Fanatic Purifier Necrophage, new strongest build?

[Less2]

Driven Assimilators have long been one of the strongest and certainly the quickest snowballing build. They combine total war CB with the ability to assimilate conquered pops rather than kill them off like other genocidal civics. Fanatic Purifier Necrophage seems to beat them now.

Points in favor of FP Necrophage:

- You assimilate conquered pops just the same as your DA brethren. Better, in fact, if we assume that the average AI pop has shitty traits while your main pops are better optimized. Also no unwieldy pop pie chart gore.
- Unlike DA, your civic gives huge bonuses like the other genocidal civics (+33% fire rate/-15% ship cost/+33% naval cap).
- Main pop is the only situation in which you can take good advantage of Slow Breeder trait, stacking it with Unruly to get more trait points than usual. Extremely Adaptive/Intelligent? Adaptive/Intelligent/Thrifty (combine with merchant guilds)?
- Assuming your Prepatent species is a subspecies of your main one, they won't be purged. This also allows dual-specialization, and only the subspecies needs rapid breeders since the main species will (almost?) never grow.
- 2 guaranteed habitable worlds will mean an immediate ~20 extra pops in the early game which only costs you about 200-300 minerals to obtain. Ship them back to the homeworld to avoid culture shock and they'll pay themselves off very quickly and give you a massive headstart. The fact that you'll also have two colonies growing immediately without the massive alloy cost is also a huge boon.
- Eventual fastest growth as soon as you unlock robots. Fan Xenophobe/Rapid Breeder + robots leaves even the most optimized DA in the dust on growth. And you were already winning in the early game before this due to 2 immediate colonies that don't cost 1000 alloys and the assimilated primitive civilizations
- All the overall big benefits of not being a Gestalt (deal with crime lords, more influence, more happiness, ecumenopoli, overpowered Synthetic evolution).
- Basically immortal leaders. Effectively more immortal than Gestalts in fact, since they can die to random failure while you'll probably be able to research repeatables faster than your leaders reach their natural end of life.
- Potentially combines well with lithoid if you want to avoid caring about habitability on all conquered worlds (though you'll lose 35% growth speed from no rapid growth and lithoid penalty). -50% upkeep for lithoids from Necrophage will also be incredibly helpful since miners being weaker than farmers normally leaves them starved. You'll be able to almost ignore needing miners along with completely ignoring food, so max out the energy and make a huge fleet.

Thoughts?

 

[MrFreake_PDX]

QA loves the Lithoid Necrophage.

 

[sillyrobot]

I'd be tempted by a xenophobic, non-Fanatic Purifier version. You get access to, but no requirement to use, the purge.

 

[GuildenSpur]

QA loves the Lithoid Necrophage.

Care to share the specifics (traits/origin/ethics)?
I'm interested what fun builds people came up with.

 

[mial42]

I'd be tempted by a xenophobic, non-Fanatic Purifier version. You get access to, but no requirement to use, the purge.

But you don't get the Total War CB.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Care to share the specifics (traits/origin/ethics)?
I'm interested what fun builds people came up with.

My most recent game I had:

Origin: Necrophage (of course)
Primary Species: Lithoid, Necrophage, Deviants, Decadent, Intelligent, Communal, Natural Engineers
Secondary Species: Unruly, Slow Learners, Rapid Breeders, Adaptive, Strong
Ethics: Fanatic Spiritualist, Authoritarian
Authority: Corporate
Civics: Indentured Assets, Gospel of the Masses

 

[DaJay42]

Ship them back to the homeworld to avoid culture shock and they'll pay themselves off very quickly and give you a massive headstart.

Note that this one should no longer be possible, according to the patch notes.

 

[Don_Quigleone]

The problem is that because all other species have to be purged, you'll be limited to growing necrophage pops, and so you'll have almost no natural pop growth. Not sure if this is a good tradeoff.

 

[caffrn]

Since Purifiers are banned in most mp rounds. I am going with FMaterialist+Xenophobe+Technocrazy+Meritocracy. You get a massive pop advantage by purging the primitive worlds into Necrophages, which results in a stronger rush in 2030 and with that, an earlier Synthetic Ascension.

 

[Zxcpoi]

I play only FP but I don't like smell of Necro.
If only there would be more materialistic Ithkulish flavour
Let's wait MOO3ish DLC or mod ;-) (with spying, ethereal races, pure Ithkul e.g.).

 

[Zxcpoi]

QA loves the Lithoid Necrophage.

Most of us roleplaying some background not only pursuing fast victory (persuasive but always fast) so Lithoid Necrophage is senseless Oxymoron like Machine Necrophage

P.S. Seems to feedback to post a little are roleplaying, most is jacking to score. Pity for you. More disagrees

 

[Pale Blue]

Note that this one should no longer be possible, according to the patch notes.

You purge the primitives, they convert to your primary species, primary species can be resettled to homeworld, profit.

 

[Lykus Cerebros]

Edit: Sorry my bad ignore me.

 

[Pale Blue]

You can only build the building after the culture shock wears off.
A friend says he tested stealing pops from primitives inside his borders and it worked.

He also said they had a age advance afterwards and went from 3 pops back to 24 so that might be interesting. Maybe you can abuse the age events from active observation.

Fanatic purifiers don't care about that silly building that converts pops, they just commit mass genocide and reuse the leftover corpses. FP necrophages has a special purge type that converts the purged pops without a building.

 

[GuildenSpur]

My most recent game I had:

Origin: Necrophage (of course)
Primary Species: Lithoid, Necrophage, Deviants, Decadent, Intelligent, Communal, Natural Engineers
Secondary Species: Unruly, Slow Learners, Rapid Breeders, Adaptive, Strong
Ethics: Fanatic Spiritualist, Authoritarian
Authority: Corporate
Civics: Indentured Assets, Gospel of the Masses

I am playing something similar but as a FP. Your setup seems a bit more logical to play in regards to traits and the use of the Prepatent species. In the FP build, the Prepatent species doesn't grow. It's just some extra pops at the start. Fuel

 

[Timil]

I can't have a Prepatent species with the Fanatic Purifier Necrophages... they prefer to purge them instead of uplifting them

 

[Unendingfear]

I can't have a Prepatent species with the Fanatic Purifier Necrophages... they prefer to purge them instead of uplifting them

You should be able to bypass that issue if you make the Prepatent species the same as the Necrophage species (same name and same portrait). The game will recognize them as the same and then they’ll behave normally.

 

[Less2]

You should be able to bypass that issue if you make the Prepatent species the same as the Necrophage species (same name and same portrait). The game will recognize them as the same and then they’ll behave normally.

Yep.

It does get annoying through since you have to manage two pops with the same name. It'd be nice if you could have a subspecies with a different name, e.g. "greater x" and "lesser x". You can do this through genemodding mid-game but not from the race creation screen.

Where this becomes annoying is in the resettlement screen where you can't tell your necrophages from your normal pops apart, and only the necrophages can be rulers. Of course you could resettle the rulers but then that costs 2x as much energy.

 

[covya]

Yep.

It does get annoying through since you have to manage two pops with the same name. It'd be nice if you could have a subspecies with a different name, e.g. "greater x" and "lesser x". You can do this through genemodding mid-game but not from the race creation screen.

Where this becomes annoying is in the resettlement screen where you can't tell your necrophages from your normal pops apart, and only the necrophages can be rulers. Of course you could resettle the rulers but then that costs 2x as much energy.

I gave the sub-species nomadic for exactly that reason, makes them cheaper to resettle so you can tell which is which

 

[Don_Quigleone]

You should be able to bypass that issue if you make the Prepatent species the same as the Necrophage species (same name and same portrait). The game will recognize them as the same and then they’ll behave normally.

This is such an exploit .

Other then if you use this exploit, I think it's strictly weaker then normal purifiers, as you can only meaningfully expand your population via conquest, given your huge -75% growth malus.