Xenophobe Playstyle and Tips?

[AxelinCG]

Recently I tried to use Xenophobes as my main ethics to play (Usually Fanatic). Quite good start impression due to the 30% additional Border Extrusion and Alien Slavery (Love that role-play to eliminate and enslave all xenos).
I tried to do 3 play-through but I none of them end up decent enough.
As I didn't really grasp the play-style of Xenophobes.
First Play-Through:
Rekt by A 3-empire Federation. Held on to about 10 years after losing the first battle.
After the First Play-Through I summarized my mistake:
1. Didn't have enough Ship techs (weaponry, defenses and such)
2. Rivaled too much people and nobody can even help.

The Second one and The Third one I properly focused on Military tech and keep expanding with Colony Ship to get those delicious border projection boost. But It never end well, mostly become a extremely long term war from 10 - 30 years without any result.

So I'm just here in the forum to ask:

What is the best possible way to play a Fanatic Xenophobe Empire?

 

[First Order of Enoch]

You're running into the same problem that the "Fanatic Purifier" AI runs into.

No friends in a game about diplomacy.

You just gotta get really good at having the biggest doomstack.

 

[Alblaka]

Fan Xenophobe - Militarist - Star Empire.
Focus on expansion and landgrabbing (aka, colonizing as far away from your home system as feadisble).
Earlygame, mining&research stations are your main income, thus trying to get as much valuable territory as possible gives you an early advantage.

Snowball that advantage by developing your colonies faster and then proceed developing mores. Make sure to build maxed (to whatever currently avaible) spaceports on every colony to increase your naval limit. Then use your advantage in mineral production to fill up that cap (plainly spamming non-missile corvettes will do fine, regardless of tech levell). Then go to war, but avoid fighting multiple enemies at once.

Technically you can do this strategy with pretty much any militarist empire, albeit xenophobes have the advantage of being far superior at landgrabbing, whilst suffering from diplomatic isolation.

You're running into the same problem that the "Fanatic Purifier" AI runs into.

Actually, in all my games so far, Fanatic Purifier AI's do extremely well and usually blob hard towards the mid-game, until coming to a stalemate against federation blobs.

 

[First Order of Enoch]

Actually, in all my games so far, Fanatic Purifier AI's do extremely well and usually blob hard towards the mid-game, until coming to a stalemate against federation blobs.

In my game the Fanatic Purifier always gets ganged up on early, unless he rolls lucky and gets the advanced AI start. then he's a problem

 

[Alblaka]

In my game the Fanatic Purifier always gets ganged up on early, unless he rolls lucky and gets the advanced AI start. then he's a problem

Let's agree that it might be indeed the start that makes or breaks a purifier game, for both AI and player.
Advanced AI start is an automatic win, but otherwise you will need to either have good avenues to exploit your expansion potential, or have neighbours who don't DP up the instant they meet you (i.e. several Federation Builders).

 

[Lither]

My suggestion is to kill the aliens

 

[AxelinCG]

Fan Xenophobe - Militarist - Star Empire.
Focus on expansion and landgrabbing (aka, colonizing as far away from your home system as feadisble).
Earlygame, mining&research stations are your main income, thus trying to get as much valuable territory as possible gives you an early advantage.

Snowball that advantage by developing your colonies faster and then proceed developing mores. Make sure to build maxed (to whatever currently avaible) spaceports on every colony to increase your naval limit. Then use your advantage in mineral production to fill up that cap (plainly spamming non-missile corvettes will do fine, regardless of tech levell). Then go to war, but avoid fighting multiple enemies at once.

Technically you can do this strategy with pretty much any militarist empire, albeit xenophobes have the advantage of being far superior at landgrabbing, whilst suffering from diplomatic isolation.



Actually, in all my games so far, Fanatic Purifier AI's do extremely well and usually blob hard towards the mid-game, until coming to a stalemate against federation blobs.

Thanks for the advise. Any of them are appreciated!
All though how could I cover the influence cost? Simply Rivalries?

Let's agree that it might be indeed the start that makes or breaks a purifier game, for both AI and player.
Advanced AI start is an automatic win, but otherwise you will need to either have good avenues to exploit your expansion potential, or have neighbours who don't DP up the instant they meet you (i.e. several Federation Builders).

This is actually the problem I faced on the first play-through. 3 Empire to my east built a federation and I got at least 7 Empires around me that together surrounds me. So i basically can not expand further after 2250.

 

[Alblaka]

All though how could I cover the influence cost? Simply Rivalries?

Rivalries and a focus on Influence-giving research. Avoid using policies and spend all Influence on new colonies (or alternatively chokepoint frontiers). Usually works fine for me, and I even have Influence to spair to boost infrastructure in new colonies.

This is actually the problem I faced on the first play-through. 3 Empire to my east built a federation and I got at least 7 Empires around me that together surrounds me. So i basically can not expand further after 2250.

Sounds like a restart condition to me.

 

[Surimi]

You don't need to purge everyone to play xenophobes.

Just conquer them and build a monument to how awesome you are on their planet. Generally, it's not too hard to keep happiness levels out of the danger zone unless they're of completely the wrong ethics.

One of my favourite games as as "xenophobe"/individualist starfish with the charismatic trait. For most of the game they didn't purge or enslave and everyone loved them because they were super-cute. Only when the empire was too huge to stop did the alien slavery and purging of dissidents begin!

 

[dying0d]

The trick is basically to be as space borne as possible, and build up fleet cap early.

Build a large fleet and conquer a neighbor before they start all Ying eachother up. Until then you hide your nature and fight the diplomacy system so you don't get dog piled too early.

I like using outposts to choke off or surround my first target. That leads them to being weak militarily for when I conquest them.

Hold off on purging until you have a huge decent foothold or else you will be dog piled still.

Xenophobe is a tricky balance game to start but with the right moves and treating of neighbors you can survive it's weakest point, the start

Use your starting fleet as 3 scout ships to get a peek into the systems out around and find the enemy, this is what will allow you to outpost vlbox them in. Also if hyperlink only, will help see the choke points and also lead to seeing the space borne enemies around. Don't research right away these menace, as it will lock up your society research too much. And don't try to establish comms either, for the same reason.

You should have a ludicrous amount of space borne research/resources coming in before you start your first colony, which means you will plow through some early game tech quickly. Capitalize on this tall type start strategy and build yourself the military to go wide, and if purge is your thing, eventually purge the galaxy

 

[Diezy]

Your main strengths are huge borders and Aggressive First Contact, you'll want to use those to secure much vital space early on in the game. You'll want to secure planets to cover as much space as possible at first, and then you can colonize the best planets later. Quite peacefully too, not counting the pre-contact bullying of construction ships, to intrerrupt their outpost building

Turning Purging off, and exploring really far into finding another Public Enemy and calling that one a Rival, which will make some rivals of the rival like you more, even enough to get you a good Defensive Pact! So scouting is very handy there!

Also you'll want to scout around a lot, to find the Xenophobic Fallen Empire in advance, because those huge border buffs are going to be a pain, and you'll end up doing border friction even if your planets are waaaay far, even without Star Empire! And you might be thinking, that they can't get mad if you haven't contacted them, but they will make contact with you on their own if the borders touch!

 

[Foefaller]

Couple of tips from my playing:

Regulated Slavery has no diplomatic malus, consider switching to it at first if you need to do actual diplomacy (or at least to stave off everyone rivaling you all at once until you can deal with fighting them all at once) you can go back to reg. xeno slavery once you are fairly certain you can win a war against everyone in your sector of the galaxy.

Be careful with your rivaling. I'd start with only a single rival (ideally someone you already had little chance of doing any sort of diplomacy with who is already in frosty relations with someone you might be able to get a NAP signed with) and add more only as you have the strength to deal with multiple neighboring empires. As you have found out, rivaling all of your neighbors is a sure way of getting your all of your neighbors to band together against you.

Seriously consider Militarist as one of your other ethos. Military Dictatorship and Military Junta are both great government types for building and/or maintaining massive fleets, which you will need.

Expand quickly. Especially on higher difficulties, being able to outproduce your enemies is more important than being able to out-research your enemies (especially when you will be making up for some of that loss when you start salvaging the debris from after your battles) Once you've grabbed everything in reach and have your neighbors under your thumb, then you can scale back and start working on internal development.

Finally, when it comes building enough warscore to force a massive federation to capitulate, I recommend building multiple invasion-ready armies right before the start of the war, and once you've shattered most of the enemy's fleet(s), splitting up your fleet to simultaneously bomb and invade multiple worlds at once. Keep in mind that while you can in theory conquer anywhere with basic assault troops, slave and clone armies do it cheaper and the other armies do it with less bombing required (A stack of 12 Gene Warriors can sometimes take smaller worlds with almost no bombing at all!)

 

[icon41gimp]

Use cleanse planet wars followed by colony ships to expand. Will keep mutual threat lower than straight up conquering which is what drives nearby empires to form a huge federation against you.

 

[wurmkrank]

Use cleanse planet wars followed by colony ships to expand. Will keep mutual threat lower than straight up conquering which is what drives nearby empires to form a huge federation against you.

uh pretty sure cleanse is purging. Are you sure that won't freak everyone out much more?

 

[GC13]

I re-learned a very important lesson today: never rival two empires who are anywhere near each other. They'll rival you back, then form a defensive pact because they have the Same Rivals bonus.

 

[TestosteroneLol]

Don't rival anyone who doesn't rival you first, but conquer the first empire you meet. You should be able to roll them pretty easily and then you have a free capital world. Consider enslaving everybody to have a massive boost to early mineral production (and therefore fleet size), or if the climate allows, purge everyone on their planet and resettle some of your own species there while that is taking place. Nomadic helps as a trait, as does adaptive, communal or conformist.

I would pair fanatic xenophobe with collectivism over anything else because if you have ethos drift purging or enslaving aliens will seriously destroy your economy due to unhappiness.

After you have a bigger fleet than anyone else just conquer as often as is possible.

 

[The Founder]

I grew convinced that the purpose of Fanatical Purfiers AI was to advance Diplomacy:
Rivalry is declared towards anyone you hate. Xenophobes hate everyone and have a lot of extra rivalries.
Having shared rivalries results in relationship boost.
Relationship boost lead to NAP, Defense pacts and Federations. Wich is self-stabilising once formed.

When playing as Xenophobe, I consider it a happiness boost first. Symbol of Unity is simply put the best Happiness building in the game right now. +10% Happiness. Easy requirements. No Maintenance.
The only one comming even close is the Paradise dome, but it is not nearly as easy to get and comes with tradeoffs for early warfare.

Something you might want to avoid is the spreading of communication. Purge and Warfare only cause Diplomacy penalties if the other side has communication with you.

 

[Alblaka]

When playing as Xenophobe, I consider it a happiness boost first. Symbol of Unity is simply put the best Happiness building in the game right now. +10% Happiness. Easy requirements. No Maintenance.

Symbol of Unity grants -10% Ethic Divergence, not happiness (anymore).

 

[Xoatl]

I play xenophobe often. I also play precursor starts. It's important to invade and purge any space age pre-ftl species asap. If you find them in the early game you need to nip that in the bud. Then war and purge even further just to make room and by the time it hits mid game and huge empires are forming they'll still be far enough away to not be an issue. Also, most of your purging will be done before making contact so you won't suffer a diplo malus with these empires. Just don't accept making contact with country in that one repeatable event.

Playing Xenophobe in a non-precursor start might be a little different.

 

[First Order of Enoch]

Symbol of Unity grants -10% Ethic Divergence, not happiness (anymore).

I believe he meant "Symbol of Purity"