Sooo, is virtuality the only thing that matters now?

[Average AMD neanderthal]

I dont have season 08 just yet, but i find it both fascinating and worrying to see that any posts about new builds that go viral are all centered around mixing just about anything with virtuality. Meanwhile science is still crap, trade is not as strong as it used to be, and the only thing that goes hard is being a xenophobe or phile and focusing on production and warfare. Is there not more creativity other than old meta build + virtuality?

[Carog the Fat]

Virtual is only good for tall empires, there are posts of people going virtual and losing all production because of its down sides, so if you want to go wide no it is not meta.

[GLUE]

Individualist machines with modularity are hilariously broken and have a higher potential for scaling than virtuals, their research is going to be worse due to sprawl but dark matter engines coupled with dark consortium seems borderline unbeatable in terms of fleet production. Currently playing an mp game after a long hiatus in which a guy is running said build and he seems completely untouchable, he's outscaled everyone by 2300 so hard that the game might as well just be basically over

Nanites would have absurd gamebreaking (in a literal sense, 8 fps on normal speed is quite the experience) scaling if they didn't instantly nuke your war exhaustion down to -100% after one battle, might be doable if you decide to become the crisis? Nanotech really feels unfinished, deposits scale with planet size and yet there's no way to view the size of uninhabitable objects, they could really use some larger ship hulls that don't cause your CPU to cry out in pain

[Graknorke]

Basically the ascension paths from the newest DLC are all more powerful than anything that came before. So you're going to be hearing about them a lot when it comes to what's most viable.

[Sifo Dyas]

Virtual isn't all that great unless you enjoy playing with one sector 3 planets. You are insanely penalised for playing wide. It auto fills up any available jobs with the virtual pop which is nice.

[SirKingJof]

As others have said, all the new ascensions are great, crushing anything machines could do before and on par with the best build for organics of the recent past.

Modularity is probably the strongest of the 3, if only for dark matter engines, and is useable with just about any empire focus. Nanites probably the weakest of the 3 but not by much. Virtuality is only great if you plan to take it from the start and play very tall which obviously means next to zero map control.

New dlc always brings power creep, that's just the way of things, but there's tons of strong ways to play.

[kirb]

Virtuality rundown:
Incredibly strong if you're willing to play extremely tall but it has an interesting power curve that has never been observed before in the game's snowbally nature: achieving virtuality will spike you to comically insane levels of strength decently early on but after that you plateau and will have to play very carefully to not get left behind later in the game as you can no longer expand your sphere of influence and power after the instant power spike outside of getting vassals or developing your planets into ecus/abandoning your entire empire to move onto a ringworld/building tons of megastructures/etc. So it's extremely high risk high reward. Most of the benefit of virtuality goes away when you have 6 colonies or more (although after 3 or 4 the benefit is neutered to near uselessness and after that you start incurring heavy penalties on your pop's production power that can actually scale into the negative and start TAKING the resources they're supposed to be producing. So, to summarize, you HAVE to play taller than the burj khalifa and you have to make the gambit of taking the god pill at the expense of losing almost ALL future scaling and expansion power.

IMO the reason it's talked about so much is because it's a fun and unique new way to play the game

[Cosmoros]

Originally posted by Silica dust enjoyer:

Individualist machines with modularity are hilariously broken and have a higher potential for scaling than virtuals, their research is going to be worse due to sprawl but dark matter engines coupled with dark consortium seems borderline unbeatable in terms of fleet production. Currently playing an mp game after a long hiatus in which a guy is running said build and he seems completely untouchable, he's outscaled everyone by 2300 so hard that the game might as well just be basically over

Nanites would have absurd gamebreaking (in a literal sense, 8 fps on normal speed is quite the experience) scaling if they didn't instantly nuke your war exhaustion down to -100% after one battle, might be doable if you decide to become the crisis? Nanotech really feels unfinished, deposits scale with planet size and yet there's no way to view the size of uninhabitable objects, they could really use some larger ship hulls that don't cause your CPU to cry out in pain

Nanites need a buff to be able to survive more than few stray bullets xD

[Kaelmato]

Virtual is the new and broken feature of the new DLC, virtual combined with the new cosmogenesis trumps every other playstyle in its wake, it's not even close, you can easily reach 300k research a month which is absolutely bonkers (needs to be maintained manually, so some micro is required), and once you have ringworlds and ecumenopolises, you can spam instantly filling ringworlds and ecumenopolises on all your systems you can build one in making you absolutely skyrocket, just don't go too overboard.

That's probably why all the posts you're looking at are talking about virtual, as it's the new fancy ascension path and extremely broken one at that. The other ascension paths, while still powerful aren't as gamebreakingly OP so that is why virtual is getting all the attention.

[Average AMD neanderthal]

Originally posted by Kaelmato:

Virtual is the new and broken feature of the new DLC, virtual combined with the new cosmogenesis trumps every other playstyle in its wake, it's not even close, you can easily reach 300k research a month which is absolutely bonkers (needs to be maintained manually, so some micro is required), and once you have ringworlds and ecumenopolises, you can spam instantly filling ringworlds and ecumenopolises on all your systems you can build one in making you absolutely skyrocket, just don't go too overboard.

That's probably why all the posts you're looking at are talking about virtual, as it's the new fancy ascension path and extremely broken one at that. The other ascension paths, while still powerful aren't as gamebreakingly OP so that is why virtual is getting all the attention.

I've been trying to get back into the game with the release of season 8, but it's been hard to see what's changed since 2020 when you read that everything you used to know is nerfed borderline into the ground or drastically changed. and the meta just screams: MACHINE AGE.

[SirKingJof]

Originally posted by Average democracy enjoyer:

I've been trying to get back into the game with the release of season 8, but it's been hard to see what's changed since 2020 when you read that everything you used to know is nerfed borderline into the ground or drastically changed. and the meta just screams: MACHINE AGE.

A lot has changed since 2020 to the extent that i wouldn't even attempt to play a meta build or even read about what's top tier. Unless you're playing multiplayer you don't even need them, just play a few regular games doing what you want to feel out the system.
You'll pick up what's powerful by the mid game then just go from there.

tldr: Too much has changed since 2020 that you won't get it from reading and everyone always bangs on about what's new, don't worry about it and just play a few test games to feel it out.

[titanopteryx]

Virtuality is for playing tall but so is megacorp. Machines can be megacorps now. Has anyone tried a virtual megacorp machine empire?

[Carog the Fat]

Originally posted by titanopteryx:

Virtuality is for playing tall but so is megacorp. Machines can be megacorps now. Has anyone tried a virtual megacorp machine empire?

yeah my first game was machine mega corp into virtuality we helped the inifinty sphere create a new universe and decided to own one too by making it with cosmogensis.

[Carog the Fat]

I think virtual matrix defenders is probably fun too as that is small and as a machine intelligence you can hit -100% pop penalty to empire size.

[Kitsune GG]

I've tried tall virtual and it hasn't clicked for me. Nano/Cosmo crisis has been fun times, but I do wish the nano ship was a tad more survivable. Haven't tried modularity yet, been playing around to much with Nano and the new cyber origin.

[Carog the Fat]

yeah I prefer wide but modular robos playing with 6 colonies was fine, and a nice change of pace but a big empire looks and feels better. Even is it is a PITA