A quick guide to one of the best current meta builds. 2.8.x (Outdated as of 3.0)

Overview

This build uses the Necrophage Origin and aims to get as much tech as possible to get ahead of everyone and then crush them.

The Empire.

• Dictatorial. When given the option for a 3rd civic switch to Oligarchy for Meritocracy
• Authoritarian = Slaves, extra output for our workers, best Living Standard in the game (Stratified Economy), Allows you to pay virtually nothing for workers and slaves while also giving them very little diplomatic power. This means that these pops won’t really impact the stability on your planets.
• Fanatic Materialist = reduced upkeep for our robots later and a juicy 10% research speed.

• Slaver Guilds = More output for our slaves. Indentured Servitude lets slaves work the hyper efficient technocracy jobs while also consuming virtually no upkeep.
• Technocracy = More unity from the tons of researchers we will have and extra tech from science directors.
• Meritocracy = 3rd Civic when we unlock the society tech for it. 10% more of everything.

• Necrophage

Lithoids. This in combination with Necrophage drastically changes how you would play a normal empire. With both of these traits on our species, it ends up with 100% pop growth reduction and that means we can’t grow them. It’s okay because we don’t want to do that anyway. More on this later.

• Lithoid
• Necrophage
• Intelligent = more research
• Natural Engineers = more engineering research which is the most important one since we want to synth ascend as fast as possible.
• Charismatic
• Deviants & Unruly are free picks since they barely do anything.

Anything organic (not Lithoids or Machines though).

• Ingenious
• Industrious
• Strong
• Unruly & Deviants

How to play

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• Like with every other empire, strip every component that you can from your corvettes in the ship designer and upgrade them for -145 alloys. This nets us 145 free alloys. Disband the corvettes.

• Unequip your governor (if he has the crime reduction trait) and your enforcer. Unpause the game for a couple months and your crime should go up to 15-20%. This lets us enable the crime lord deal in the Decisions of a planet and this nets us a very sweet 10 stability on our planet which equals more resources. Do this for all of your planets as this 10 stability modifier lasts for the entire game.

• Change the Slavery Type of both of our Species to Indentured Servitude.

• Grab Choke points around your capital, don’t expand into territory you can’t defend.

• Avoid war in the early game, secure good relationships with neighbors so we can tech rush more freely.

• Stacking Hangar bays with strike craft will make your starbases have very high power in the early game which will trick the AI into being afraid to attack you.

• We have a finite number of pops from the main species since we can’t actively grow them but we do have some blockers in our capital that we can clear to get a few free pops from the main species.

• If you want to min/max, grab a governor with the Environmental Engineer trait to clear those blockers faster and cheaper. Generally though, you want an Intellectual one for more research.

• When it comes to the Chamber of Elevation building in your capital, you want to keep it around for the extra unity and replace it before the 10 year mark so it won’t convert your pops.

• Like with most empires you want to stack Research Labs in your capital and try to replace the Administrative Offices, Civilian Industries & Alloy Foundries with 3 Research Labs as soon as you can (provided your economy can handle them) and move them to your other planets.

• Rush your guaranteed primitive worlds as soon as possible and keep the new species on Residence Citizenship until the Culture Shock modifier on the planet expires. Then you can switch them to Indentured Servitude.

• You don’t want to go ham on colonizing planets because only your Main Species can work as Rulers and you have a finite number of them. As a general rule of thumb stick to a max of 5 planets and resettle main species pops that are not slaves to work as rulers for your other planets.

• As soon as you get the tech required to build Robot Assembly Plants, you want to build one on all your planets as this will let you grow organics and robots at the same time, effectively doubling your pop growth.

The goal is to Synth Ascend as fast and as efficient as possible. The sequence goes something like this.

• Powered Exoskeletons -> Robotic Workers – > Colonial Centralization -> Droids -> Complete the project from The Flesh is Weak (Ascension perk)-> Galactic Administration (Society) + Positronic AI (Physics) -> Synthetics -> Synthetic Personality Matrix -> Synthetic Evolution (Ascension Perk).

• When the Synthetic Evolution project is finished we want to get rid of some of our food production since Robots can’t eat food. We do however want to keep some Organics as we want to keep growing them alongside the Robots for more pops.

• Give our Robots Efficient Processors, Loyalty Circuits, Logic Engines or Superconductive and Luxurious and apply the template to our trait-less robots.

• You want to create another template for our Robots with Mass Produced, Efficient Processors, Loyalty Circuits and Repurposed Hardware. This is for growing purposes. Go to all of your planets and change the robots that are growing to this template. Every once in a while, we can apply the main template to these Mass Produced ones.

• You might want to make additional templates for Mining or Generator worlds if you want and give the robots working there as miners additional minerals from jobs etc.

• Necrophages have access to the Adaptability Tradition which is one of, if not the best tradition currently in the game. 1 extra building slot on all your planets and 10% habitability? Yes please.

• You want to get the extra building slot as fast as possible and then either open up Domination for the Blocker Cost Reduction for your Capital or go and finish Discovery. After that, grab Workplace Motivators in Domination for the Extended Shifts edict and finish Adaptability. From there, you can do whatever you want to do. Supremacy is insanely good to have when you’re going to war, Harmony and Prosperity are both nice.

• Tech Ascendancy should always be the first pick.

• Since we want to synthetically ascend as fast as possible, our 2nd pick is The Flesh is Weak which will turn all of our pops into Cyborgs which gives them really good bonuses.

• Depending on which techs you have researched and how close you are to having Synthetic Evolution unlocked, you can opt to wait and grab Synthetic Evolution as your 3rd Ascension Perk. However, if you don’t get good RNG, you might want to grab another Perk as your 3rd one and get Synthetic Evolution as your 4th. In that case Executive Vigor is nice.

• In my playthrough i went for Tech Ascendancy // The Flesh is Weak // Executive Vigor // Synthetic Evolution // One Vision // Master Builders // Arcology Project // Galactic Wonders