How to play as vodyani ?

[Reidas]

It's turn 66 , i have 190 points ( Sophon have 407 and space frog have 331 ) ...
How are you supposed to play as space vampire because after all those turns beside sucking the essence of minor faction and build people/ark , I dont know .

[AoX]

Seems to be the general agreement that they're just really bad at the moment. Which is fine, it's early access. You need to pray you don't have cravers near you, and that you have some neutral faction around to start leeching really quickly. If your start is isolated, you're doomed.

[Reidas]

Well cravers are in a worse situation than me : 170

[Astasia]

If you start anywhere near a minor faction the Vodyani are currently super OP in my experience. Make a leecher fleet quickly and start camping for essence. With +150 essence per turn you will explode past the other factions. Don't forget to edit the ark design to add a bunch of the +50% bonuses and remove the engine. Throw some strategic resource missiles on them and they are also godly powerful ships through the current mid-game.

[Ciros]

how do you colonize with them? I unlocked tech but dono how to colonize. Do you do it with the ark?

[Nyarzyae]

Bring a ARK to a system with habitable planets and anchor dat bigass ship there.

[Astasia]

You build an ark, which only costs essence and finishes in a single turn, move it to the system and anchor it. By the time it arrives you can have enough essence to bump the population up to 2-3 by spending more essence, which again takes only one turn each. It's crazy powerful.

[Ciros]

Thanks

[Omnibrain]

Vodyani are total garbage. When you have truce with the neighboring enemy you cannot leech anything. usually at turn 70 I still have only 2-3 systems. For a space nomadic species their military vessels are rather weak. Plus, the enemy can spam powerful attack vessels nonstop while you have to waste turns producing defensless leecher ships.

[Taishibethi]

I've found the Vodyani to be incredibly powerful as long as you don't overextend yourself right off the bat. Just save your essence, protect your leechers/wheels with combat ships, siphon off minor factions and the outskirts of other empires, and you'll be fine. As long as you remember to boost your pop with essence to improve FIDSI and build Arks, you'll be more or less unchallenged in terms of power by midgame.

The Vodyani are fundamentally slow starters, but if you focus on Dust production (to turn into essence) and Food production (to raise pop w/o essence) you should be fine.

[[DW]__||MARKA||__]

Agree with basically everyone here, all you gotta do is spam leechers and save up enough essence to get the first ark (also boosting your production with heroe skills and buildings helps a lot speeding up the process).

You should at least have 4 ships leeching each spot you find to gain essence efficiently.

[RetiredVet]

Get Toisom ships uplocked asap. You can get 4 vampire modules on those ships. Combined with some a wheeler with several probe modules and then a couple gouge or racks to add some bite you can leech 350 essence per turn per system and crank out the first 5 arks pretty fast. The forced truce is the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ part but generally I can run in and just leech away for a LONG time before they actually attack my fleet and i have to retreat or fight and usually takes me draining 2 or 3 of their systems nearly dry before they force a truce. If you are out of options as far as soul draining races, make sure you maximize the +50% dust modules on your arks, including existing ones then upgrade, then wait till you have 1-2k saved and use the dust to essence conversion. Also, if you don't care to piss off races you can click on their little 'sheet' icon on diplomacy if you aren't totally at war with them, and demand whatever you need, as long as you don't demand ALL of something they have they USUALLY will concede, ONCE so make it count, if you ask for too much more than 75% of an item they own they will war, or if you demand a 2nd time they will war, which who cares anyways, drain their souls lol

[Omnibrain]

I played a few games with Vodyani now but it just feels weird, yes you can be very successful but you are basically just exploiting broken game mechanics to succeed.
First off you just restart the game until you have a minor faction nearby to leech, then you abuse the AI's stupidity to ignore leecher vessels in their system. Thats just lame, dumb and boring.