2.2 Tips & Tricks

[PirateJack]

This is a thread for the little optimisation tricks you've developed since 2.2 was released, since so much has changed and all the old strategies need adjustment if they're going to work.

I've got a few that I haven't seen mentioned on here before.

1. Don't settle all available planets straight away in the early game. For every colony you create your homeworld growth takes a negative, which can lead to a stagnant population on your primary manufacturing/research centre. Once you've got a few planets with the Planetary Administration built (which gets rid of the 50% growth penalty for colonies) you can afford to go whole hog into colonising because the immigration pull is spread over a few worlds rather than just one.
2. Clerks are not very efficient but are quite useful for keeping POPs busy while you're getting ready to build your next specialist building. If I've got 3 POPs as clerks I know it's time to put another building on the planet.
3. If you're playing a warfaring race and are facing the mid-game mineral crunch, it's not a bad idea to take Nihilistic Acquisition (or play Barbaric Despoilers) to get the Plunder casus belli. This allows you to raid planets for their POPs, which make nice slaves, and forcing a surrender on the enemy gives you +1000 energy and minerals. Keep your neighbours weak and you can farm them for slaves and minerals on a 10 year cycle.
4. Following this, slaves will preferentially go for the 3 main resource production jobs, allowing any citizen species to take the clerk jobs first so you're automatically maximising the gains from slavery.
5. Once you research Gene Clinic, immediately put it on every planet. Replace the amenities building if you have it, or put it as your first building on any new colony. POP growth is king in this patch and Medical Workers are your Dukes.

Anyone else got tips they'd like to share? I've been mostly playing Barbaric Despoilers so all of my tips are focused around that (seriously, BD is now a really good way to play tall while still playing aggressively) so any other play style tips would be appreciated.

 

[Pyoro]

You can get rid of the 50% growth penalty in colonies by resettling POPs there, assuming you have the energy and can resettle; then upgrade immediately.

 

[draqsko]

Change policies to Nutritional Plentitude (for more growth) and Marketplace of Ideas (for early unity production from your trade routes) and after you get a few unity buildings going on your various planets switch to Consumer Benefits for the consumer goods to save yourself some civilian factory buildings.

 

[FonVegen]

1. Set your trade policy to Consumer Benefits. Especially if you focus on trade the amount of consumer goods you'll get is going to be immense, or at least large enough that you can focus your entire CG industry on one planet.
2. Don't try to build every district on every planet. If you have a designated agri-world, only build enough city districts to make every building there a hydroponic farm (apart from a gene clinic, a food processing center, and depending on the size of the planet an entertainment complex for amenities) and then stop developing it and discourage growth before unemployment and overcrowding become too large.
3. And I can't believe I'm saying this, but if you want to play xenophile, now's a better time for federating than ever. You get to stay president until an AI gets stronger than you, the federation fleet still costs no upkeep and you'll have full control over it and its designs, every other empire does constantly produce federation ships until the cap is hit, and they immediately join up with the behemoth of a (completely free!) fleet you get to command. You also get free research, trade, and migration agreements with all of your federation members, and at least the trade one is not to be scoffed at, because having all the energy and crashing the market with it by buying all the resources is fun.
4. And of course one of the basic features of this update: SPECIALISE YOUR PLANETS. that does mean you need to keep a close eye on them during wars so your industry doesn't get taken down, but the additional production of everything is more than worth it.

All of the above are things I do that in my opinion made my game a whole lot easier. To reiterate on the federation fleet: 60k fleet power as a very tall and very much not fleet focussed empire, for free. No upkeep, AI empires restock any ships that are lost at high priority...

That said: I am playing a MegaCorp, so it may be that what I said only applies to that specific play style.

 

[TreborTheTall]

Hey everybody, I just found this post and I wanted to share my two videos on the subject:

Hope you all find it helpful

 

[SeekingEtermity]

Gene Clinics are underpowered. Each pop working them only increases the base growth by a small amount (10% of base, which typically means 0.3/month) and therefore it takes a pop working one 334 months (27 years 10 months) to produce that pop's replacement (i.e. to have more non-medical-worker pops on the planet than you otherwise would have). You could instead have had the medical worker pop(s) just doing something directly productive that whole time.

Additionally, there's currently a pop growth bug where once growth hits 100 or more, it resets to zero whether it was at 100.0 or 109.8 (and yes, I've gotten growth to 9.9something, and it suuuucks); until this bug is fixed marginal bonuses to growth rate may be entirely worthless or at least less useful than expected. On the other hand, the marginal growth that pushes the growth over 100 a month faster than it would have can be worth it; going from 3.0/month (34 months to grow) to 3.3/month (31 months to grow) or 3.6 (28 months to grow) are pretty big jumps; going from 8.2 (13 months) to 8.5 (12 months) is still a very meaningful jump, but then going from 8.5 to 8.8 or even 9.0 (12 months) doesn't gain you anything at all (for now).

Also, yes, with faster growth comes faster unlocking of buildings and more pops to resettle to worlds that need them for whatever reason. And yes, on really big worlds (ringworld segments come to mind, except usually by the time you have those you have so many "finished" worlds ready to export their pops you can fill up the ringworld with migration and resettlement anyhow, and building slots are precious on ringworlds) it can be worth the time in terms of reaching "final" population faster than you otherwise would, but you'll still probably want to replace the gene clinic with something that is actually productive before you reach that point.

 

[AlanC9]

Gene Clinics are underpowered. Each pop working them only increases the base growth by a small amount (10% of base, which typically means 0.3/month) and therefore it takes a pop working one 334 months (27 years 10 months) to produce that pop's replacement (i.e. to have more non-medical-worker pops on the planet than you otherwise would have). You could instead have had the medical worker pop(s) just doing something directly productive that whole time.

This is often true. However, if you need amenities and the choice is between medical workers and entertainers, I think the medical workers win out.

 

[SeekingEtermity]

This is often true. However, if you need amenities and the choice is between medical workers and entertainers, I think the medical workers win out.

Depends whether or not you also want Unity. While the traditions are still definitely not all great in 2.2, entertainers are 2/3 as good as culture workers at providing it (and possibly cost less CGs?) and if you use them for your Unity production you won't need the amenities from medical workers.

 

[Mr0Santan]

I would say that settling status quo for "Liberation Wars" giving you a vassal is a trick (bug) is a good one.

 

[Kryndude]

Don't settle all available planets straight away in the early game. For every colony you create your homeworld growth takes a negative, which can lead to a stagnant population on your primary manufacturing/research centre. Once you've got a few planets with the Planetary Administration built (which gets rid of the 50% growth penalty for colonies) you can afford to go whole hog into colonising because the immigration pull is spread over a few worlds rather than just one.

I disagree with this. Your capital growth stagnates with only 2 colonies anyways. Just go ham and colonize everything you see. This way you can acquire precious building slots much more faster as your colonies start hitting 5 pop mark, and then along with three additional forges that you had built in your capital you can add as many forges as your colony number allows which brings your early game fleet production capability to its max. You can then capitalize on your military strength in many different ways.

With the same logic, you do NOT want to build gene clinics on every planet as it's first building, because gene clinic is a very long term investment. For your first few buildings you want stuff that gives you benefit right away so that you can start snow balling. You're not in a position to make long term investments, and rather you should prefer immediate power boost. That's why I think forge is the only viable option for your first 5 or 6 buildings that you build regardless of where you build them. And then once you've secured your early game survival and crucial strategic map positions you can go on with building stuff like research labs or unity buildings or even gene clinics.