How to specialize as the Vaulters

This is a guide to provoke thoughts into your gameplay while playing as the Vaulters. Indirectly, this guide will give some general ideas too. With it, you will conquer the galaxy and unlock its secrets much faster than ever before.

Understanding The Vaulters

The Vaulters is the best faction to go for a tall empire in Endless Space 2; the portal is the most powerful tool what this faction obtains. Because of this, your empire's borders don't need to be clustered. All of your colonized systems are one border; you can portal anywhere in one turn.

You should always colonize -the best option available- regardless of the distance from your capital or other systems. Since you can transport anything (civilian & military ships) through portals in one turn, the micromanagement to fully optimize your systems is very much easier than other factions.

Before continuing on about system specialization, you have to find the best spots first! What that means is the exploration is the backbone of a successful Vaulters playthrough. Let’s continue from ship specialization.




Always seeking, never straying. - Ilona Zolya

Endless Specialization (Ships)

Just like the faction itself, the Vaulters ship design is very much customizable too. Forcing you to create your own designs than any other faction in the game. There are 5 types of ship types you should always be mind of when playing as them.

• Explorers
  
• Identifiers
  
• Defensive
  
• Offensive
  
• Circumstantial

EXPLORERS

Since your science ship starts with 4 support modules, you can very much make the fastest exploration ship in the galaxy at start If you dedicate all 4 slots with movement modules. With a total 16 movement points you can pretty much scout much space as possible before your colony ship (Argosy) cooldown ends. This is a must If you don’t want to leave it to chance. You have to scout everytime to find the best spots in the galaxy.

IDENTIFIERS

Since you always want to fully optimize your ship designs, this ship has to be filled with at least 2 probes but 3 probe is the best until technological advances. It is also important for your exploration ships to warp other nodes so you have to send many probes as possible.

The vaulters have only one colonization ship,
therefore always remember to upgrade it
with your current technology.

DEFENSIVE & OFFENSIVE

You ought to spend some support modules to give movement points to your ships because it can take very long turns to get somewhere. Especially around mid-game (usually around 70th turn), where you start to invade, harass or do some quests. As you approach this stage of the game you can actually make two of a kind of same ship design you have. One for offense, with movement modules, installed and the other is for defensive purposes with no movement support modules. Since you haven’t in-need of a movement points to defend your systems via portals, why should you waste support modules, yes?

By doing defensive & offensive ship designs your defensives become even more powerful and people trying to invade you are going to have the toughest time. This will even be more powerful as you access to bigger ships. What I usually do is to write A or D front of the ship names to differentiate them better. Changing the name of the fleets would help you in the long run as well.

CIRCUMSTANTIAL

A regular player of Endless Space 2 is already doing a dedicated siege or invasion ships, commander or tanky ships, etc… But for the Vaulters, you should always consider having more and play around with more support modules. Since you can have lots of support modules this should feel like a playground.

A regular invasion ship effect is tripled -for the Vaulters- with the number of support modules It can have.

Endless Specialization (Systems)

We established that the Vaulters has to explore a vast area of space before selecting a good colonization spot and be ready for the next cooldown to end.

Capital System

Your capital system should have a good amount of food and an average amount of industry. Science or dust isn’t that important for at first (we will get to that later on) but if you have to select one of the dust should be your selection.

You should shape your capital as a population production area and try to improve its food production much as possible. With portals, you are going to be sending these populations to your new but far systems in one turn and boost its effectiveness faster.
The important thing you should be aware: economic tier 2, a good selection of resource to upgrade system and building portal for both systems. You have to do all of these before reaching the maximum population in your capital system!


Always Keep in Mind Before Colonization

• Colonize only the best ones. The distance is irrelevant.
  
• Save enough dust for a buyout the portal for the colony.
  
• Send population to boost the effectiveness.
  
• Only build the necessary buildings for the desired specialization.

Early Colonization Goals

As for your second system, you should consider acquiring an industry system. This will help you to create big fleets and do buildings faster. Since early on you don’t need that complex ships with modules or don’t have the industrial capacity to build lots of buildings. It’s wise to have your industry first.

Trying to have Titanium or Hyperium isn’t that big deal really; your factions buildings or heroes can already help you to produce enough.

Later on, you have to go for a science-specific system. To continue building and expanding and after that, you are pretty much alone on how would you go based on what you find out. I’m assuming you did your duties to explore the stars very fast.

Later Colonization Goals

After 3-4 good quality colonies, it’s time for you to go mid-tier resources (like anti-matter) or desired luxury resources. Even colonizing the academy is a legit option; you can go anywhere!

From this point on your own strategy should be set or could even go wild and colonize only the “best of something” systems. You just make sure you are producing enough population to fill those new planets faster.

Strategic Scenarios

Once the essential systems colonized you can always do more strategic things with it. Grabbing a near enemy system just for teleporting reinforcements or just to block trading routes in later situations.

FIDSI, Resource and Population Management

FIDSI MANAGEMENT

Food
As an infrastructure resource, you should always be aware of this when transporting lots of populations to newly colonized systems. The system could start starving due to lack of food production but it’s not an urgent matter If they are going to starve in 20 turns or something.

Always make sure you are not over committing the food production for other systems though. It would be waste of turns and resources but of course you should never stop to improve your food production in your home or population production systems. Not to mention your food production won't be affected by colonization so it's always a good idea to send populations elsewhere.

Industry and Science
Even though you are specializing the systems you should build the counter buildings when there is no desired building left to do. It’s also important for systems to able to build higher tier buildings or produce science or dust idly. Just make sure you build the priorities for the specific system at first.

Dust and Influence
These are very much important for every faction but in the early game due to the extreme potential of exploring the curiosities, you can get a big boost if you focused scouting. As you always should. Looting different kinds of luxury resources would be beneficial by selling them on market too.

Since as the Vaulters going to have big population It would be hard for them to maintain laws after 30-40 turns. So, be mind of the Influence income during these turns.

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Since you can use the strategic resources to upgrade system development and you should also do this early as possible in order to transport populations. You can pretty much rush early on with spending strategic resource. While it is good to upgrade system development much faster with titanium or hyperium (giving a quick boost to FIDS) these would scale badly as the game progress. It wouldn’t be bad but it’s not great, so to say.
For system development, it’s just more efficient to select bonuses giving any kind FIDSI bonuses for each population. Things like Adamantian and Anti-Mather is highly useful when upgrading systems.

POPULATION MANAGEMENT

Even though the vaulters starting populations give few good land battle bonuses, it’s not a great one to build an empire upon but since we have to produce populations as soon as possible we have no choice but to improve to the overall effectiveness of the populations.

Either upgrading system development, planet specialization, laws or buildings which giving bonuses o population. Know that we are very depended having lots of populations to fill those planets early on, so we might at least improve them. Boosting population is very important for this faction early on.


Having Sisters of Mercy is useful to nullify
happiness penalties because of big population
or bad planets.

Law and Hero Management

LAW MANAGEMENT

Starting with the science and military party is very useful for you. At the start, you can select the “lower fleet cost” to push your science ships 1 turn faster. When you are done sending explorers and identifiers you can select “Cram Exam Act” to push out colonization technologies or just go for “Super Tax Act” to prepare yourself for market dealings for buying out portal or population boost purposes.

More importantly, staying as science party allows you to push our system improvements much faster and helps in your first quest too.

HERO MANAGEMENT

Vaulters heroes are very useful. They can produce titanium and hyperium from thin air. They are also good at boosting out science and defending their governed planets. They have militarist and pacifist hero since your second party usually going to be one of those ideologies too you can use their senate bonuses separately as well.

Technology

Being science party allows you to be very selective when it comes to technology. You can pick up your desired colony technologies with much efficiency. Also, this allows you to cherry pick food building tech but the most importantly you can unlock system development very fast which is synergies with the whole transporting mentality.

Vaulters population, heroes and able to explore curiosities making you very efficient at technology department. Researching Aurigan Sheild should be one of the first things you should do but of course, the best technology the Vaulters has is boarding party.

Offensive & Defensive Tactics

Vaulters are a tough nut to crack. Should be able to hold on invasion for quite some time. This would give the necessary turn to group up in a safe system and creating a fleet to defend the blockaded or facing an invasion system.

For offensive tactics, you should always consider having a “reinforcement system” when going on an invasion. Remember that your defensive fleets could defend this too. You can send fleets like hordes as soon as portal becomes online.

Vaulters could turn their ships into rouges and blockade the colonizing systems to starve them out. This is also a usefull option to scout others where probes can’t reach and would be more continuous information about the opponents.

The faction shines at melee range so you always be on your enemies noose. The boarding party is a legit tactic; currently, it’s almost OP. You could have lots of fast invasion ships too due to big support module ships and bring the fight to them. Since Vaulters the best melee faction you can give the hardest time to your enemies and forcing them to defend.

Never forget that fire and armor power of your ships are not that good. You won’t be that much effective if you want to battle with the weapon power. Even though you can improve the weapons damage, firing multiple weapons at the same time is better. So having nukes would be less efficient(because of flaks) since you are shooting less, lasers would be much better.

Political Situation and Diplomatic Relations

The secrets of the stars will be ours - Ilona Zolya

POLITICAL SITUATION

Politicly you are set for science for life. Because as you produce more Vaulters to fill the planets, the science poll is always going to be filled. Your second party could be militarist or pacifist depending on your playstyle but that's not a problem.

Having portals allows you to micromanage populations way easier. You can always find the most efficient ways and set it up in one turn. Which makes this excessive population transportation micromanagement, manageable; with other factions, you usually forget about transportations which will arrive in longer turns.

Though as you have fully specialized systems, in the late game you are going to start to see some changes. With assimilating minor factions and all some systems votes will change dramatically.

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS

Diplomacy is not their strongest suit. With all that raiding operations and picking the best systems right before their eyes from your opponents are making you very unlikeable neighbor. Since you can pretty much be neighbors with anybody.

It’s though for Vaulters the have trusting ally and you will be in conflict with many people. So it’s best for you to be aggressive all times and keep snowballing by picking the best systems.

Weaknesses and Vaulters as Opponents

The main disadvantage is diplomacy because of having too many neighbors it’s really hard to fully commit to one side. It is best to pressure the Vaulters with an alliance.

They are also very predictable in space combat. Having mass flak guns and long-range tactics would help to stop those boarding tactics. They also have a low amount of armor & weapon slots. Which makes it harder when they face enemies with high armors.

They also depended on their precious colony ship losing this for long turns would hurt them immensely. It’s wise to attack Vaulters science ships on sight because you are going to fight them eventually you might as well slow them down; they are very depending on exploration.

Their population is only good at melee they need a long time to snowball. Making them focus on the military would stop their process.

A Quick Summary

GOOD

• Exploring
  
• Colonizing
  
• Invasions
  
• Population micromanagement
  
• Gathering up forces

BAD

• Space battles
  
• Diplomacy
  
• Low dust production
  
• Depending on finding good spots
  
• Barely passable starting populations

Epiloge and Credits

I hope this writing will prove some thoughts the next time you play as the Vaulters. I find them very unique and they are doing this without trying too much. I will add more sections if there is a new game-changing mechanic or balance patch introduced. I will try to answer if you have questions.

Thank you for reading and I congratulate the Amplitude studios for this cool game I enjoy playing. The artwork from in-game and you can check out the comic from here[wiki.endless-space.com].

[Camoes]

OLá Ruzen! Espero que esteja bem! Comprei os Endless (1 & 2) , faz agora 2 anos e meio. Vou agora finalmente começar a jogar o 2, e escolhi os Vaulters! Obrigado pelo Excelente Guia e Bom ano de 2022!

[koxsos]

I believe they do, or at least they should, if they really do not for you, please submit a bug report.

[Muffato Salivato]

Portals do not work for civilian ships.

[Doctor G]

How to specialize as the Vaulters

pop around , kill everyone.

end

[Metalsmith]

Pretty guide, but not helpful enough.

[NorteraiN ヅ]

thanks

[FreeTaiwan]

How do trade companies factor into your gameplan? Given that your cities can be so far apart because of portals, do trade routes benefit from portals?

[LipiusLipni VII !^^]

I always friend the sisters because they so HOT ! Im legit always going for them trying to protect them if any one does anything to them I WAR WAR WAR !

[Jones 27]

Nice guide, but the big question it provokes is: "How are Vaulters even gonna be remotely balanced versus what we already have?" Instant portals and strategic ressources from thin air may be fun in solo play, but in multiplayer it seems quite overpowered. Unless of course there are no further worlds to colonise. ;)

[I Am Atomic!]

ps for previous post.

while a few coordinators make a decent support/tank fleet you can also be effective using mass of the 1cp support ship as speed enhancer ships supporting 1-3 of the 4cp heavy ships as your offence - just keep in mind that blast effect battery will effectively kill off 1cp ships so sometimes you need to reserve 1 slot for engines despite having speed+ support ships.