xBr0wnBear's Racial Trait Guide (Brutal / Brutal-Agg)

This is an in-depth guide to racial picks for the Brutal and Brutal - Aggressive Enemy Difficulty. I've been working on LPs on the highest difficulty for Stardrive 2 and was asked a few times on what people thought were good and bad racial traits. Here's my personal opinion on the matter.

About the Guide

The current guide represents information in the 1.0H version of the game.

This guide was made based on experiences off and on camera for Brutal / Aggressive Enemies Difficulty. Some Picks may change based on the difficulty setting. In addition, these picks represent my personal opinion. The guide is seperated on a tier list based on the strengths and weaknesses of the picks. The order within the tier does not matter.

Feel free to agree/disagree in the comments section, ask any questions, or suggest improvements to the guide. I only ask that you respect your fellow commenters and myself and to keep it civil. :)

A little about me...

I've been playing 4x space games since I was in elementary school...a very very long time ago with Star Lords and then MOOI. I've gone through all of the positively rated 4x games on Steam, the Gal Civ series, Stars!, Space Empires Series etc. Out of everything, my favorites were Distant Worlds and MOOII with Gal Civ II an honorable mention after that. I also enjoyed SINS which is in its category of it's own as a Space Game but it had a lot of good enjoyable features such as watching 100 beams of illuminating light purify everything :p

Currently I run Brutal - Agg Let's Plays of SD 2 on my channel.

Shameless self-plug... https://www.youtube.com/user/xBr0wnBear

Class A Picks

Class A picks represent picks that provide a strong pick / cost ratio and few drawbacks.

Rich HW - Your HW will always be a core planet in your empire. Making it rich gives you a very strong start. Unless you found some Huge Rich/UR planets in the mid game, your HW will be one of your main factories. You bought a sandwich and for $1 you get twice the meats. Yes Please
(As a side note I wouldn't take poor HW. It makes your start very volatile and if you don't find a nearby awesome planet you're completely crippled.)

Subterranean - 6 points is very cheap for this and one of the main benefits is that asteroids are usually ultra-rich and have some good resource. Combined with asteroid superstructure, asteroids become extremely strong production bases. Your homeworld will also benefit but you'll have to find some sources of approval in the late game otherwise you'll lose a decent amount of productivity. Nonetheless, Subterranean is a strong first class pick.

Class B Picks

Class B Picks represent picks that have a good benefit/cost ratio or a situationally great benefit/cost ratio.

Sacrificers - Sacrificers is a situationally great 2 point pick. If you find an early game neutral to conquer or a weak enemy empire to rush then you just hit the literal gold rush + RPs.

+Ship Offense - In the latest patch Cruise Missiles and Long Range is still the name of the game. Blow them up before you need to worry about tanking. 2 RP for 20 % is pretty cheap. 6 RP for 50% is probably closer to excessive but hey I won't judge if you want to one volley enemy cruisers.

+Production / Pollution Reduction - Production drives this game from the early to the end. I haven't done the math to see which one is better but you can't go wrong grabbing a bonus here. You can also take both or +2 in one but then subterranean is better overall once you have a few buildings.

+Farming / Photosynthesis - More food -> more people doing other stuff or more money which is always good. In the start of the game those early farmers can be producers to rush a faster colony ship. Might even be a borderline A pick depending on if there are neighbors to rush. The bonus carries well over to the mid game too.

+Money - There's a time where you'll start taxing which takes away your production / science. Consider money another approval bonus but money you can use to spam production on key worlds later on to plan an emergency defense. Throwing 50% taxes to rush out ships where you want them popping out is also a nice bonus. Having money to jump start new colonies is very strong. There's a lot of possibilities but make sure you use your money.
4 RP for 50% boost is a bit pricy but I would never take the -3 RP for 25% penalty. You'll be hurting much sooner than you think if you didn't rush Imperial Banks.

Class C Picks

Class C Picks represent those that have a mediocre bonus/cost ratio or a very luck-dependent trait.

+Ship Defense - The current patch promotes killing over tanking. Nonetheless, it has its uses. On corvettes, you can tank a few extra shots so I won't say it's a bad choice.
3 points for 25% and 7 points for 50%. A bit on the expensive side but a smart leader can make a few tanky ship designs to front line...
Overall it's probably better to take it for the malus and use those points for +20% damage. The only time you care is the final boss.

+Science - If production is the heart then Science is the brains of the game. The problem with + Science is that it doesn't exactly scale well until the mid game where you have a lot of scientists. If you do those missions and tech trade you already should have a decent tech on the highest difficulty. In addition there's only a few key techs in the same branch you'll want to grab pretty early on and there's no science victory. It shames me to say that +Science just isn't worth it as much as in say MOO.

+Growth - More people -> more resources -> more techs / ships / planets. It's like you start with cloning bays everywhere especially if you get +100%. Unfortunately the better way to get people is to just grab them from others. The current meta is not centered on natural growth but instead on grabbing as many enemy HWs as early as possible.

Aquatic - Highly situational, if you find a bunch of organic planets then it's good. If not, you somewhat wasted points. Unfortunately it doesn't stack with subterranean so aquatic gets counterfeited by that ability. For one more point you get extra population capacity in all worlds rather than only organics.
Tundra, Terran, Oceanic, Gaia, Swamp get the bonus. You get +1 food, +10% approval.

Resourceful - Once again, a highly situational pick. It's actually a bit annoying to get to 4 resources so with 2 what do we get or care about? Remember I'm talking about the completion bonus and not for each resource possessed.
Diamondite (+10BC), Spice (+1 Research/sci), Bakta (+10% approval), Nano (-25% rush cost), Lemba (+.5 growth), Proto (+10% approval) are the ones that are definitely helpful!
Triithium (+33% fuel efficiency) and Artifacts (+2 BC/trade) and Delicacies (+10% dip relations ) Full Bonuses are useless although you'll get the full set bonus anyways because the per resource bonuses are good.
Noxium (+20% missile) / H3 (+25% beam) are situational. Since missiles are FotM, noxium bonus is more useful.
Latinum (+10 tolerance) can be useful.

Honestly I'd edge this on the border to class B if it wasn't so luck dependent. It really is a cheap place to dump 2 points and there's way more good bonuses than useless ones so chances are you'll be able to take advantage of it.

Class D Picks

Class D Picks represent those that have inconsequential benefits or are war win picks which are those that are only useful if you're already winning significantly.

+Spies - Spies arn't that annoying and they definitely don't have enough options in this game for them to be worth it. You don't want to be in the position where you need to rob everyone to catch up in tech and unlike MOOII you can't pretend you're the Galactic Al Qaeda so if I was to find points to grab it'd be in spies. Also think about it this way, if you take bad spies and another con to grab +money or +production you can just pay/build more spies later on to make up for it. There's also a small chance you get the anti-spy leader for all the spy defense you need. A small chance but still worthy of mentioning.

+Diplomacy - The bonuses are too poor to be worth it but is the malus worth it? In Brutal diffiulty the hardest part of the game is the start where you need to make sure you don't get backstabbed. If you don't have the fleet, you're going to restart. Diplomacy can buy you a few extra turns theoretically but why buy your self a turn when you can build a fleet. The pen is mightier than the sword but definitely not the laser.

+Ground HP - Ground combat is ridiculously easy. Just Hold position and you get 9 AP as the enemy runs towards you. So the question more is do you want to take the penalty. It's not a matter of having a harder invasion, all of those are pretty easy. The bigger question is do you want to forfeit some mission rewards because you can only bring in 25 hp weaklings. The 500 Biochem RP one you'll be able to do which is arguably the best one. Nontheless there are a few mid game ones that reward a decent amount of cash and RP so that's what you're trading for an extra 2 Points. I'd take the 2 points.

Creative - It's really the cost. Creative is still a fun trait but in SD2, there's not too many hard choices in each branch to make. You got many other empires to take the 2ndary techs you didn't take and if noone ever researched it then oh well, everyone's on the same field. +14 is way too much.

Assimilators - I like xeno assimilation and you can get that without spending 4 picks. Sure you can now grab 2 techs but do they have that many techs to grab that are useful?

High-G - The +10 Ground HP is pretty moot. Since ultra-rich and High-G has some correlation for non-asteroid worlds High-G does have a very strong luck-based perk but for 3 points I'll drop them somewhere else.


Holy Land - +20% approval translates to +20% sci/production for the HW. It's 1 RP but usually you don't have most of your hw as scientists until later on so for the early game you're looking at the 20% production mainly. That's not comparable to +2 production/citizen in grabbing a rich HW so it's a bit inferior. It'll scale up later on of course but by then your homeworld is but one planet out of dozens and in the early game there's a clearly better pick.

Spiritual - +10% to empire production and science is a Jack of all Trades pick. Most Races produce 2 base science so the +1 pick is a 50% boost for 3 points. With an abundant HW you have 3 base production so the +1 pick is a 33% boost for 3 points. Spiritual gives you a little bit of both for 10% but not enough to make it worth it unfortunately in the early game. Now if you reach late game or find some Ultra Rich bonanzas, then the 10% scaling pick has some use but if you are in those situations, was that 10% going to be the difference between winning or losing? Probably not...

Class F Picks

Class F Picks represent those that are actually harmful / serve little benefit for what you would gain in return..

Cybernetic - This is going to be my most controversial placement. Remeber I'm not rating Opteris as a race but the Cybernetic trait on it's own as a pick. The main problem is that early game you're building a charger building which you'll have to later pay 4 maintenance on. You also have to build your people. So you're trading the first 20-40 turns of your planet's production for much much later gains when you don't need farmers. You need to spend 200 production which you don't have to spare in the early game for each citizens. Other races will have an automated rover bay out + more by then so when you start gaining relatively to other races is much much later. Cybernetic is an 8 pointer + ingame investment that you'll find returns after a hundred+ turns.
Turtle or Die if you meet someone early and if you can't, then you're a fried circuit board.

Fantastic Traders - 3 Points to gain nothing is a bad trait. In easier difficulties you can trade but on brutal your tolerance is a precious commodity and brutal negotiators malus with all interactions makes it so that you arn't going to be entering into many trade agreements if any.

Adept Slavers - Why slave when you can conquer? Also don't forget that slave pits give -10 approval to planets that have them. Yuck.

Titan Quest - Four points so you can't build any military ships in the early game!

'Good' Negative Attributes

Since negative attributes are obviously bad, this section will describe which negative attributes are the least harmful to take.

Currently all of the Negative Attributes are extremely punishing to take.

'Bad' Negative Attributes

Most of the negative attributes are extremely painful for the points given. If you want free points consider grabbing them from diplomacy, spies, ground combat, ship defense-growth in that order. Most of those negatives have only minimal downsides.

Low-G - Ok yes it's a negative pick so it's meant to be harmful :p. But considering that 90% of the planets in the universe are going to give you -25% production and production is king. It gets special mention for why this is a bad trait to pick. Unless you're playing some one enemy small map where you need negative traits for +production so you can perform some rush, don't pick this.

Poor Homeworld - I mentioned it earlier in the Rich HW pick but if you're looking for points to grab, this isn't where you want them from. You're crippling your early position if you don't find a godly world next door. It gets placed here even though we know it's supposed to be a bad trait as a reminder to say no to the God of Poor Homeworlds.

Total War Out of all of the negative attributes, this is probably the least painful only because it's highly luck dependent. If you find a bunch of weak neutrals and hard to colonize worlds then sure why not! You still get your starting colonizer so choose wisely.

Newcomer Obviously this pick is for people who want a challenge. I only added this here in the name of completion. Anyways, giving the AI extra colonies at the start is clearly bad if you just want negative picks because they'll have many colonies over you which means they are an avalanche and you're a snowflake.

Change Log / Future Plans

v1.1 - 5/17/15
Upgraded food/photo (Extra worker rather than farmer is really strong at the start)
Downgraded Growth (Games not mid game - late game focused atm so taking over enemy planets is more fruitful than natural growth).
Aquatic confirmed to work on swamp, oceanic, tundra, gaia
Updated to game 1.1
Added the Bad and Good Negative Attributes section.

v1.0 - 4/27/15
Guide Released

Future Plans

• Waiting for future patches

[thaodahaka]

Please feel free to check out the guide I created How to Beat Brutal X 4

[thaodahaka]

I agree with some of what is written in this guide, but I've figured out how to choose Titan Quest and have a Titan class ship after about 60 turns, so I swear by that strategy instead.

[HardToCure]

I agree with previous comment. Cybernetics is underestimating. It perfectly works with subterranean and aquatic. Aquatic is another underestimated trait. It cost only 5 points. Faster start (free worker give more production, you will have 10 production with 1 free food to support first colony), more workers on the planets later. When you have a lot of workers it doesn't matter if you have +1 prod per worker or envirenment bonus.

My start is usually in 2 systems. I give everything to other races they want except colonies. When you have a lot of workers you increase tax to 50% and it will cover expenses to your first fleet. After first concquared fraction you win. Played on Brutal_x4.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=425913929

[Carog the Fat]

playing brutal x4 now and cyborgs below. running at 2500 over tolerance in total. no one attacked me due to excellent trading with them. all races like me bar the bear who i declared war on. Cybernetic isnt a class f pick. Only way you can trade up as well getting battle ships and class 3 shield from humans for a bunch of old tech previously gained from trade cost me 700 tolerance.

[Carog the Fat]

I believe you are seriously underestimating cybernetic. 1 you can take poor farmers and slow growth which is -7 points(this makes the start harder but immediately give trade access to every other nation and anything else they demand until you have a fleet). 2 trading on brutal for tech is hard but not with cybernetic indifference as you can happily over trade; this only works if you take sacrificer and borg every planet (4 enemy pop will buy 1 borg). 3 you dont need to build anything to increase happiness this saves a lot of production. my borg build is cybernetic, rich homeworld, prod workers, compent space fighter, competent engineers, sacrificers, poor farmer breeder and spys. I think looking at each option with out relating it to the rest is bad.

[Shades]

Stupid character limit.
Sorry.

[Shades]

Starting with poor stats and then just replacing everyone with elephants is hugely useful, though it takes work to micromanage the population growth.
Its also extremely dependant on luck, but if you get it, its just a massive boost on everything. Especially with subterranean and faster reproduction/cloning/hospitals.

Also I believe diplomacy helps getting better leaders which increases the chances for the elephant leader. This is unconfirmed though.

[Shades]

A few more thoughts:
Money+production are a good pair, because the money comes from taxed production.
No production-no money.

Holy land: If you trade a lot of citizens, its from your largest planet which is likely your HW for much of the game. The arriving aliens lower the morale, which the holy land nicely compensates until you can create single-species planets.

Sacrificers: Sacrificing useless aliens can be moderately useful at times, but sacrificing people is usually hurting you in the long run.
BUT!
If you are REALLY lucky, you can either easily get aliens with nice bonuses, or even the Elephant Uplift which have max stats on everything.

[Shades]

Oh, and total war is very playstyle dependant. I understand you want to take out weak enemies early and this is no problem with total war. But for people who prefer strong defences and getting every planet (or people like me who do not want to declare a war first) its very damaging for the development. Avoid it like the plague, or change the playstyle dramatically)

[Shades]

Also, Im not sure, but with newcomer, if the extra worlds are not very good, it may hurt the enemies in the long run more than it hurts you.
I dont know if they are always good worlds or not, so im not so sure about this. But as a player, I would rather take a colony ship in the beginning than a random extra world.

And while resourceful is a C or maybe even a D on brutal, its pretty useful in easier levels.
If you get 4 resources and can live without them, you can easily trade them away for a little while. Production and science bonuses are always a keeper, but even on higher difficulty levels its possible to buy tech at what is actually very cheap price. If you want to play your enemies against each other, you can give them an instant bonus in trade of tech or money, without fear of leaving what you trade in hands of your worse enemy.