determined exterminator tips, aka what am I doing wrong?

[tommie.vanhove]

so I've been trying to play a few rounds conquering the galaxy as a determined exterminator.

however I can't seem to get it going.

my last empire (RIP) it seemed like I had the best start so far.

I started in the bottom right of a spiral empire with 600 systems.
I had 4 neighbours.
th eone to the right was a machine empire(for the first time) which I had a research and non-aggression pact with and basically protected my entire left half of my empire from the other filthy organics
in the center I had a fallen empire and a 8 system, 1planet, 1wormhole outpost of an empire that was for the rest of its domain situated at the top(far far away)
to the left i had 1 actual full empire ,non machine race.

I had 2 war's with the center outpost empire, not giving any issues. during the 2nd war I managed to take over all of their outpost systems. meaning they now would have to traverse 3 other empires and basically the entire map to get to me.

just after my 2nd war my other neighbour declared war.
our power was equivalent.
I amassed my fleet to push back his initial fleet attack in a system where I new I could get my entire fleet before his fleet reached it.
I managed to bring about everything( 24k of fleet in a system with also 9 defense platforms)

and then what usually happens, happened. my neighbour was allies with 2 empires, also in equivalent power to me.
and all of their main fleets of all 3 empires clashed with my fleet.
my 24k fleet VS 40 k fleet from the 3 empires combined. and my fleet was gone.
even if I managed to beat back their first main fleet they still had say another 15k fleet lagging behind.

in short: no matter what I do, at a certain point an empire with allies declares war on me, and either does a pincer maneuver on me. or in this case ammasses 3 fleets from 3 empires to wipe out mine.

even if my power had been superior to all 3 empires. I doubt I would have been able to take on the 3 at once.

so what am I missing? is there a trick to determined exterminator.
when I look for info I get articles from various times( 2016-2018) stating either they are overpowered or underpowered. so I'm guessing they've been tweaked and nerfed a lot.
what's the status now.
are they balanced, underpowered, or overpowered and am I missing the trick?

or are you just supposed to magically make 3X the fleet, resources, etc with this empire just in case you have to fight an alliance?

[Катя Мяу <3]

Whenever you play genocidic empires (like devoursing swarms, determied exterminator, and fanatic purifiers) you are bound to get coalition wars against you, because the others want to eliminate you early on.
When I get into one of those, and notice I can't beat them with my fleets, my strategy is usually to bunker down my core systems with high level starbases, and cause status quo peace via attrition.
After that I generally wait until I get into favourable position later on. Usually by outtech-ing my opponents (I focus on research in 90% of my games), or by waiting until the coalitions are busy in oher wars, or move away their fleets, so I can blitzkrieg through their systems unopposed.
Once they amassed fleets again, I am geneerally able to status quo again, and repeat the cycle, until they are eliminated.

[Leland Gaunt]

it appears that 1 of 3 games will end in a total disaster regardless what we will do. i played some lithoids empire with same setup (hierarchical, religious trait). sometimes i win, sometimes i got smashed. even though i manipulate the game by force spawn ai empires i created

[AP WOLRD 5 MANIFEST TRUST IN GOD]

One strategy I like, if you can get a chokepoint system (the only hyperlane connecting your empire to an enemy's), you have habitats. you can build fortresses on habitats which they'll need to bombard to 50% devastation before being able to move on (ftl inhibitor tech and fortress tech required, along with lots of influence/alloys) if you have multiple in one system, the enemy will need to bombard all at the same time, or one at a time, letting them heal in between. should hopefully be enough time to rebuild your fleet and strike back

[Dakota]

Determined Exterminators are still very OP, but I will need some extra info. What difficulty level were you on, what exactly were you doing with your economy, what year was this war during, what ship types did you have unlocked and what was your fleet composition, what weapon types did you use most, did you have your border stations upgraded and defended, and lastly, did you use the "no retreat" doctrine, it's a trap of a doctrine that will get all your ships killed easily in most cases since you're usually fighting many enemies at once.

[I am Goot]

Determined Exterminator (and works for every other empire which are hated)

I exclusively play Machine Empire. When playing solo I play Determined Exterminator and Driven Assimillator empires. I use the same strategy regardless of what empire I play.

1. You need to focus on exploring as far out as possible, ignoring closed off branches of stars where you know go no where. You can survey these systems AFTER you have acquired suggestion 2.

2. You are looking for systems where there are very few hyper lane entrances. You are looking for systems where the hyper lanes are opposite each other which means ANY enemy fleet will travel over the star to get to the jump out point. May I remind you that your Bastion is orbiting THIS STAR. This offsets whether you have F.T.L. Inhibitors or don't. When you have F.T.L. Inhibitors this strategy is no longer needed. You are able to sacrifice systems which don't conform to this strategy which might be ahead of your choke point (in between your Bastion and the enemy front line, you will likely reacquire those systems later.

3. Your enemies wage war on ANYONE based on their Fleet Power versus the opponents Fleet Power. They do not wage war based on their Fleet Power versus your Bastions Fleet Power. If your Bastion Fleet Power is overwhelming to their Fleets Power they will rarely attack you. In 99 out of 100 games, you can sit behind a superior defence while you build your economy and your fleet.

4. Initial strategy should be to extend your borders until you are in a defensive position (tip 2. ) then go back and claim territory behind your lines and begin colonising.

5. As a Machine Empire (some empires differ here) you only need to produce Alloys and Energy Credits. Tech is so underrated in this game, only a handful of research dedicated planets are needed to reach endgame technology levels. Being able to produce fleets, mega structures and reinforce your defences is key to your survival.

6. Don't engage the enemy empires directly, if possible. Wait out the war until their war exhaustion reaches 100%. This is when they will beg for a truce to end the war. If its advantageous to your situation, agree. If you are handling the war well.... Attack, take systems, invade planets, push deep into their territory and IF they then attack your forces with an overwhelming fleet, you can instantly ask for a white peace, which the dumb M.F's will accept, you might take some losses to your fleet, but you have an economy to replace those ships, and you now have expanded your territory. You also have 10 years (there can be some exceptions) to secure your new territory.

Use your Bastions as part of your fleet. trick your enemy to get over confident and come to you, never go to them (except after they reach 100% exhaustion as above) If you have a combined Fleet Power between your fleet and your base, use your base to tank the initial attack, and support it with your fleet.

Someone suggested not to use No Retreat War Doctrine, this is good advice... you might only have one fleet early game, having the one which improves your fleets movement speed is best. Rapid Relocation (I cannot remember its full name)

7. As per 6. Move your Bastion line forward to a choke point, if before F.T.L. Inhibitors have been researched, follow step 2. Once your new Bastion is in place you can do whatever you want with the previous one.

8. Traditions. Make sure the first building you put on your HW is the Simulation Center (Unity producer). Open Expansion, and only select the 10% outpost cost (the rest are for colony expansion, and are not needed at this stage of the game). Second, open Discovery and only select the +35% to survey speed (the rest are not important at this stage). Third open Superiority, choose the 2 traditions on the right, you are looking for the second mostly to reduce your station upgrade costs and star base fleet power. From this point you can spend your tradition points on whichever direction you want, but finishing off Superiority is beneficial for the +20 command points and ship cost reductions. Acquiring the remainder of Discovery for faster research gain and only work on finishing Expansion when you are able to start colonising other planets. Domination is good to work on for the Influence gain but Outpost costs are already good for a Determined Exterminator.

9. Ascension Perks. I recommend Technological Ascendancy, because you need to get to Star Hold and higher Star base categories, before your enemy gets to Destroyers and Cruisers etc. Then I recommend the Active Edict Perk (cannot remember the name) because you will likely need to have more than one Edict running and you need at least 2 Perks to be able to acquire Galactic Force Projection and its unlikely you have Star Fortress at this point for the Starbase Upgrade (again i cannot remember its full name, Eternal something). 3rd choice would be the Starbase upgrade perk or if you haven't got Star Fortress improve your command points and Naval Capacity with G.F.P. For your 4th slot you should have Starbases by this point or something has gone wrong with your tech choices, so its the other variant of the Starbase Perk and G.F.P. combination. The last 4 depend on your play style. I usually go for Machine Worlds, Colossus Project (choosing the kill all pops weapon) Galactic Wonders and leaving the last slot for whatever I fancy at the time (these 4 are not entirely in order of selection)

10. Mega-Stuctures, If you don't have a derelict in your space, and have to build one from scratch, I recommend the Strategic Command Centre. It is by far the best overall Megastructure, it increases starbase capacity, naval capacity and defense platform slots on your stations. Then obviously Dyson Sphere and Matter Decompressors are the way to go. The rest are whichever you fancy at the time. A ring world are ok to have, but by time you have Galactic Wonders you probably don't need 4 extra planets to micromanage

11. Mid to Late game Wars. I recommend using a Colossus to wipe out the colonies you conquer, it prevents the enemy from recapturing them to effect the exhaustion score and if you don't capture the territory, the AI has to start again to build an economy there. You may also need to put a cap on the number of planets you are managing especially during war time, all that destroying useless buildings while you wait for years for the enemy pops to be eliminated, risking being overthrown. This takes time away from keeping attention to what your forces are doing.

Hope this helps

[HugsAndSnuggles]

Originally posted by tommie.vanhove:

when I look for info I get articles from various times( 2016-2018) stating either they are overpowered or underpowered. so I'm guessing they've been tweaked and nerfed a lot.
what's the status now.
are they balanced, underpowered, or overpowered and am I missing the trick?

Just tried them out for a bit (~30 years) - first in a long while - seems like they, indeed, have been moved closer to "balanced" in the current singleplayer meta. Sure, they start pretty much OP, but can't really snowball bacause they are genocidals, and later on tend to be kept in check by alliances. While not an easy mode (like assimilators), they are far from underpowered (like pacifists).

[Dakota]

Originally posted by HugsAndSnuggles:

Originally posted by tommie.vanhove:

when I look for info I get articles from various times( 2016-2018) stating either they are overpowered or underpowered. so I'm guessing they've been tweaked and nerfed a lot.
what's the status now.
are they balanced, underpowered, or overpowered and am I missing the trick?

Just tried them out for a bit (~30 years) - first in a long while - seems like they, indeed, have been moved closer to "balanced" in the current singleplayer meta. Sure, they start pretty much OP, but can't really snowball bacause they are genocidals, and later on tend to be kept in check by alliances. While not an easy mode (like assimilators), they are far from underpowered (like pacifists).

The trick around the whole genocidal thing is to have a dedicated pop mulcher planet that you resettle all the pops onto. This will greatly reduce the time it would take for them all to be removed compared to if they were left on a group of planets. The trick at this point is to just keep up the never ending warfare to constantly refill your grinder.

Of course you have to set your purging policy to chemical processing rather than pure extermination so that you get the energy from them and also exterminate a bit slower. In one of my last matches I built a habitat specifically for this purpose, by year 2350 or so I was pumping out around 6k energy from it alone. Another trick is to use that planet/hab as your administrative planet and spend artifacts on the planetary decision that boosts menial output by 2% and stability by 1% on the planet, this should cause additional resource gain from the pops being purged due to higher stability, I am unsure if they are also counted as menial jobs, though I am pretty sure the option for non purging robots where they are setup as permanent batteries is though. That said, the perma battery option, that exterminators don't get anyway, is somewhat weird in that it causes stability loss whereas an entire purge does not, infact sometimes I've stopped slave riots by simply swapping them from batteries to reprocessing so that they were happy that I was no longer enslaving them.

I will say that normal robots do have some advantage in this type of pop grinder setup as they have access to the galactic market, meaning they can just buy slaves right off the market and ship them directly to their grinder planet. Just buy up the whole galactic market every once in awhile and add an extra 500 energy income to your pile. Meanwhile exterminators lack that but also has the means to collect more easily through military conquest and gains unity as an additional bonus.

[HugsAndSnuggles]

Originally posted by Dakota:

Originally posted by HugsAndSnuggles:

Just tried them out for a bit (~30 years) - first in a long while - seems like they, indeed, have been moved closer to "balanced" in the current singleplayer meta. Sure, they start pretty much OP, but can't really snowball bacause they are genocidals, and later on tend to be kept in check by alliances. While not an easy mode (like assimilators), they are far from underpowered (like pacifists).

The trick around the whole genocidal thing is to have a dedicated pop mulcher planet that you resettle all the pops onto. This will greatly reduce the time it would take for them all to be removed compared to if they were left on a group of planets. The trick at this point is to just keep up the never ending warfare to constantly refill your grinder.

I get that. Problem is: grinder does not give you levels of production pops would.
Slaver gets ready-to-use planets from conquest, assimilator - pretty close to that (they have other benefits). Even for "average" warmongering empire all newly-coquered planets would still be productive, provided you put in some effort.
Genicidals, however, got to rely on their "normal" progression in order to get higher-tier production going (alloys/research). Granted, whole thing is not that bad for machines, but it's still way slower than conquest, and doesn't let you snowball out of control like fully utilizing your ex-neigbour's pops/planets would.

[Dakota]

Originally posted by HugsAndSnuggles:

Originally posted by Dakota:

The trick around the whole genocidal thing is to have a dedicated pop mulcher planet that you resettle all the pops onto. This will greatly reduce the time it would take for them all to be removed compared to if they were left on a group of planets. The trick at this point is to just keep up the never ending warfare to constantly refill your grinder.

I get that. Problem is: grinder does not give you levels of production pops would.
Slaver gets ready-to-use planets from conquest, assimilator - pretty close to that (they have other benefits). Even for "average" warmongering empire all newly-coquered planets would still be productive, provided you put in some effort.
Genicidals, however, got to rely on their "normal" progression in order to get higher-tier production going (alloys/research). Granted, whole thing is not that bad for machines, but it's still way slower than conquest, and doesn't let you snowball out of control like fully utilizing your ex-neigbour's pops/planets would.

Yeah, this is one reason why I generally dislike playing the genocidal empires, however determined exterminator works out with it fine since they can pump the energy they get from the grinder directly into research and pop upkeep, allowing them to focus every robot job on maintenance, alloy, research, and admin cap.

It can also end up rather powerful in situations where you otherwise wouldn't be able to use the pops more efficiently due to a lack of strategic resources, building slots, or need to spend alloy on something other than habs. For example, having 1000 pops shoved into one tiny hab somewhere in my space is pretty solid on the job density even in a case where it isn't hitting marks for efficiency, as the best I get out of the grinder is 10 energy per pop rather than around 20 per robot. Essentially much more useful than late game runs with organics where they're just putting people on utopian abundance or making big trade worlds to prevent unemployment and squeak out something from the pops without yet having ringworlds up.