What is the best possible build?

[Colonizor48]

Some canidates:
1: Driven assimilator + matinance protocols or rapid replicator + minmaxed traits + shattered ring.
2: Necrophage technocracy meritocracy thingy.
3: Slaver technocracy with remnants

But there are probably others. In your opinon whats the best?

 

[Mastikator]

Probably Technocracy + Slavers guild. Oligarchy authority. Shattered Ring origin. Into synth ascension.

 

[Colonizor48]

Probably Technocracy + Slavers guild. Oligarchy authority. Shattered Ring origin. Into synth ascension.

Shattered ring was nerfed in 3.0 tho.

 

[Meebleborp]

1. DA Shattered Ring, as you mentioned, is the top slot. I don't think much more needs to be said about it.

2. Normal ME on Shattered Ring is next, with Rapid Replicators + Memorialist. This is really only 2nd to DA because it has a much more difficult time on average getting extra pops. You don't want Maintenance Protocols in this case because you want to run as few Maintenance Drones as possible. This is what you can do with a couple minor artifacts, an art monument, and some Memorialist buildings.

I usually take OTA Updates third so that I can consistently resettle almost all my pops from other worlds to the ring for the first 40-50 years of the game.

By the way, the reason why this and other MEs on Shattered Ring are so strong is not just due to the tech rush, but the fact they also have an easy 10 alloy jobs to fall back on if things get ugly.

2.5. I suppose the other two ME types would be slightly below this. RS is especially strong, but way more difficult to optimize.

--- Huge gap here ---

3. Necrophage, Technocracy + Functional Architecture, usually Authoritarian for 2nd ethos. This is faster to get going and more reliable than the same build with Meritocracy. This build is pretty busted in how strong your economy can be with all the extra pops so early, though it does take a bit to learn all its nuances.

4. Void Dwellers, Technocracy + Slaver Guilds. The reason this is stronger than other base empire Technocracy builds is that it has ultra-efficient pops and gets out to much faster of a start with 3 Science Directors almost immediately.

5. This is where things get tougher to gauge, but it's probably ME with Resource Consolidation. Plays the same way as Shattered Ring, but is (obviously) quite a bit weaker. If you're strictly playing vs vanilla AI, it's possible this slot should go to a super-optimized military rush strategy with some combination of Militarist, Authoritarian, and Xenophobe.

 

[Colonizor48]

1. DA Shattered Ring, as you mentioned, is the top slot. I don't think much more needs to be said about it.

2. Normal ME on Shattered Ring is next, with Rapid Replicators + Memorialist. This is really only 2nd to DA because it has a much more difficult time on average getting extra pops. You don't want Maintenance Protocols in this case because you want to run as few Maintenance Drones as possible. This is what you can do with a couple minor artifacts, an art monument, and some Memorialist buildings.

View attachment 731398

I usually take OTA Updates third so that I can consistently resettle almost all my pops from other worlds to the ring for the first 40-50 years of the game.

By the way, the reason why this and other MEs on Shattered Ring are so strong is not just due to the tech rush, but the fact they also have an easy 10 alloy jobs to fall back on if things get ugly.

2.5. I suppose the other two ME types would be slightly below this. RS is especially strong, but way more difficult to optimize.

--- Huge gap here ---

3. Necrophage, Technocracy + Functional Architecture, usually Authoritarian for 2nd ethos. This is faster to get going and more reliable than the same build with Meritocracy. This build is pretty busted in how strong your economy can be with all the extra pops so early, though it does take a bit to learn all its nuances.

4. Void Dwellers, Technocracy + Slaver Guilds. The reason this is stronger than other base empire Technocracy builds is that it has ultra-efficient pops and gets out to much faster of a start with 3 Science Directors almost immediately.

5. This is where things get tougher to gauge, but it's probably ME with Resource Consolidation. Plays the same way as Shattered Ring, but is (obviously) quite a bit weaker. If you're strictly playing vs vanilla AI, it's possible this slot should go to a super-optimized military rush strategy with some combination of Militarist, Authoritarian, and Xenophobe.

We are kinda forgetting 1 build. Doomsday lithoid driven assimilators/determined exterminators. A good alloy rush build. Was good in 2.8 and i see no reason its not just as good if not better in 3.0 due to the building changes.

 

[Sinister2202]

Shattered ring was nerfed in 3.0 tho.

They are still talking about nerfing it.

 

[Bankipriel]

I think it greatly depends on base galaxy settings (and whether you play with the new growth mechanics, which I don't, and have modded out).


On vanilla w/ baseline settings (x1 tech/unity & x1 planets), the above suggestions seem sound/reasonable.


However, playing something akin to 2.8 growth, with Starnet/tech, x2.5/3 tech/unity, x.25 planets, 12 total war force spawns (out of 24 total empires) on 800 stars, w/ 75% advanced starts . . . the above options don't play as well, because conquest and wide play is just not a viable strategy during the first century, because committing full naval forces to win a war almost always means getting destroyed on the other side of the empire.

With the settings & mods I enjoy, I find population growth to still be the single most important factor, because conquering weak neighbors (when there even are any) more often leads to defeat, as the pops aren't worth the expanded borders & travel time, and the loss of allies/buffers against the inevitable coming storm of FP's/DA's/DS's/DE's. So Hives & normal empires w/ mechanist are still the two strongest choices, IMHO.


Against the hardest, modded settings I can still win against about 75% of the time (which is as much punishment as I enjoy), the two strongest empires IMO are:

1) Lithoid Hive : Tree of Life

2) Authoritarian, Fanatic Materialist: Technocracy & Memorialist : Mechanist

The first provides a very strong early game with great habitability & the best pop growth in the game.

The second provides a strong early game with second best pop growth in the game, great tech potential, and the potential to get habitats feeding biologicals to Ecu's and robots to resources worlds earlier than any other empire.


It's also worth considering what mods you want to play with. I always play with Expanded Stellaris Traditions (as do about 140K other people), and this mod makes Unity almost as powerful as Research, which makes Memorialist an even more top tier choice for the incredible trifecta of society/unity/stability. I often ignore physics & engineering for the first few decades and rush society & traditions, getting terraforming very early & getting Titan mechs and multiple orbital damage reductions, allowing me to "win" most early wars by holding superior enemy forces against fortress worlds until I can force a white peace. In my last game, I didn't even build a ship until 2270 when I could start cranking out cruiser fleets.

 

[Oculument]

Some canidates:
1: Driven assimilator + matinance protocols or rapid replicator + minmaxed traits + shattered ring.
2: Necrophage technocracy meritocracy thingy.
3: Slaver technocracy with remnants

But there are probably others. In your opinon whats the best?

Best for what purpose? Easy? Fun? Peaceful? Warmongering? Taking on an 25X crisis? Anything can win versus the AI.

Lithoid Terravore with Calamitous Birth origin for going fast crisis. Blow up the galaxy before the 25X crisis even spawns.

 

[theBigTurnip385]

Lithoid Terravore with Calamitous Birth and turned up habititable planets.

Settle the 100% planets and eat everything else

 

[Lykus Cerebros]

3. Necrophage, Technocracy + Functional Architecture, usually Authoritarian for 2nd ethos. This is faster to get going and more reliable than the same build with Meritocracy. This build is pretty busted in how strong your economy can be with all the extra pops so early, though it does take a bit to learn all its nuances.

Agree with everything else but I think I would make a case here for Xenophobe to get access to the necrophage purge. Yeah it's less efficient, but getting access to a number of main pops very quickly is really good and I feel like outweighs the benefits of Authoritarian since slaver guilds aren't really great with necrophages.
All under the impression you don't get necrophage purge with authoritarian.

 

[Meebleborp]

Agree with everything else but I think I would make a case here for Xenophobe to get access to the necrophage purge. Yeah it's less efficient, but getting access to a number of main pops very quickly is really good and I feel like outweighs the benefits of Authoritarian since slaver guilds aren't really great with necrophages.
All under the impression you don't get necrophage purge with authoritarian.

Yep, Xenophobe is definitely competitive as long as you only use the purge when it's needed. It's possible it's just stronger in general, unless you know you're not running into any Hive Minds or anything. Auth is certainly better for the early economy (the strengh being stratified + worker output, not slaver guilds), but Xenophobe's pop growth is strong in its own right. The most important part though is that you can enslave prepatents + primitives with either, which allows for a pretty broken early economy from which you can accomplish almost anything.

 

[Strangedane]

Terravores with calamitous birth is very very strong.
Can clear a 6 AI 200 star system in roughly 40 years. Eat, breed and repeat.

Scions can roll an early 6k fleet that takes around 60 corvettes to stop.
Against most AI, nothing stops this for a while if you roll it early enough, and the snowballing potential is insane but very rng.

As mentioned, Assimilator on ringworld is wicked sick.
Nothing much to say about this one.

Necrophages are strong especially as egalitarian xenophobes or technocrats.
These require a bit of fiddling about to play effeciently and the micro may be too much for a lot of people. The raw power from the combination of enslaved prepatents and specialised ruler pops is pretty good. I usually use lithoids as ruler pops as well, so habitability is less of a concern.

 

[Scyobi_Empire]

Fan Militarist/Authoritarian MegaCorp with Indentured Assets and Free Traders with Hegemon. Good for chaos and military.

Not the best, but it is decent.

 

[MathyM]

If you do decide to run a Necrophage minmaxed empire, it'd seem that Lithoids are the best choice right now. The main disadvantage (slow pop growth) being completely irrelevant to you. Eating minerals isn't optimal, but it does reduce the need for microing, and if you happen to go Synth, that won't matter for long anyway.

The other downside is that you'll be limited to Lithoid portraits.

 

[Dr. B]

Best possible build relies on game settings and your own goals and are thus difficult to pin down.

My credits are on a well played genocidal empire though.
Total war, powerful military advantages from the start, you can get some serious snowballing going.

Currently I play this:
Fan. Xenophobe, Spiritualist
Fanatic Purifiers, Exalted Priesthood, Oligarchy
On the shoulders of giants
Rapid Breeders, Traditional, Quick Learners, Nonadaptive

On Admiral, Ironman, no mods, no fancy exploits, by 2270, all other empires are inferior/pathetic.
Psionically ascended in 2249, all worlds terraformed , just steamrolling everyone. Not so much fun anymore.

This is certinly not the best, also not optimised play at all, it just shows the power of total war and the starting military advantages from a genocidal empire.

(In this case, you can also shift out of Purifiers via the chosen one event, and play a normal empire game afterwards if you so choose.)

 

[How Zany]

Best Possible Build falls under 3 categories in my opinion.
Category 1: The Builds that when played by the AI is the strongest build that will dominate any other build given to the AI to play. Basically making strong AI enemies that will be a challenge for you to play against.
Category 2: Builds that when played by a human player and carefully managed will be far more efficient than other builds and dominate the galaxy. Some of these builds are only strong if you micromanage them as a player and the AI would not be able to use this effectively.
Category 3: Builds that are extremely optimized to do a very specific thing like reaching end game crisis quickly for example or getting through ascension quickly.


I have play tested many builds and creating new builds and empires is kinda my favorite thing to do as a pass time in Stellaris. I probably spend equal amount of time playing Stellaris as I spend on building new crazy empire builds. For this reason I have lots of builds and I will be placing them here in a ranking tier list for each category. Feel free to try them out for each of the categories to see what you think!

Category 1 (The AI controlled opponent):
1: Progenitor Hive + Devouring Swarm + Extremely Adaptive + Rapid Breeder/Budding + Ascetic - Repugnant - Sedentary/Unruly.
- So this thing in the hands of the AI is insane. With a base +25% habitability (habitability impacts growth speed + lets you settle almost anywhere) and +35% growth speed, whenever the AI plays this against me the AI empire controlling this swarm will typically cover the map with endless fleets and have too many planets to count. (I called this build the Zerg Swarm)

2: Subterranean Lithoid Devouring Swarm (Terravore) + Subspace Ephapse + Industrious + Very Strong + Resilient - Repugnant - Unruly/Sedentary
- This build is a surprise for me. Because I didn't think this build would rank so high. But whenever I put this build in for the AI to control, not only does it end up being one of the strongest empires, but there's almost no way to take them down. Subterranean makes planetary bombardment almost impossible, and ground invasions against them with their Very Strong and Resilient bonus is incredibly hard to overcome. They can be at war with the whole galaxy and be totally fine surrounded and attacked from all sides. (I called these the Planet Eaters)

3: Clone Army Lithoid Fanatic Purifier + Distinguished Admiralty + Very Strong + Resilient + Conservationist - Unruly - Sedentary.
- This build starts with a +78% bonus to ship fire rate, 73% bonus to ground army damage, 123% bonus to defensive ground army bonus. I have never seen this do poorly by the AI but at the same time they have trouble against the first 2 builds in this category. (I named these the Horsemen of Apocalypse using the horse lithoid appearance).

4: Authoritarian Fanatic Spiritualist + police state + Exalted Priesthood + Traditional + Natural sociologist + Conservationist + Resilient - Nonadaptive
- I don't understand why this build is so strong in the hands of the AI. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. This was a joke build I made that somehow always DOMINATES every time it is in the game as the AI. I would have thought this would be an average playable build in the category 3 perhaps but apparently the AI can make this build completely bonkers. The amount of unity bonuses this build gets is really high so I guess unity is really strong? This build somehow always dominates as an AI empire that not only refuses to die when it is behind but normally is one of the top three empires in the galaxy in any playthrough it spawns in. (I called these the Wessari Holy Covenant in the game... a totally random and arbitrary name, and I thought this was just an average build I swear).

5: Resource Consolidation + Determined Exterminator + Rockbreaker + Durable + Superconductive + Mass Produced - Luxurious - Repurposed Hardware
- I have tried many many builds for machine empires, and for some reason the AI seem to be able to play this specific build the best. Oddly enough the lithoid and biological swarm builds seem to do better than all my machine builds that I give the AI to play. (I called this the OMNI Exterminators).

 

[How Zany]

Category 2 (Player Controlled Empire):
1. Fungoid/Plantoid + Post Apocalyptic + Fanatic Purifier + Catalytic Processing + Radiotrophic + Budding - Fleeting - Sedentary
- This build is unreasonably strong and actually stupid simple to play. Radiotrophic makes your pops eat only half food, the other half is energy credits, except on tombworlds your pops have no energy credit upkeep. That's fine because all of your worlds will be tomb worlds since as a Fanatic purifier you will just armaggedon bombard every planet in sight. Since you pops only eat half food and you can turn food into Alloys, making alloys have never been easier and cheaper. All you do is find your neighbors, armaggedon bombard their planets until it is a tomb world, then settle there with your own population, and rinse and repeat. Budding will make your growth even better as the game goes on to catch up to the fast early game swarm builds. This weird cheeky little build has given me countless hours of enjoyment and it is mindlessly simple to play ironically. You don't even need to terraform anything, every planet will eventually be a tomb world that is perfectly habitable for your race. The key to playing this race is just to go on the attack right away. Don't wait around... Right from the start make a corvette fleet and start making tomb worlds for your people! (I called this race the Death Fungus).

2. Syncretic Evolution + Fanatic Materialist + Authoritarian + Megacorporation + Indentured Assets (slave guild) + Anglers + Aquatic + Intelligent + Conservationist - Sedentary - Slow Learners.
- This is probably the best tech rush build I have ever made. You sit on your initial 3 ocean planets and build TALL. Anglers allow you to build infinite number of farms which will be filled with your slave race of Syncretic Evolution farmers who will make lots of food for you as well as mine minerals or make credits. Anglers also gives some of your farmers the ability to make you consumer goods, which is important here since the extra consumer goods will allow you to supply and make Tech Labs. That's right we will be filling 2 of the first 3 planets with Tech labs. The third planet will be filled with Unity producing buildings. Since we will not be expanding wide but only building tall, the Megacorp 10% bonus to unity will really help this empire out with unity growth that most Fanatic Materialists won't get to enjoy, and we don't have to be afraid of ever getting hit by the empire size penalty. We will be getting so much tech and unity from just sitting on our three initial planets that we will be far far ahead of every empire in terms of technology and unity researches. Also could be a very viable build to Become the Crisis if you want to go this route. This build is very flexible in terms of where you want to go with it. It's just abuses the two most OP traits in the game which are Slaver Guilds and Anglers. You don't even need Technocracy for this build and you will be getting more research than most Technocracies because Angler lets you make infinite farms on your planet which also gives you consumer goods, meaning you have infinite consumer goods, meaning all your buildings can be tech labs. (I called this build Fishy Research Partnerships).

 

[How Zany]

3. Ne c ro phage + Technocracy + Meritocracy + Fanatic Materialist + Egalitarian + Intelligent + Conformists - Sedentary - Fleeting
- This is another tech rush build but this time of the n e c r o phage variety. Having Conformists I found to be very important as Egalitarian + Oligarchy combined gives you a 40% bonus to faction unity gain, and so government ethic attraction is pretty darn important to have for your nec r o id race to be focused around science/materialist doctrines. This I found to be a bit harder to play than the second build I showed in this category where you build tall in an aquatic race in ocean worlds with Anglers, but Necro phage does get the job done, and is fun when there's a war and you can take over enemy planets to convert their pops into yours. Definitely fun but not as synergistic or powerful as the second one. (I named this the Vampire Scientists).

4. Prosperous Unification + Inward Perfection + Agrarian Idyll + Fanatic Xenophobe + Pacifist + Rapid Breeders + Extremely Adaptive - slow learners - fleeting - repugnant.
- Ever wanted to make peaceful farmers OP? This is the build that makes peaceful farms all over the galaxy. This doesn't sound that powerful on it's own but this build starts off with 40% bonus population growth and 20% bonus habitability. You can grow almost anywhere and you grow FAST. (I named this build the Cockroach Collective).

 

[How Zany]

5. Police State + Byzantine Bureaucracy + Egalitarian + Fanatic Pacifist + Extremely Adaptive + Rapid Breeders - Unruly - Repugnant.

This is a peaceful expansion build that gives high stability and habitability. Stability and Habitability are really strong in this game.

 

[RabbaDooDabba]