What are the strongest builds you can think of for PvE?

[Skoga]

For me it's usually the good old Technocracy Meritocracy Fanatic Materialist build
Give me some new ideas please

[Wisch]

Pretty much any build can become a monster by mid-game, but for early starts, clone army is hard to match. You're limited to 100 of your primary pop but you hit that cap very fast, and you get plenty of options for further expansion if you use robots/aliens. There's a quest chain with further bonuses attached, as well.

Any origin that gives big bonuses in exchange for habitability issues (e.g. gaia seeded, void dwellers), combined with xenophile lets you fill worlds early while still being able to use those bonuses. Xenophilia in general can snowball pop growth really fast in crowded galaxies, especially if refugees start showing up en masse. Just don't bother trying to mod or specialize your pops, that way lies madness.

[HyperKnight]

Megacorps are way better for science than Technocracies, especially on large maps.
You can crank out more labs because of huge income, and plop those Private Research Enterprises en masse.

[Cerodil]

Depending on your spawn, getting an extra ocean world or two, any aquatic build can be monstrously powerful vs the ai.

[Wisch]

Aquatic/Hydrocentric is very powerful, especially if you're going for a xenophobe empire. Cheap terraforming and the ability to make your ocean worlds bigger. Note that you don't have to pick Ocean Paradise origin (and lose your guaranteed habitables) to use it.

Best part is the unique colossus weapon they get, the best in the game, imo. It instantly terraforms a world to ocean, kills all non-aquatic pops, and gives you control of it. Can also safely be used on your own worlds, as long as you don't mind losing any non-aquatic friends there.

[Bandit_6]

Lately I'm loving the fungoid hivemind with intelligent, aquatic, and budding, throw in the tree of life origin and you've got the fastest growing pops in the game that you can gene edit fertile into for that hot, nasty pop growth. With clone vats I've gotten monthly assembly speed up to 9 and have gotten to 1000 pops by 2300.

[Skoga]

Originally posted by Bandit_6:

Lately I'm loving the fungoid hivemind with intelligent, aquatic, and budding, throw in the tree of life origin and you've got the fastest growing pops in the game that you can gene edit fertile into for that hot, nasty pop growth. With clone vats I've gotten monthly assembly speed up to 9 and have gotten to 1000 pops by 2300.

Do you go for hive worlds or just stay with aquatic worlds?

[Rock]

Megacorp is pretty strong tbh. Combine that with Mercantile tradition so you can crank up the unity or consumer goods production. Or if you make a federation you get best of both choices. Seize assets wars on other mega corps allows you to yoink all of their Branch offices to you further snowballing economic might.

You can have a relatively small Empire as megacorp but have extremely strong economy and because of that have strong science and navy. Playing tall as Megacorp is very easy and you are an impossible Empire to conquer because defending your borders is very easy. Megastructures will further boost tall play style. Empire sprawl will stay low if you play tall which allows you to tech up and tradition ascend at fast rate.

Techno Necro....very strong. Grand Admirals cannot stop you. But requires you to study how to micro your Empire so your first 30 years are spent perfectly. Strong early game snowballs into strong mid game and so on. And warfare as xenophobe Necro is a blissful experience.

Overtuned origin is actually pretty busted. You can select 30% pop growth and 20% all science up at the cost of 60 years of leader life. When your economy can handle it, choosing "damn the consequences" edict will double the positive effects of your Overtuned traits.
The start is rough for your leaders, focus on selecting young scientists as you replace them, do not care what their expertise is. Ignore governor until tradition boost. First tradition Harmony and select the one that grants +20y leader life. After that things will calm down and you can start playing normally. Picking up the early tech that increases leader life +10y is also a obvious choice.
If you combine Overtuned with technocracy you are going to be disgustingly strong. Your people grow fast and research everything in a blink.

[Wisch]

Make sure to abuse mercenary enclaves. As long as you keep your economy strong, and keep upgrading them, they're competitive all the way to endgame. Make sure to push for all the galactic community merc upgrades for more frequent payouts. If your enemies start making enclaves, even better. They'll probably recall them if you try to hire them in wartime, but it costs them money to do so. As long as you can out-economy them you will always win every war. Even the ones you don't join.

Two from civics (or just one if you didn't start as Barbaric Despoiler), one from an ascension perk (gives more payouts from all your mercs too), plus whatever the galactic laws allow. Get enough mods to payout rate and they will literally pay for themselves, plus an occasional truckload of research, alloys, minerals, food, even a few permanent fleets every now and then. Feel free to feed those to the scrappers for more alloys.

Also note that you can conquer merc enclave systems to get even more of them. The only penalty to going over your merc enclave cap is that you can't form any more.

[SVaughan]

I always tech rush for torpedo based weaponry. As it seems the AI can't fathom fighting fleets of anti-ship vessels equipped with state of the art torpedoes. Then again, I like playing an AI Mind and wiping out biologics while also exploiting biologics with food trades.

[pete3great]

All gestalts and some megacorps are going to be better. You don't even have to lean into Aquatic with a hive mind as described above to succeed. It's overkill. Driven Assimilators remain one of the best builds in the game if, and it's a big if, you can make it through early game without getting dogpiled by the AI. You have to be johnny on the spot with your fleets, and defensive starbases, but rolling into mid-game you'll be vastly more powerful than anyone except the Fallens.

The trick is to get the charisma trait for your main robot species, and the civic that lets you move pops around without spending influence.

[michaelbnx]

Hi,
It's an old one but I really like to play ecu rush with rogue servitor and remnant origin. RNG dependant for the primitives, but with a bit of luck you can get bio-trophies on all planets and then ressettle them on your ecu for crazy production bonus. With more luck you can get another relic world, meaning 2 ecus. And with a lot of luck, as in my current game, you get the cybrex for a research ringworld.

[CrUsHeR]

TBH if you just mean single player + conquest, i'd always take Driven Assimilators.

Being able to instantly take over a whole empire with all its pops, with a free CB which works against everyone, is just too good. You even get paid in unity for each assimilated pop, in 3.6 with cybernetics you also get engineering research on top.

Only annoying thing is that since the recent updates, the assimilated pops always remain unemployed. So if you take over a LOT of planets with a LOT of pops on them, it is super-annoying having to click on the job assignment on every new planet each year. Otherwise you get the drone corruption event on each of them.



Personally i find the constant warfare too repetetive, relaxed empire building as megacorp is more enjoyable.

[pete3great]

Originally posted by CrUsHeR:

Only annoying thing is that since the recent updates, the assimilated pops always remain unemployed.

Yeah, it's weird. I just go in the jobs and double click on either maintenance drone or (if there are pops still assimilating) the assimilation job and they'll usually go get the jobs you want them to have. You can leave them for a few days (monthly tick?) and they'll find jobs on their own, but you're risking trouble with a bunch of unemployed pops.

[AticAtac]

I don´t have any mods, so no. There are no better builds. Techno-Materialists all the way.

[Fênix]

Originally posted by Maximum Tomfoolery:

Aquatic/Hydrocentric is very powerful, especially if you're going for a xenophobe empire. Cheap terraforming and the ability to make your ocean worlds bigger. Note that you don't have to pick Ocean Paradise origin (and lose your guaranteed habitables) to use it.

Best part is the unique colossus weapon they get, the best in the game, imo. It instantly terraforms a world to ocean, kills all non-aquatic pops, and gives you control of it. Can also safely be used on your own worlds, as long as you don't mind losing any non-aquatic friends there.

Devo admitir que essa informação salvou minha vida, começar sem mundo garantido é realmente muito difícil...