mostly sunk into building out capacity to fit all the new arrivals. Genemod my own species with Fertile+Erudite+Nomadic+Communal as soon as able, enslave all alien species and genemod them with whatever combination of Very Strong/Nerve Stapled/Industrious/Agrarian/Ingenious is most useful [I do have a few psionic residents who get Erudite+Natural Engineers/Physicists and Indentured Servitude so they can fill researcher jobs], have pop controls on for all of them so that I continue to benefit from my native species growth (and don't have so much risk of a situation where specialist jobs are going unfilled because there are too many slave pops and not enough free ones). Dumped most of my influence into building Habitats (more colonies = more growth = more everything) until I unlocked Ringworlds, kept systems without important resource deposits free of habitats so that I could turn them into ringworld systems later (can't build a ringworld in a system that already has a habitat). Once my alloy income got high enough, started dumping it all into megastructures for long-term growth - built the science nexus, coordination center, dyson sphere, matter decompressor, and a couple ringworlds so far. (Dyson Sphere and especially Matter Decompressor are eventually critical for continuing to expand inside the finite territory Pacifism leaves me with - minerals eventually become the chokepoint resource because you can't make them on ringworlds and can only get them on a limited number of habitats in a given territory) Currently sitting at about 2000 pops at year 2350 and doing a lot of resettlement to shuffle them around efficiently as more ringworlds come online; have functionally won except for waiting for the crisis to trigger. I've bumped it up to fire between 2350-2400, but I expect to have no problems clearing 1m fleet power before it pops now that I'm wrapping up megastructure construction and can just pour my alloys into fleets.
When you're playing Void Dwellers, migration treaties are entirely on the table, in my opinion. Once you've signed one, you can start colonizing planets with the species you've signed with, essentially nullifying Void Dweller's main drawkback.
Although you probably wanna make sure you have any planets you want to colonize with the right environment first, before signing the treaty.
When you're playing Void Dwellers, migration treaties are entirely on the table, in my opinion. Once you've signed one, you can start colonizing planets with the species you've signed with, essentially nullifying Void Dweller's main drawkback.
Although you probably wanna make sure you have any planets you want to colonize with the right environment first, before signing the treaty.
Maybe, but you still gotta be able to turn those planets into bottomless pits of immigration pull. You're going to be putting a lot of immigration push into the system from your overcrowded habitats, which means a lot of your growth that's on the table to be distributed between you and your signatories based on immigration pull. If 80% of the total push into the system is coming from your own colonies, you gotta be able to keep 80% of the total pull coming from your colonies, too, just to break even, and then the gains you can get even from generating enough pull to take 90-95% of the pool for yourself are pretty limited. Immigration treaties are much, much stronger when you can contribute a low percentage of the total push and still generate a high percentage of the total pull, because then that pull is all actively siphoning the other guy's growth and not just mostly getting spent on recapturing and retaining your own.
If you just want a way to get efficient labor out of a ground colony as void dwellers, much easier to go xenophobe, buy slaves/steal pops to get other species, colonize your planets with your main species and then just shove your slave population onto them to do the actual work. Keep just enough void dwellers on the ground to keep order while resettling new ones that grow back onto a station, or just nerve staple the slaves to make it a nonissue. Or use bots to do the same thing much earlier in the game - even with basic bots, you can found a colony, keep enough organics on-surface to work the admin jobs, fill the planet with mine and farm districts, and just export robots to the colony to work them without penalty.
Posts
Queued up two habitats over gas resources so I’ll be rolling in credits. And the enigmatic fortress is in my territory so that’s going to be fun.
Terraforming is also a thing, and a lot more important for single-species empires. And robots! I knew that droids could colonize planets, but it wasn't until yesterday I had to try it (Voidbourne start), and it turns out you also have to enable it in their species rights because its turned off by default. Note: has to be droids, not just robots.
Is there a way to keep other species out of my Habitats? Ideally I'd like those to be inhabited purely by my Penguin people who have to live there, but I keep having other species move in.
Yeah I used to have that issue too, and I'm not sure what fixed it. It might be worth starting a "trial game" with the settings you want, i.e, start the game, open the console (`), type "observe" and check that all of the empires you expect to be there are there. I was having a problem with Fallen Empires not spawning and that was how I debugged it. Turns out FEs are spawned last after everything else on the map, and they respect the "no advanced neighbors" setting, which also applies to other empires. So if you have more than the default amount of empires for your map size and/or you have "no advanced neighbors" on, there might not be room for the Fallen Empires, and they just won't spawn. Which is dumb, but there you go.
I'm finding my current game a lot more interesting than the last, partly because I went "Voidborne" and its forcing me to play a bit differently, partly because the FEs are actually there so there's the ever-present threat that they'll wake up and start getting all murdery, and partly because I force-spawned some custom empires to make sure that I wouldn't end up with a big pacifist love fest. Specifically, I force-spawned some determined exterminators, only to discover that two other determined exterminators have also randomly spawned. Fortunately they spawned next to each other, but once they're done exterminating each other they might actually become a threat.
Also for single species empires. On top of terraforming, which you should be able to afford. You also have the option to gene mod our species to have sub-species that prefer other planet types. I wouldn't waste resources having pops on zero habitability worlds for them. Yes, if you get your economy rolling well enough you can brute force it, so it's only an issue early and midgame, but still a massive drag on your economy. If you have to drag it down, do so with either ships for your fleet or starports over your startbase capacity that act as both anchorages and a cheesy way to check piracy because a starbase in a system reduces all piracy in that system to zero. Not mention, I do believe zero habitability does actually reduce growth to almost zero in the current game because the devs really did want that cheese tactic to totally not be worth your time. So it's double upkeep for everything, you need to spam amenities out the ass, stability is low, output for resources is low and it's not helping you get more pops to fill more jobs.
Voidborne is an awesome origin. The changes for it will help a ton, no more cheesing housing problems with fortresses because we get proper housing building enabled for them. Though I don't think gestalts ever had to do that shit because their housing always worked. One aspect that I would love to see brought for voidborne to every other empire, is making it so that colonizing a planet requires an influence cost. That would actually better train people to deal with the idea that you have to balance your influence usage. Currently, outside of voidborne, the game strongly trains people to paint the map and that mindset is pretty out odds with how influence usage changes past the initial expansion stage. Voidborne really does force to think long and hard about influence spending, so you think carefully about how you want to expand and don't just nearly mindlessly throw starhubs up to grab the best systems and get the best choke point furthest away from your homeworld to box people in. Sure you can do it, but that means less alloys and influence for your next habitat, possibly putting it off till later. If they did a similar thing with colonizing worlds, maybe not 200 influence, you'd get a similar impact where someone decides, "hmm, it's not a bad system, but I do want to get my next colony up and running. So take the gamble on not getting this system with 3 each of energy and minerals."
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
To be fair, prior to this patch influence became fairly meaningless after a certain point so we probably needed more things to spend it on in order to make spending it an actual choice, but they certainly do seem to have pushed the needle pretty far in the other direction for some strategies.
If nothing else, it's making the Domination tree a lot more tempting than it used to be.
That said, there is an argument that a fair number of things that cost influence are due for a re-evaluation because some of that stuff either costs too much influence or shouldn't cost any. This doesn't mean we don't have enough influence, it just means they aren't worth the influence costs they currently have. From what I understand all the edicts that cost influence are suppose to be influence sinks, so they aren't exactly working when there is hardly a time to spare influence on them. In fact, could be a case that not only do they need to be cheaper, but maybe have their effects reduce as well. Then you get shit like mastery of nature, it's probably a very weak perk option now because there better choices for that influence, one those being just build more habitats. I'd also say it's incredibly weak because if you pop mastery of nature on a planet, someone can then invade and essentially get the full bounty of your choice without out wasting either influence or a perk slot. It really needs a benefit that is both exclusive to those that peak it up, in a way that can't be obtained by invasion that actually is worthwhile. 33% cost reduction to blockers isn't that great and honestly, if they did do a change, that would be a great way to make it better, while also killing the way that people can exploit calamitous birth to get free pops.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
I think I'll call that one a loss. I converted my entire species into robots, but it put me soooo far behind the engineering curve. The big empires had mega engineering way before me and the awakened empire just kind of rampaged all over the map and stomped out the crisis event in like 10 years.
That's ok. Time to try a different origin!
Keeping order in a slaver empire is mostly about seeking out direct stability bonuses and manipulating the relative political power of rulers/specialists/workers [IE, finding ways to get more ruler jobs on a planet so that your happy rulers can offset your unhappy workers and drag stability upwards]. The Aristocratic Elite civic does both things at once and is probably the simplest cure-all for stability problems, but you can also get stability from places that don't actually look like stability increases - building a Galactic Stock Exchange, for example, adds two ruler jobs to the planet and will probably drag that planet's stability noticeably upwards as long as you don't end up with unhappy pops filling them somehow.
Started on the western edge of the galaxy, with a Materialist Fallen empire to the north, a Xenophobic FE to the southeast, and one of the two advance start empires to my immediate east. Thankfully they weren't expanding quickly so I was able to take the relevant systems to avoid getting boxed in, even if I have to delicately manuever around the Xenophobes.
Turns out this advanced start empire are Fanatical Authoritarian... pacifists and it was incredibly easy to get htem on my side, and we somehow quickly discoverd the OTHER advance start empire (Some form of egalitarian) who are literally on the other side of the Galaxy. Having found all of the relevant empires, we got access to the Galactic Senate and this is where only having three empires has started to be an issue, as me and my authoritarian buddy basically run the table here. But because those two other empires basically disagree on everything, it makes me the deciding vote, so I basically get my way all of the time. I've already caught up in poltiical power even though I'm not #1 in anything except tech. I think if I do this again, I'll have 3-4 advance start empires, just so the Senate has some play in it.
Still, it's been pretty fun and maneruvering around Fallen Empires to continue to expand my territory has been fun. Glad they added administrative buildings so I can compensate for the ridiculous amount of space my empire is taking up.
I thought about it for a minute then went “lol nah” and proceeded about my business, expecting them to come knocking on my door at any moment. So far they haven’t seem bothered by it because shortly after they invited me to a federation. I’ve got a bunch of corporate branch offices and with my three migration treaties I’ve already colonized four planets. I’m making absolute bank from trade.
This feels like something that could get out of control really fast if I play my cards right. The one negative is that my influence is climbing very slowly. I’ll probably need to break some of my treaties soon so I can expand a bit more.
I’m really surprised I’m still stuck on this game, it’s really got me good. I’ve played so many different runs since federations launched, mostly to get my bearings but I’ve just been having a blast.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Tell me I'm wrong? Please?
Second post talks about the economy ai changes.
I always play as humans of different flavors. I prefer the potential future of "us" than so made up race. I must be in a really small minority with that, but it's how I enjoy the game.
I occasionally play Humans, though never any of the two default ones. I have three main flavours of Humans: Post-Apocalyptic Communist Humans (who only got their shit together after World War 3), Space Roman Empire Humans (because I gotta use that SPQR name list for something, right?), and Driven Assimilated Humans.
But mostly I play Space Orcs and Hive Minds.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
But the underlying problem is still juggling pops around to where they need to be. There's probably a better way to do it but I haven’t figured it out.
Resettlement is the blunt tool for this. Aside from that there's not much you CAN actively do to move pops around - there's an edict you can unlock through the galactic community, but I don't know exactly what the mechanics are or how well it works.
Suddenly-unemployed specialists usually mean that a pop from another species showed up on the planet and was better-suited to the unemployed pop's old job (an Intelligent pop arriving on a planet with a Researcher job occupied by a non-Intelligent pop, for example). When that happens the new pop takes the job, which is good since it makes you stuff more efficient, but if it's a ruler or specialist job and there's no other jobs of that tier, the displaced pop ends up unemployed for a while until it demotes to a level with a job available. It's basically frictional unemployment, and is resolved either by resettling the pop to another world with an available high-tier job or just waiting for a while until they finish demoting.
Habitats have housing problems (although I think the upcoming patch is supposed to change that) but they're powerful because they let you fill space much more densely with less sprawl by jamming more colonies into already-colonized systems (which also indirectly increases your pop growth, since you get a fixed amount of growth per colony). Also keep in mind that while you can throw habs up almost anywhere, they're significantly better if you can put them on top of an exploitable resource deposit. The default habitat districts aren't especially strong because they just get you clerk jobs (Clerks being basically the lowest-tier 'it's better than being unemployed' job a pop can occupy) and entertainer jobs, but if you put a hab up on top of a mineral deposit, for example, you'll be able to build mining districts in that hab, which are much stronger and let you expand a 3 mineral deposit into a 200-mineral mining colony if you've got the excess pops it takes to fill it. Habs that aren't on deposits of some kind can still be good, but the powerful thing to do with those is mostly fill them with housing districts and alloy plants/factories - you basically want to fill them with buildings that give better jobs than the job-giving hab districts, and then use the district slots for housing only. Habitats often end up overcrowded eventually, but that doesn't actually matter very much as long as you can keep stability high; overcrowding mostly just penalizes pop growth on that colony, which is still way stronger than not having the colony at all.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
-Knowing how to tech. Big mistake a ton of people make and I've done it until recently myself, is falling into the trap of prioritizing all research boosts above stuff that isn't directly or indirectly related to pop growth. For instance the first 20% to society research, actually isn't that good because you have so few researchers. A ton of people will get something like that tech, tech to boost farms and tech for armies. Then they boost research, not realizing that they'd get better returns from boosting farms now and waiting till later when they have more research to boost tech research.
-Knowing how to grow pops and get jobs filled quickly. Know when you can boost pop growth and how to do it. Also know which jobs to sack early on because they are currently unneeded. Bureaucrats and enforcers are the big one.
-Cheese stability, a big one here is abusing the crime lord deal. Sack the enforcer, let crime get high enough that you can make said deal, then reopen the enforcer jobs. Grats you have 10% more stability, which means more research output on that world.
-They might also be aggressively rushing neighbors to get more pops and systems for less influence.
-They might be playing with tech and traditions costs being lower than the default.
-The obvious grabbing civics, traits and origins that massively boost their research output early on.
-I think there is some sort of bullshit, where you have setups with tons of factories and administration buildings on a world and the player shifts between the pops all be specialists that make them a massive pile of consumer goods, while they are way over admin cap. Then once they have enough, they close all the civilian industries and open the bureaucratic jobs to get under admin capacity and pump out a shit ton of research until they deplete consumer goods enough that they have to care. I expect the devs will kneecap this probably in the max update because it's bullshit.
-Being really fucking lucky on some of the shit they draw. Leaders that boost research, hitting shit that gives them tons of research, hitting shit that gives them tons of resources for expansion (influence and minerals), being in a spot where maybe research grants are worth using. Same deal with the research edict that uses nanites.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
I know some people try to conquer just one ai as soon as possible before going research heavy but your mileage may vary on difficulty.
So because I have to sit here and wait an hour here are some of my tips and tricks.
Early on you will want to do your best to keep people off of enforcer jobs and amenities(why waste having 4 clerks for the 8 amenities for single digit additive % in stability bonus when you have> 30 pops). Go for entertainer buildings but since they give 2 jobs and you only really the one early on just before its done building force one specialist to be unemployed the month before and once its done switch it around.
The game is absolutely loaded with additive % bonuses which makes the traits like thrifty and intelligent compratively useless to traits like fertile growth speed. However because the base resource of a farmer job is 6 and a electrician is 4 you can sell 100 food for 70 energy on the market effectively getting 4.2 energy per farmer compared to the base 4 of an electrician the farmer trait is the trait to get. for this trick to work you need to sell food 100 at a time. Wait for the market to reset and sell again.
Research prioritiesis not something to stress about as much because if you're going through it all in >80 years then 12 months isn't that big of a difference. But my research hierarchy is
Growth (the 5% mineral job tech gates robots so that is #1 priority even sometimes buying a industrial scientist if you are lucky in relic fragments.
Pop job efficiency(the 20% ones)
Unlocks buildings
The rest
Weapons tech(except armor 3 which gates the metallurgist efficiency techs but since you are looking at less than 25 alloy production this is a luxury tech.)
I usually get impatient waiting for the crisis and call my games 'done' once I'm over 1-2 million fleet power and it's been a long time since I've seen the year 2400 before hitting that point; it's all a question of pops (or, more specifically, it's a question of alloys and research, but mostly alloys - which are gated by pops). Everything you want to do is a question of how many pops you can have doing it and how many pops you have to have working the jobs that support those pops. There are things you can do to streamline your economy, and weird system trickery you can engage in to cheese the process if you want, but mostly it's just about finding ways to Get More Pops as fast as you possibly can.
In terms of specific advice:
-Take good species traits: Virtually every race I build has Rapid Breeders and most have Nomadic. Every other bonus you can get is subordinate to pop growth because you can always get better, more flexible results by just having more pops than by having pops who are better at producing a specific resource, especially in the early game where you don't have as much opportunity to specialize.
-Colonize everything you possibly can, as early as you possibly can: Fuck habitability. Colonize high-hab stuff first, but if there's a planet in your territory with 0% habitability, don't just stare at that red icon the whole game, put a colony on it. It'll have half the normal population growth, which is still more than none, and its pops will have high upkeep, but A)if you can resettle you can just move them to a good planet where their net production will be higher and B)even if you can't, their net production will still be more than zero so having them is still better than not. This was true when admin cap was a real cost, and it's even more true now that it isn't.
-Build the good pop growth buildings, don't build the bad ones: Notably, this means do not build gene clinics/hospitals. Yes, they give pop growth and pop growth is the most important thing in the universe, but they also cost pops because you have to staff them and give only small bonuses per staff. This makes them bad except on a pointlessly long timeline. There's no reason to even waste time researching the tech until you're doing repeatables. But do build robot factories everywhere, ideally with your first building slot. It's a huge amount of free pop growth and will get you to the 10 pops you need to lose the colony growth penalty faster. Also, don't forget to template your bots as soon as you're able, to give them +assembly speed - that perk adds the same amount of growth to each planet with a robot factory as a +10% growth bonus does.
-Sign every migration treaty you can IF you can generate enough migration pull to make it worth it: Migration treaties are powerful because they let you siphon OTHER peoples' growth for yourself. Take Free Haven, build some ecumenopoli, turn your colonies into black holes of immigration pull so that every piece of growth anybody loses to emigration push anywhere ends up in your empire and not somebody else's. If you can't generate that kind of pull - for example, if you're playing Void Dwellers - don't sign treaties with anybody or your growth will end up benefitting them instead.
-Take good ascension perks: Again, pop growth. Genemod ascension offers some massive bonuses in this area - even just the first tier lets you slap down Clone Vats on all your planets for +33% growth, and the second lets you mod your pops to be Fertile for another +20% over the Rapid Breeders they should already have. If you've got immigration treaties, Xenocompatibility is another huge +20%. Having your 2nd, 3rd, and 4th perks be Engineered Evolution->Xenocompatibility->Evolutionary Mastery will vault you massively ahead on the growth curve.
-Buy slaves from the slave market: Even if you've outlawed slavery, that just makes them more expensive, but they're still staggeringly cheap compared to the value of having extra pops appear from nowhere. Dump your excess income into clearing out the slave market from the moment it gets founded until nobody else in the galaxy is willing to sell you any more of them. get more pops.
-Don't forget food bonuses: It's a hassle to micromanage once you have a lot of colonies, but you should have Encourage Growth running on all your planets as much as you can, even if you gotta buy food from the market to do it, especially in the early game. Once you've got a reasonable number of colonies to forward the bonus to, you should switch to the Nutritional Plenitude policy for the growth bonus (plus free happiness!).
-Neglect your military early-game as much as you can get away with: This got a lot easier with Federations, but in the early game every resource you spend on your fleets is a resource you can't spend on growth. You want to be sinking all your influence and alloys into claiming as much territory as possible and putting down as many colonies as possible. Any excess alloys left after you become influence-limited should be spent on throwing starbases up at chokepoints before you start spending it on ships unless you have to. Usually having an armed starbase blocking their only paths into your territory is enough to keep a neighbor at bay for a while even if they have way more fleet power than you, because starbases are pretty strong compared to fleets for the first couple decades of the game. You can also achieve this by sending envoys to improve relations with all your neighbors, or by making friends with one or two large neighbors and signing a defensive pact (although this costs influence), or just by taking one of the origins that lets you start in a federation - but regardless of how you do it, the longer you can skate with no fleets before you start having to spend resources on defense, the better-positioned you'll be in the late game.
-Steal other peoples' pops if you can: Once you can afford a fleet without giving up pop growth to do it, take pops from the rest of the galaxy, too, either by claiming and conquering their systems or just via Raiding bombardment. More people means more resources means more everything.
-Take ethics and civics that are compatible with your plan: There's more flexibility here than in other places, but again: Pop growth first, pop efficiency second. Both Xenophobe and Xenophile are powerful right now depending on your plan; Xenophobe gives a flat growth bonus if you don't want migration treaties, and Xenophile gives you Land of Opportunity plus extra envoys for keeping the neighbors pacified and a trade value bonus that can be substantial. If you go Xenophobe and can stand being Pacifist, Inward Perfection is huge; if you go Xenophile, Free Haven and Merchant Guilds are both very strong - there is, for example, a pretty potent set of synergies between Fanatic Xenophile+Free Haven+Merchant Guilds+Ringworld origin in which you make friends easily, sign immigration treaties with all of them, have colonies with 100% habitability for all pops where it's easy to stack up immigration pull, generate a bunch of extra Merchant job slots via ringworld commerce districts which give trade value and free bonus unity, rack up a large bonus to that trade value from Xenophile, and then use that extra unity generation to finish the diplomacy tree early and qualify via Merchant Guilds to found a Trade League federation, which gives you the Trade League trade policy that stacks another big bonus on your already-boosted trade value by effectively letting you run Consumer Benefits and Marketplace of Ideas at the same time.
Just as a run-through example of strategy decisions and the reasons behind them, my current game's strategy is underperforming a fair amount because I missed a lot of opportunities experimenting and got boxed in by the Enigmatic Fortress on a small map with max empires, but I still have 250k fleet power and 1500 alloys/month at year 2350 and the strategy was roughly this:
Try out Void Dwellers and seek to maximize the benefit. Since Void Dwellers has housing problems, migration treaties are off the table, so: Fanatic Xenophobe (+20% pop growth)/Pacifist (just to unlock Inward Perfection; pacifist is otherwise a pretty substantial drawback). Inward Perfection (another +20% growth) and Aristocratic Elite (this was to manage stability from low housing, but I'm not sure it was the best investment - Corvee System would probably have served me better). Species was Rapid Breeders+Nomadic for growth, plus Communal to minimize the housing problem (worth it? unclear so far, might never find out since hab housing is getting changed), paid for with Nonadaptive (because it doesn't matter almost at all for Void Dwellers anyway). Built 4 science ships and set them exploring as soon as possible (gotta know what directions to expand in, plus better odds of firing Precursor freebies sooner), expanded as quickly as possible until I butted up against neighbors, with priority going towards valuable systems and chokepoints. Boxed neighbors out with starbases, invested enough in research to keep the starbases strong enough to beat their fleets until I could afford to build a fleet of my own; invested first in some additional habitats as soon as I could scrape the alloys together (Void Dwellers has a pop growth advantage because it starts with 3 colonies, but once everyone else ALSO has 3-4 colonies you're falling behind until you can start building more; you wanna keep that window as small as possible). Genemod ascension, all the megastructure ascension perks. Tech ascendancy perk 1 (Interstellar Dominion probably better on large maps, especially if you plan to shed Pacifist by going Psionic ascension and taking the option to turn your Chosen One into a god-emperor, but small map+pacifist means minimal influence saved from Dominion). Eventually take Nihilistic Acquisition to game my Pacifism - I can't claim systems to expand my population, but I CAN declare Liberation Wars and just kidnap whole planets until I've stolen all their pops. Start going to war with the neighbors and taking all their people (probably should have done this earlier, but like I said: first time trying this plan); minerals income mostly sunk into building out capacity to fit all the new arrivals. Genemod my own species with Fertile+Erudite+Nomadic+Communal as soon as able, enslave all alien species and genemod them with whatever combination of Very Strong/Nerve Stapled/Industrious/Agrarian/Ingenious is most useful [I do have a few psionic residents who get Erudite+Natural Engineers/Physicists and Indentured Servitude so they can fill researcher jobs], have pop controls on for all of them so that I continue to benefit from my native species growth (and don't have so much risk of a situation where specialist jobs are going unfilled because there are too many slave pops and not enough free ones). Dumped most of my influence into building Habitats (more colonies = more growth = more everything) until I unlocked Ringworlds, kept systems without important resource deposits free of habitats so that I could turn them into ringworld systems later (can't build a ringworld in a system that already has a habitat). Once my alloy income got high enough, started dumping it all into megastructures for long-term growth - built the science nexus, coordination center, dyson sphere, matter decompressor, and a couple ringworlds so far. (Dyson Sphere and especially Matter Decompressor are eventually critical for continuing to expand inside the finite territory Pacifism leaves me with - minerals eventually become the chokepoint resource because you can't make them on ringworlds and can only get them on a limited number of habitats in a given territory) Currently sitting at about 2000 pops at year 2350 and doing a lot of resettlement to shuffle them around efficiently as more ringworlds come online; have functionally won except for waiting for the crisis to trigger. I've bumped it up to fire between 2350-2400, but I expect to have no problems clearing 1m fleet power before it pops now that I'm wrapping up megastructure construction and can just pour my alloys into fleets.
Although you probably wanna make sure you have any planets you want to colonize with the right environment first, before signing the treaty.
Maybe, but you still gotta be able to turn those planets into bottomless pits of immigration pull. You're going to be putting a lot of immigration push into the system from your overcrowded habitats, which means a lot of your growth that's on the table to be distributed between you and your signatories based on immigration pull. If 80% of the total push into the system is coming from your own colonies, you gotta be able to keep 80% of the total pull coming from your colonies, too, just to break even, and then the gains you can get even from generating enough pull to take 90-95% of the pool for yourself are pretty limited. Immigration treaties are much, much stronger when you can contribute a low percentage of the total push and still generate a high percentage of the total pull, because then that pull is all actively siphoning the other guy's growth and not just mostly getting spent on recapturing and retaining your own.
If you just want a way to get efficient labor out of a ground colony as void dwellers, much easier to go xenophobe, buy slaves/steal pops to get other species, colonize your planets with your main species and then just shove your slave population onto them to do the actual work. Keep just enough void dwellers on the ground to keep order while resettling new ones that grow back onto a station, or just nerve staple the slaves to make it a nonissue. Or use bots to do the same thing much earlier in the game - even with basic bots, you can found a colony, keep enough organics on-surface to work the admin jobs, fill the planet with mine and farm districts, and just export robots to the colony to work them without penalty.