Building tall and robot pops

[Stormwind]

Still trying to wrap my head around this game.

I was following a guide for a 3 planet tall build centered on getting droid tech.

I never got the droid tech.

The robots could only work the mineral and farm jobs, and after awhile I didnt see any point in perhaps being left over with some robot unemplyment, so I abandoned the guide and just stopped robot making altogether.

What am I missing with robot construction? How do I get droid tech, when should I build robots, what are the advantages and disadvantages of including robots in a otherwise organic population?

[Meewec]

it should show up sometime after you have the robots tech and the planetary centralization tech from society research. droids can work more complex jobs but not the most complex jobs so after you get the tech they'll be able to work more than farms and mines.

[Markus Reese]

Remember there are intermediates before robots, between robots and droids, and between droids and synths.

Robots have the advantage of different upkeep requirements, unique bonuses but a big one is robot production is independent of biological growth. I have a tall tech species that is just mad runaway once I start robots

[Nightmyre]

https://turanar.github.io/stellaris-tech-tree/vanilla/

Pay attention to the weights and prerequisites, should help you along.

The primary advantage of robots is simply that they grow in parallel to your organic pops. That means their growth is a flat boost to your natural pop growth.

[MaGicBush]

Odd I never thought to try synthetics as a tall empire. I always play as a galaxy conquering empire.

[Nightmyre]

There really is no reason to distinguish between "tall" and "wide" in this game.

There is absolutely zero advantage to not taking up as much space as is reasonable. The only thing you should be paying attention to is who is your neighbour. Take all the space they provide to you, and build on every planet within that space.

It's not like in games like Civ, where taking up that extra space comes at an increasingly punishing cost. In Stellaris, taking extra space is always profitable.

[Stormwind]

Originally posted by Nightmyre:

There really is no reason to distinguish between "tall" and "wide" in this game.

There is absolutely zero advantage to not taking up as much space as is reasonable. The only thing you should be paying attention to is who is your neighbour. Take all the space they provide to you, and build on every planet within that space.

It's not like in games like Civ, where taking up that extra space comes at an increasingly punishing cost. In Stellaris, taking extra space is always profitable.

Yeah I get that, I was more using it to explore certain aspects of the game. My previous game I had grown so huge and had so many mismanaged planets to keep track of and not understanding allot of what was going on, so I thought I would keep it small and concentrate on the little details. There is the idea of the "one planet challenge" I would like to experiment with too.

[Markus Reese]

There still is tall/wide, but it is a smoother gradient in managing the administration bonus. Keeping it tight allows a strong defence. A few specialized planets allow for science runaway. Robots quickly get the industry up while the biologicals focus on science and diplomacy. It does depend on galaxy size and tall is bigger than pre 2.0, essentially minimizing the administration penalty combined with a science focus.

The qlorvins are a weak species, life seeded for fun with focus on engineering. Materialists xenophiles. Robots fast and off I go. Usually focus on full synthetic conversion for fun. The empire stays small, but grows fast. Usually get ringworlds and make a couple as the administration grows.

[Nightmyre]

Originally posted by twistedmelon:

There still is tall/wide, but it is a smoother gradient in managing the administration bonus. Keeping it tight allows a strong defence. A few specialized planets allow for science runaway. Robots quickly get the industry up while the biologicals focus on science and diplomacy. It does depend on galaxy size and tall is bigger than pre 2.0, essentially minimizing the administration penalty combined with a science focus.

The qlorvins are a weak species, life seeded for fun with focus on engineering. Materialists xenophiles. Robots fast and off I go. Usually focus on full synthetic conversion for fun. The empire stays small, but grows fast. Usually get ringworlds and make a couple as the administration grows.

Again - not really true.

You could sorta make the argument on the defence perspective, but it's completely nullified once you get access to gateway technology, which lets your large empire defend just as easily as a small one.

And there is no advantage to having a few science planets versus ... having a lot of science planets. The increased research costs are far outweighed by the increased research produced, and the (relatively) small increase in consumer goods is more than easily handled as well.

Again - no advantage to limiting your empire size. The only restriction you should try to stay within, is making sure that your neighbours are friendly. Beyond that, expand as big as you can get.

[Markus Reese]

That is also a late game vs early game not accounting for infrastructure investment, stability and other bonuses. Time to get to that point, ascension perks, etc. That is why I say a gradient. A massive early sprawl redirects investment and slows down play vs a tight and controlled development allowing rapid early development. The longer the game goes, the more a large empire is beneficial. Plus of course your species and govt setup factor it one way or another as well.

This also needs to consider what difficulty you are on. A group of higher difficulty AI aligned with you in a federation, all small will run more efficient than just one big empire. Though you still gotta deal with that AI...

So a tall play, post 2.0 is securing tactical space, and optimizing development for a rapid tech growth and only colonizing/bordering what is manageable to get that early tech lead and efficiency. After that you grow and expand. Spend for an immediate return you can capitalize on. A Tall play now isnt about just being small, it is about being efficient.

That efficiency allows your small area to develop fast and do lots with your space, with growth exceeding cap. Remember, planet growth slows when you are expanding, so a constant early game expansion slows your making use of said things.

Hence the topic of pondering a tall machine species. It gets you an early game strength advantage and tech advantage which then translates iinto diplomatic strength and peace to go "wide" that way. In short order, yout federation is just a big tech steamroller. Now you are expanding beyond your admin cap locally with growth in planets more efficient, early megastructures, etc.

But that still means space. Dont want to just turtle up. But want to be efficient all the same. My last play with the Qlorvins had a few constellations to keep me reasonably around cap so I did not bog my early growth. Come midgame, I developped within that space so admin was exceeded. By that point though, then my game was any exceed offered more than it took. Ringworlds and such just exploded growth. course my tech lead was quite high now, and come endgame, the admin cap is being paced by endgame tech. Putting me with the admin quantity of a wide, but without the penalty.

Edit: Add to this growth from winning wars, strong federation, subject empires etc. While AI not as powerful, that still made for quite the powerhouse.

[Nightmyre]

To be clear - if we're talking difficulty, I always play on 5x crisis strength, with endgame crisis date set to 2250, and all advanced start empires.

I must repeat - there is no benefit in efficiency to playing smaller empires. You should *always* take up as much space as is available to you. The only limiting factor should be to guarantee that your neighbours are friendly, which typically means you want to be at no more than three neighbours.

[Markus Reese]

So it is best, but only in very meta map setups and empires? A player doesnt have full control of the start unless dictated specific. I have had to go tall when wanting wide, and the versa. Going tall doesnt mean not grabbing space. It is about concentrating it.

@OP, other things that help going tall. Communial traits to reduce housing, mastery of nature, voidborne, megastructures, perhaps megastructures. Machine planets/archologies can be very potent.

These are all valuable when going tall. You get more pops and that means tiles from less space. Habitats are useful because you get a special district if built on tiles with a resource and to free up planet space by making them refinery habitats. Megastructures, aside from habitats are restricted to numbers buildable at a time by an empire, unmodified by time, so megas are a huge focus to maintaining the late game.

With my strong alloy foundries, I was able to have my planets of qlorvins archologies, massive output. Minerals from scores of mining habitats. I got liquid metal. That with edicts and ascenion perks had me doing a ringworld in a bit over ten years.

But my borders were defined by neighbours. If there was some extra valuable constellation, or some place with lots of planets, would have grabbed it. But there was no advantage to going beyond what did. Had it been some with five colonizables, like my current game, would have widened it out.

So expand according to value. But if you need or just want to play tall, focus on tech to gain fleet strength, and tactics to maximize what you can get out of finite space.

[Nightmyre]

Originally posted by twistedmelon:

So it is best, but only in very meta map setups and empires? A player doesnt have full control of the start unless dictated specific. I have had to go tall when wanting wide, and the versa. Going tall doesnt mean not grabbing space. It is about concentrating it.

This is the part that I keep having to disagree with. It's not a question of going tall or wide. There is never a situation where you should voluntarily choose to take *less* space than you can. You should *always* take as much space as is made available to you, and you should *always* colonize every planet in that space (when you do that is another story, of course).

You may be restricted on just how much space that is, but regardless of that answer, your overall strategy should remain largely the same.

[Theutus]

I play tall in every Stellaris start, I can't stand micromanaging more than a few planets.

[Stormwind]

Originally posted by Theutus:

I play tall in every Stellaris start, I can't stand micromanaging more than a few planets.

Do sectors help? I havent really tried doing anything with them, I dont understand their function.

[Meewec]

Originally posted by Stormwind:

Originally posted by Theutus:

I play tall in every Stellaris start, I can't stand micromanaging more than a few planets.

Do sectors help? I havent really tried doing anything with them, I dont understand their function.

unless you want to put an ai of questionable skill in charge the only real use of sectors is so you can assign a governor to them to provide bonuses