best Builds GO!

[Lord Hartz]

I need Empires to try out. I want an empire that will dominate everything. I want that easy mode while playing on medium/hard difficulties.

[budisourdog]

Xenophobe, Militarist.
Early game your neighbor will PROBABLY be a degree of xenophile or pacifist if you have default clusters of empires. If you have random generation or a hostile neighbor, early game all you need is a good star fortress or 2 at the right chokepoints.
Play "tall". Lots of labs on your core and initial colonies. Expand only when you need more resources, usually alloys to arm up.

also I don't know where to put this but trade, commercial centers, don't build any they are quite useless

When you tech to battleships and XL guns like Tachyon, you can start to more aggressively expand colonies for more alloys and strategic resources. Remember to use the buffs from them in wars they're stupid powerful.
Around your fourth ascension perk you should pick up defender of the galaxy. This gives a FREE +200 rep with EVERY AI in the galaxy. This is basically a diplomatic free pass, now everyone will be relatively friendly and no longer want to conquer you, and they might even let you into their federation. Combined with an embassy and membership in galactic community, they'll fool themselves into thinking you are their friend. This also makes them more accepting of you subjugating them, which can be turned into annexation in 10 years.
Build fleets and prepare for conquest. Fight the weakest enemies you can to just expand as fast as possible. The crisis are coming, the FEs will be awakening. Go over the cap as long as you have +100 alloys and energy.

Start building gateways in your major systems, disperse at least 4 good shipyards across the territory of your empire.
If you can build a Sentry array do it, the intel will be invaluable.
When you are equivalent to the nearest FE, declare war on them. You're mostly after their t6/5 shields and thruster techs, in the second or third round you'll probably take their worlds and reap the benefits of overpowered buildings.
The crisis will eventually hit. Basically doomstack your fleets and don't overthink it.
Victory screen eventually.

[yuzhonglu]

Terravore/ Necrophage.

You start next to two primitive worlds with Hive Mind pops whose population you can assimilate and grow, meaning you can save resources not building colony ships. Those resources could be spent on corvettes if there's any near neighbors.

Even better: you can grow other Hive Mind pops instead of your main pop, thereby negating the biggest downside of terravores and necrophages (slow pop growth of your main species). With genetic ascension you can modify them to be whatever you want, and you get access to cloning vats for even more pop growth.

Furthermore, for every organic species you conquer, you can keep 75% of the pops through necrophage purge, thereby negating the biggest disadvantage of being a Total War empire (most total war empires cannot keep the pops they conquer).

You keep all the advantages being a Terravore. Faster ships, ability to eat planets for minerals and pops, cheaper ships, and you're a Hive Mind so you get automatic pop growth bonuses and spawning pools from year 1 and get access to the Hive Mind unique civic Subspace Ephase, which is one of the strongest civics in the game for war.

Oh yeah, your leaders are also immortal.

Enjoy.

[nilfiry]

You don't really need anything special for medium/hard, but if you really want to easy mode, just play diplomatic in the early and mid game. This will work even on Grand Admiral.

No need to waste your Ascension Perks on Defender of the Galaxy--that is a relatively useless perk unless you are playing 25x crisis on a short timeline and have to min/max. Just send envoys to improve relations with empires that hate you. The initial 2 you get at the start is usually enough, If your galaxy has any fanatics that just wants to kill everyone, you might need to speed up getting into defensive pacts with your neighbors.

Set your diplomatic stance to cooperative after you are done expanding. You can change it to whatever else after you are comfortable with your military.

Send gifts to neighbors that don't like you. Make sure the value of your trade is around 100, so you get the full +100 opinion from favorable trade deal.

Accept most pact/agreements/embassies. Though, you can ignore migration treaties if you don't want xenos in your empire.

Do join the galactic community.

In between all of that, just build a few of your auto best ships whenever you have alloy to spare, and make sure you keep it up so you can get to the leviathans before the AI does.

Do that, you are pretty much free to put all of your resources on research without worrying about ever getting attacked.

And whether you are prepping for 25x crisis or not, don't bother building more than one shipyard starbase. Just your Mega Shipyard is enough. If you need more, capture the AI's Mega Shipyards, as the bonuses do stack. This is because you are going to want to turn all of your other starbases into Anchorages. Depending on how many planets you have, you also need to put at least one Stronghold per planet. The more naval capacity you get, the better: aim for at least around 6000 if you are fighting 25x crisis or if you plan on soloing the rest of the galaxy.

As an added bonus, Try to get the Galactic community to pass resolutions that boost Naval Capacity, as these will also boost your diplomatic weight from navy. Repeal the ones that decrease your naval capacity. By the time you get around to 8000 capacity, you will have enough diplomatic weight on your own to solo the rest of the galaxy combined and pass/fail whatever you want (especially after they wreck their fleets in a few wars). Just make sure you propose some dummy resolutions that you don't care about to get the AI to waste all of the favors they have from you, so they cannot use your own diplomatic weight against you when you want to pass the real stuff.

[talemore]

Plant specie

Post apocalypse

Gaia seeder

You know the rest.

I would claim anglers is not worth it.

Strong, Agritarian etc 27,5% food boost

+ 50% pop food reduction

Anglers not looking good compared to post apocalypse origin. It blows.

[Kyutaru]

In every 4X game, I find the optimal strategy to be to minimize civilization threats the moment I encounter them. Whether this is through one-sided alliances or total obliteration is up to you and how strong you feel in the moment. But ultimately, you should be planning to betray your neighbors at every possible turn or adding a newly discovered faction to your swelling empire by force or intimidation. It's the safest way to not have to manage a 20-sided war on multiple fronts, which while entirely possible for the United States government, it tends to be extremely unviable for your video game's meager turn-by-turn resource income. Since 4X games don't scale up sufficiently enough for galactic wars against multiple superpowers, your best bet is always to devise a strategy that allows you to quickly neutralize the threat other civilizations pose.

Whether that be through conquest or manipulation, it's still you dominating your rivals.

[cincila]

anything genocidal as anything else is unplayable endgame (I am referring to endgame lag ofcourse)

[New To This]

No matter what you go, the opening strat is identical.
Spam Alloys, Spam fleet, Take over your nearby enemies in 35 years, cruise to victory.
I feel so unmotivated to even make new races, because the differences are just irrelevant ATM.
So just go all in on anything that starts hard, and fast.

[steven1mac]

Clone Origin, militaristic materialist xenophobe.

[New To This]

Originally posted by steven1mac:

Clone Origin, militaristic materialist xenophobe.

One of my Favorite.

[talemore]

Pacifist xenophobe equalitarian

With doomsday origin

It's so good that the game will be over before it started.

[Bishi]

My favorite build if I want an easy game and also become Emperor is a Technocracy with Masterful Crafters on a Post-Apocalyptic origin with Relentless Industrialists as the eventual 3rd civic. Fanatic Materialist and Authoritarian for slave robots and eventual Stratified droids/synths. Intelligent, Natural Engineers, Thrifty, Sedentary, and Unruly. If you go Mercantile relatively earlier you can get marketplace of ideals (the unity trade policy) and have a pretty balanced economy while you focus alloy production. Enslave everyone you conquer, buy all the slaves on the market, and throw them into the mines/clerks, they'll become free synths anyway in the future.

Probably not the most meta gobble everything up build, but one I've had a lot of success on.

[Sedmeister]

MC criminal heritage. Take merchant guilds. Rush mercantile tradition first then subterfuge second (so you can get Intel on new contacts quick to open branch offices quicker). Make your capital a trade capital, spam Commercial Zones. You'll be swimming in credits by about year 30. The MC origin limits your ability to wage war (you cannot declare war whilst you have open branch offices) but having criminal heritage should piss them off enough they'll declare on you. Just make sure you have your claims set up early.

Also, similar to the above but with any standard Empire but make sure you have some authoritarian so your slaves can be clerks raking in the credits.

In both cases, create and release a vassal as soon as you pick diplomacy as your third tradition and form a trade Federation.

[Xaphnir]

Not the most creative, but: anglers/catalytic processing is incredibly strong right now.