Is there a good Criminal Syndicate build now?

[Balleflass]

I remember some time ago that everyone and their grandmother told me that standard MegaCorps where much better than Criminal Syndicates.
But now you need trust and/or high standing to open branch offices, something the Criminal Syndicate don't need.
Are they now viable?
Any specific build that makes Criminal Syndicates really fun to play?

[Noobatron1111]

Hi. I had a great game last week with an syndicate. Extrem Xenophile Syndicate on an Ocean Paradise. It was a great match. I had like 50 branche offices and still most nieghbors loved me. Always in the Top Three of the normal empires, with huge fleets. It works way better now, than back in the days. Make some migration pcts to settle on other planets

[Balleflass]

Thanks, man!
Nice to hear it's fun to play Syndicate again.
Any suggested Origin, traits and Civics for a Criminal Syndicate?

[Noobatron1111]

at your service. Origin Ocean Paradise (planet size 30) - etrem xenophile, Pacifist
Criminal Heritage + The Angler Version of a Mega Corp (forgot the name)

positive: aquatic, dorsile, traditional
negative: weak (nah, we don´t work ourselves), not adaptable (because you are locked for ocean worlds anyway)

If you try it, don´t forget to spare some civilisations with your branche offices, so you can still make war- If you have somethings on their planets you cn not attack them. In this case you must shut down your offices before you attack them.

[Noobatron1111]

https://i.imgur.com/E9bYzUH.jpeg

[Kufesska]

Originally posted by Noobatron1111:

Hi. I had a great game last week with an syndicate. Extrem Xenophile Syndicate on an Ocean Paradise. It was a great match. I had like 50 branche offices and still most nieghbors loved me. Always in the Top Three of the normal empires, with huge fleets. It works way better now, than back in the days. Make some migration pcts to settle on other planets

don't ai just build a lot of enforcers, greatly reducing your profit from branch offices?

[Cicatrice]

I ignore trade with Criminals and treat them as a piracy faction or a straight up war faction. You can go spiritualist and use religion as another form of ethics manipulation, which is also fun. So my preferred build is clone army/criminals/death cult into psionics. Try and grab a second race as residents for pop growth later on.

[Commander359]

Not in the slightest. The problem with criminal syndicates is that their entire focus is around disrupting the day-to-day operations of your opponents world through clandestine work and criminal operations....which means nothing being that the AI doesn't care about the day-to-day optimization of its empire because it receives unlimited resources at all times that it merely chooses to spend in conjunction with its pre-programmed advancement based on player set difficulty.

Now, against players they are a metric pain in the butt, effecting trade, stability, recourse production, and pretty much every aspect of planetary production. So, if your into PVP, then they are great. If your into the standard PVE experience, they are the most useless faction in the game.

Also, make sure you never spawn an AI syndicate into your game, or, if you do, make sure you form trade deals with regular megacorperations pronto. Otherwise they AI syndicate will focus you, AND ONLY YOU, and use its unlimited influence and credits to spawn branch office after branch office on every world you own even if you have enough enforcer squads on that world to make judge dread blush.

[Balleflass]

So if I understood correctly Criminal Syndicate are 100% useless at PVE?
Normal Megacorps is the way to go for playing alone?

[Ryika]

Originally posted by Balleflass:

So if I understood correctly Criminal Syndicate are 100% useless at PVE?
Normal Megacorps is the way to go for playing alone?

What Commander359 said about the AI having infinite resources is complete nonsense, but the general trend still holds true.

With how much the AI tries to keep Crime down, it's hard to really get a reasonable benefit out of them in a cost-efficient manner. You do hurt the AI by making them spam Enforcers, but why would you spend your resources hurting a single AI when you could also spend them to scale up? Especially when you can't even attack them until you've closed your Branch Offices.

They can be fun when played right, but their playstyle just isn't cohesive. They're not entirely useless - +1 Codebreaking helps greatly with speeding up first contact and making sure you're the one who gets the Influence (Ruthless Competition brings this benefit too, though), and +1 Cloaking Strength can be quite neat at certain breakpoints in the game, but their actual mechanic just doesn't work well.

[Balleflass]

Thanks for the explanation, Ryika.
So what would be the most fun way to play a Megacorp with the current patch?
I've been away from Stellaris for over a year.

I see some people swear to Aquatic origin and some swear to Voidborne, and then I see a couple of threads where a bunch of people swear to the origins who lets you start in a federation or together with a big brother AI who protects you early game.

Any suggestions?

[RCMidas]

What type of fun do you enjoy? Casual RP, mechanic minmaxing, a halfway point, a specific test build or three to screw around with stuff, just testing stuff until the midgame, surviving the endgame crisis, surviving all four x25 crises, vanilla or mods, some combination of these, or something else entirely?

If you were to boot up Stellaris, assuming nothing had changed from last time you played, for the pure reason of "I want to have fun the way I did a year ago", what would you do?

Start with that, but with Megacorp authority. That's basically it, as a starting point, then you expand outwards.

[Balleflass]

I dont care for min/maxing.
I like to play weird factions in games that play totally different to the game's more normal factions.

I really dig the branch office playstyle of the Megacorps, and I was hoping the criminal syndicate had something that could suddenly sabotage a lot of navy right before an attack, but I guess stuff like that's impossible as you need to close the offices before attacking.

The RP part is fun ofc, but I feel I need to find that balance between a Megacorp that is fun to play and a Megacorp that has a fair chance of winning, where Criminal Syndicate (according to many posters) only seem to only work for the role players as it sounds like a very weak choice winning vise.

[Commander359]

Originally posted by Ryika:

Originally posted by Balleflass:

So if I understood correctly Criminal Syndicate are 100% useless at PVE?
Normal Megacorps is the way to go for playing alone?

What Commander359 said about the AI having infinite resources is complete nonsense, but the general trend still holds true.

Complete untrue, AI planetary building optimization is complete trash, yet I see plenty of AI factions keep up well into the late game with player empires with perfect optimization. This becomes further obvious when fighting with AI enemies during wartime. I have personally trashed AI factions in direct combat to the point of leaving only a single star system only to watch as they spit out another 15k fleet in 3-4 in-game months with no feasible way to fund them as soon as the war ends.

Same thing goes with Criminal syndicate AI factions. For players, putting a syndicate branch office on a planet halfway across the galaxy is ludicrous, and takes easily between 4-5 hundred influence per office. Yet, time and time again I watch AI criminal syndicates drop them four or five at a time across various worlds.

Mind you, the AI does not always flaunt this fact and it can be fairly easy to surpass their allocated budget through sheer brute force efficiency, but it does mean that actions to suppress their economy through clandestine actions are both physically impossible and pointless to attempt as they are not concerned with general income and their economy physically can not crash.

[Ryika]

Originally posted by Commander359:

Complete untrue, AI planetary building optimization is complete trash, yet I see plenty of AI factions keep up well into the late game with player empires with perfect optimization. This becomes further obvious when fighting with AI enemies during wartime. I have personally trashed AI factions in direct combat to the point of leaving only a single star system only to watch as they spit out another 15k fleet in 3-4 in-game months with no feasible way to fund them as soon as the war ends.

Same thing goes with Criminal syndicate AI factions. For players, putting a syndicate branch office on a planet halfway across the galaxy is ludicrous, and takes easily between 4-5 hundred influence per office. Yet, time and time again I watch AI criminal syndicates drop them four or five at a time across various worlds.

Mind you, the AI does not always flaunt this fact and it can be fairly easy to surpass their allocated budget through sheer brute force efficiency, but it does mean that actions to suppress their economy through clandestine actions are both physically impossible and pointless to attempt as they are not concerned with general income and their economy physically can not crash.

You can bring as many personal anecdotes as you want, the truth can very easily be seen via the observe console command. Anyone - including yourself - can literally just look at the AI and see that the conclusions you've drawn are incorrect, and are based on either a misunderstanding of game mechanics, or a misreading of the actual state of the game.

With very minor exceptions, the AI is bound to the same economic rules as the player, meaning they have to collect and spend resources, pay upkeep for stuff, will experience deficit situations when it lacks a resource, etc. The only thing that really allows them to do things that the player can't, are the economic modifiers they get on higher difficulties.