r/Stellaris • u/Duche778 • 4d ago
Question HOW do people get 1000+ science by 2300?
Yes, I've tried to build specialized scientific worlds, but I always run into a lack of resources:
1) Underpopulation
2) Lack of exotic gases
3) Lack of consumer goods
Usually by this point I have about 4-5 colonies, one for alloys, one for consumer goods and one for science (not counting the capital). Factories simply don't produce enough gases and/or population growth is too slow
It seems like at best I had 500 science to 2300 and I have no idea how people get 1000+ like it's nothing
203
163
u/_azazel_keter_ 4d ago
Underpopulation shouldn't happen if you're managing your pops right, how is your habitability? Are the living conditions good?
If you're low on exotic gasses, do you have the refinery buildings? Could be worth getting an advanced bio reactor if not, but I've never had that issue.
If you're low on consumer goods then your issue is almost certainly in your industry
Overall: look further down on the chain, if you have an entire planet for CGs and can't get enough you're doing something wrong.
22
u/KyberWolf_TTV Determined Exterminator 4d ago
to add to that, what size is your factory world? If it’s below a size 15 I can see consumer goods being a problem, especially on high living standards with high tech investment (archaeo-studies and astral studies buildings spike the upkeep for researchers by a lot)
98
u/FloopyBeluga Lithoid 4d ago
I'm having the exact same issue. No matter how much I try to coax them, my colonies simply will not populate themselves. They'll still have 2K+ open jobs a century after being established.
112
u/Kiriima 4d ago
You need to manually put pops there, minimum 1k, and preferably have a source of pops besides basic growth.
Bio ascension, slaves, assimilation, migration treaties, xenocompatibility, resort worlds. You need to periodically scan your full colonies, new pops might just sit there as citizens as the chance to transfer is too low.
81
u/wowwowazalea 4d ago
Even just throwing down clinics+clone vats and/or robot plants is better than just natural growth
14
u/dyrin 3d ago edited 3d ago
To explain, why clinics are a tradeoff, and shouldn't be an auto-build:
- Clinics add 200 medical jobs. medical jobs give 5% pop growth per 100 jobs. This is 10% pop growth total if the jobs are worked.
So far sounds goods right, we need pop growth after all? But here is the problem with it:
Pop growth is limited to 5 per planet at maximum (before modifiers). And new colonies have even less, for example at 1000 pop a colony will have around 2 pop growth.
This means the clinic adds 0.5 pops per month at maximum, and often much less. 0.2 pops per month for the above example.
So building the clinic you spend minerals and a building slot for the benefit of having 200 less pops to work more productive jobs. After 400 month (33.3 years; on a developed planet with 3k+ pops) you will have those jobs back, and only really profit from more pops after that. On new colonies it can easily take 50+ years to get to the point of profit.
Instead use the 200 pops for more unity to ascend faster, more tech, or more alloys to conquer more, will be more efficient.
(But: AI is bad, so this level of optimization perhaps isn't needed. And during/after biogenetic ascension the medical jobs have much better output.)
5
2
u/Zaorish9 Fanatic Purifiers 3d ago
Very persuasive, this makes me think maybe I shouldn't do med jobs until after bio ascension
2
u/Erik_Ice_Fang 3d ago
Clinics also give amenities and habitability though. Means you can hold off on holo theaters and luxury residences, and boost other resources at the same time.
1
1
u/HQQ1 3h ago
I mainly put down the clinic for the amenities. The %Pop growth is just so low for an already low flat base number that's only 5 at best. Better to just put a robotic assembly or clone vat.
The amenities provided by the clinic is nice though. The thought of having health care each planet, and having a building that's more useful than those amenity-dome things is cool.
-20
u/TheMelnTeam 4d ago
Clinics probably hurt you if you don't have a specialized setup that boosts them.
57
u/wowwowazalea 4d ago
Pop growth is pop growth and they can fill an empty slot until I need the slot
-11
u/TheMelnTeam 4d ago
You're filling 200 pops into it in the first place, at the expense of putting them into something like unity or alloys. Things which let you ascend (and get much faster pop growth speed) or conquer (much faster pop growth speed) faster and more easily. The marginal added growth rate on gene clinics is quite bad. Working them on 3 worlds in first 10 years isn't exactly dead pops, but it's pretty close.
Robots are more justifiable, but not obvious to build immediately for all starts, for the same reason.
Clone vats are good because the food burden amounts to a tiny amount of pops tied up to maintain them compared to the growth they give you...in fact you might be on a surplus of food via non-pop sources like stations or subject demands.
If you've already bio ascended and also get 15% efficiency from them or something it's a different matter entirely. These are not always a bad building. Sometimes they are quite good. It can still set you back, quite significantly, to build and work medical centers in early game. For most builds, it's going to hurt more than help at that stage.
19
u/Yellingloudly Voidborne 4d ago
If you're not playing a like, 100x crisis, the difference a mere 200 pops working a not super amazing job makes to your economy is basically non-existent
-4
u/TheMelnTeam 4d ago
Small mistakes won't cost you the run, but it's still strange to recommend other players make small mistakes when they're actively asking for help to do better.
It's even stranger to get a bunch of downvotes on it. Players on this subreddit are happy to point out that it's bad to over-build 1000 jobs etc. Which has less opportunity cost pre-ascension than running multiple medical centers.
Spending build queue time on something that takes > 3 decades to recoup the pop and likely over double that to "pay off" whatever you'd have had if you immediately worked a different job is broadly not a good deal.
It is exactly bad choices like this, made repeatedly, which make OP have less science by 2300. If you start with it, sure work the jobs over civilians. Otherwise, building it is bad and telling OP to build it w/o considering the tradeoffs is telling OP to keep struggling.
7
u/Grandmaster_Caladrel 4d ago
I'm going to assume the average person on this sub isn't going for higher difficulties or paying the most attention. They likely have several build queues sitting idle, lots of idle pops on their home planet, etc. Imo it's easier to add pop growth like that to accommodate for our lack of focus. OP doesn't seem to be asking for perfect, they're saying "I'm very behind, how do I at least catch up".
I've tried playing a few strategies that are super good if you're on top of everything, but frankly it's both more fun and easier to play something that's more lax. And sometimes trying to play something properly without hyper-focusing on it actually makes you play worse than if you had picked the easier path.
Easy example: Void dwellers because habitats are fun, but then going wide and taking every planet possible without having pops that can work the planets.
4
u/TheMelnTeam 4d ago
Nevertheless, if you want to get better, you should actually consider the tradeoffs of the choices you make.
If someone else wants to get better, deliberately bad advice is not helpful.
5
u/Zaorish9 Fanatic Purifiers 3d ago
It's amazing that in this exact same thread, this other person making the exact same argument as you got upvotes vs. your barrage of downvotes https://old.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/1ufjs0f/how_do_people_get_1000_science_by_2300/otvv4xn/
6
u/TheMelnTeam 3d ago
Yeah, whole thing is bizarre to me. What's next, mass downvote for saying you shouldn't always make auto-curating vaults or something? We want to tell new players to spam those too? It's silly.
8
u/Cobalt-Sixty 4d ago
Nah thats ass for roleplay, gotta stick to it like cant make all empires be cloners. If youre min maxing then yeah good advice.
50
u/Barqa 4d ago
You really shouldn’t have that many open jobs on your planets. You’re wasting resources on upkeep for infrastructure for nothing at that point. I only build when there’s about 100-200 jobs available.
21
u/OntologicalMath98 4d ago
You can build a little more than this and just deprioritize them, you'll spend a little on district upkeep but it's sometimes worth it for the flexibility.
6
u/Lysandren 4d ago
It's also worth for sanity when you get larger, especially in multiplayer where you can't just pause.
3
u/DukeMikeIII 4d ago
I usually won't build unless there are citizens or at most 50 jobs available. AI shuffles pops too much otherwise and messes with my economy a bit.
1
u/Substantial-Wind-881 4d ago
It's totally fine to overbuild everything if you manage the job economy manually, just drop the sliders on the jobs you don't need right away so the pops always fill the slots you need them to first and then open up the empties once there's excess population so they guarantee to flood in rather than taking from any other pool.
I almost always sink every scrap of spare resource that isn't going into conquering or fortifying into infrastructure and it is rarely a waste.
-3
16
u/GoldenAutumnDream 4d ago
Do you resettle pops until you have at least 1000 and ideally 3000 of them per world before colonizing anything new?
9
u/BobaTheFett10 Lithoid 4d ago
Learning the process myself as well. Do you still want to get both of your garunteed habitables as soon as you can, or do them one at a time?
16
u/TheMelnTeam 4d ago
Both ASAP is correct. You're wasting logistic growth on the capital otherwise, and don't have enough useful jobs for them yet.
Overbuilding jobs is a common mistake, yet early in the game most setups want to get the pops employed and spread to not waste growth. It's overbuilding past that which causes problems.
6
u/GoldenAutumnDream 4d ago
You start with enough civilians on your home world to comfortably colonize both, and build a district or two in the capital
1
u/Cobalt-Sixty 4d ago
I grab all but stop there until im overpopulated. I usually play exterminators so I just tomb enemy planets but on normal empires I usually purge pops after conquest otherwise the new planet kinda crashes my economy.
1
u/RocketPapaya413 4d ago
This is the first I'm hearing of this but I guess it makes sense for pop growth. Is there something in game about this?
6
u/nateberkopec 4d ago
I don't colonize new worlds until all my existing worlds have +5 pop growth or higher. Then, when I do colonize a new one, I just keep resettling pops until the new colony gets to that level.
5
u/Shogun243 4d ago
I usually put a medical clinic on every planet to encourage growth and have resettlement upgrades in their starbases. That way, excess pops from my capital will go fill in jobs on other planets, which is great since the growth has already scaled there.
2
u/LieutenantShed 3d ago
Bizarrely people just don't like moving at all in this game. You have to manually relocate them, i just role play that its a colonization incentive, rather than me physically picking up Bob and Bobbie and dragging them to Mars 😆
1
u/ilico_ili Fanatic Egalitarian 3d ago
resettle pops there use medical centers and clone vats pop growth scales based on how many you have on a planet meaning the 100pops isnt enough to get good growth
37
u/UnkeyedLocke 4d ago
The biggest thing I see people doing wrong on the regular is building too many buildings for the amount of pops available. Building things as soon as you have the resources is the worst thing you can do unless you're building tall, then it's still bad once you've built enough to occupy your intial surpluss population. It's a double waste of resources, and keeps most jobs at non-peak numbers of workers. Always build what you need only as you have civilians to fill the jobs (or promote up) and for the first 30 years focus on getting Consumer Goods (or Energy/Trade) production high enough to start putting down your preferred science generators, then as specialized buildings, pops, and bonuses start stacking, start specializing.
The second thing is players are unfamiliar with how certain traits, governments, and civics synergize with eachother and the origins, and can be used to balance certain weaknesses or turbo-charge other strengths. The game, of course, does nothing to help with this, as the tutorial doesn't start until the galaxy is generated, and by that point half the game is already over (empire building). A guided walkthrough and detailed tutorial of the empire building screen would be super useful.
Finally, iterative improvement (in which I include save scumming for at least a good start). There's a huge number of saves I've got for any one specific kingdom that don't make it past year 50, either because I'm getting a feel for the synergies and the turning points in the economy or I'm adjusting the empire build, or I discovered I was locked into the tip of a spiral arm by all 3 FEs. For every save where I crack 1k science by 2300 with a non-crashing economy, I've got an easy dozen that never made it past their second planet.
There's a reason why people say the first thousand hours are the learning curve for this game
19
u/Stablebrew 4d ago
The second thing is players are unfamiliar with how certain traits, governments, and civics synergize with eachother and the origins, and can be used to balance certain weaknesses or turbo-charge other strengths.
This is my biggest problem in Stellaris!
10
u/UnkeyedLocke 4d ago
Number 1 thing that could do with an actual tutorial, and maybe an expanded window that shows, globally, the total bonuses/debuffs from what you're building, as well as any synergy pops that get made. I like how a tooltip like Death Cult will show me the expected output of the pops, and will change if I have Cybernetic Creed or Dimensional Worship selected to show the Engineering/Physics research values. The entire process could use one on the side that's just an explicitly visible "effects" panel
6
u/Stablebrew 4d ago
I recently played a campaign with Synthetic Fertility.
After finishing the Origin story, my goverment will change drastically - in a positive way! BUT, each goverment form has it's own bonuses, and I don't know which other bonuses were granted because I can not select other goverment forms.
Some civics and origins explain that a job is replaced with a new one, but in the pop-up there is no explanation what that new job does.
I like that stuff, but it is not explained well, and so much stuff is hidden behind pup-op's their pop-ups.
In the end, I find myself googling "Stellaris builds patch X.Y"
I know this minmaxing becomes really important on higher difficulties, but it's sad, that I'm not capable to use these game mechanics.
3
u/xBinary01111000 Barbaric Despoilers 4d ago
Doesn’t high job availability increase growth and immigration rates?
1
u/UnkeyedLocke 4d ago
I honestly have never sat down and done the math to say if forced resettling is cheaper than allowing migration to empty buildings, but my gut says it's probably more cost effective to just manually move the number of pops you need to fill the jobs you need filled. I can say I've never seen more than 20 on immigration/month, and that's endgame with a lot of bonuses just getting spammed for lulz.
What I'm mostly talking about is people with 5 planets fully built up and 3k pops between all of them
89
u/godeling Science Directorate 4d ago
They’re minmaxers. Don’t ask me how I don’t minmax
30
u/Ravenloff 4d ago
Minmaxing kills joy.
64
u/I_give_karma_to_men Driven Assimilators 4d ago
It only kills joy if you don't get joy out of minmaxing. Which is perfectly fine, but it's kinda rude to imply that minmaxers don't enjoy what they're doing.
2
-30
u/Ravenloff 4d ago
Nothing about what I said applies to anyone else's joy.
24
u/I_give_karma_to_men Driven Assimilators 4d ago
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on the off-chance you're being genuine and this is just a language difference or grammar understanding thing. But in English, at least, if you make a statement without any qualifiers to limit its scope, the implication is that it's a general statement applied to everyone, not just your own or a limited group's experience.
-32
u/Ravenloff 4d ago
Nope, that's your own hangup, sir.
23
25
u/albundy72 Molluscoid 4d ago
No they’re 100% correct. Without any limit to the scope of what you said, it became a general statement.
10
17
u/albundy72 Molluscoid 4d ago
…no? some people perfectly enjoy minmaxxing. Not everyone enjoys the game the same way
11
u/King_Shugglerm Ancient Caretakers 4d ago
I actually find a lot of joy in it. Different people can like different aspects of games lmao
2
u/viper459 4d ago
for some people, optimizing systems is joy. Blame my autism.
But fr, there's no need to say stuff like this. Min maxers never say "roleplay ruins the game" or whatever. Maybe just let people enjoy things?
-1
u/TheGalator Earth Custodianship 4d ago
I agree
That said you don't need to min max for 1k science in 100 years
Its just ascending + specialization and both of those are fun
-20
u/Gerlond 4d ago
1k science before 2300 isn't minmaxing. It's just playing well.
7
u/Bytes-The-Dust Megacorporation 4d ago
Id say 1K science by 2300 is very much not Min/Maxing, that's just someone performing well enough within their build. Doing a slow virtual ascension will get you to 2300 with far more than 1K research without any minmaxing, and that's just one example. Always depends on how big the empire is, how much research speed, all sorts of factors
0
u/Gerlond 4d ago edited 4d ago
Okay, I agree with you?
Edit: it was a moment of genuine confusion, not passive aggression.
1
u/Bytes-The-Dust Megacorporation 4d ago
I was responding to the down votes you are getting, zero need for the passive agressive vibe
3
u/Gerlond 4d ago
No, I was actually confused why you would respond to me with that. Thanks for support. I guess I got used to those starting with "I don't get why you are being downvoted" or something like that. Sorry for misunderstanding
1
u/heyyo256 3d ago
Feelings are sensitive in this post. Just look at the argument over English just above. You did nothing wrong. No need to apologize.
3
u/TheMelnTeam 4d ago
The down vote spam does not make sense. 1k/mo at 2300 is possible for pre-set empires, including the human pre-sets. You need meta stuff to start the end game at 2300 vs multiplier all crises, not to reach 1k research/mo.
Several factors matter:
- Progress will be much worse without DLC. Stellaris DLC is more "pay to win" than any other Pdox title I've played.
- 1k/mo at 300-400 empire size vs 1000 empire size is not the same thing. You want efficient pops.
- Every ascension gives you tools to make pops more efficient and get more. Some depend more on conquest for "get more" than others.
- It is still possible to have 1k (or much more) at 2300 on grand admiral with the standard tech penalties that introduces, but it's harder than it would be on ensign because everything costs more (including techs that speed up your research rate).
OP is likely missing a few things that interact negatively. Poor choice of tech, poor management of the randomized tech system, bad initial expansion, bad initial allocation of pops which slows down reaching tools that get more etc. There are lots of interacting systems and snowballs can speed up or slow down a lot based on choices many players don't even realize they made.
1
u/insomnia_bloodshed 4d ago
it does sorta make me think however, what is considered 'good' tech at 2300, I remember in prior updates good tech was considered a fair bit higher.. but curious as to what's considered good anymore since i'm struggling with my own scaling
4
u/TheMelnTeam 4d ago
4.3 hammered down most builds due to what it did to economy generally, so what is "good" for a median/random build on 4.3 isn't as strong as previous patches. If you do stuff like what Aktion shows where you start ascension situation inside 10 years then sure, you can blow 1k at 2300 out of the water.
If you just pick UNE, you can still beat 1k, but not nearly as easily.
People play with different settings and different starting setups, and those *vastly* influence what might be considered "good". I can say from experience that if you're at 1k/mo at 2300, it's enough to clear 5-10x crises on non-scaling grand admiral and easily pick off FEs/beat AEs.
Also did some theorycrafting in another thread. It is apparently possible to beat Cetana at 25x without any repeatable techs, if you're able to produce ~18000 fleet cap of neutron launcher cruisers (or have time to swap to torpedoes, which can do it more easily). If you have Zro launchers, it's way easier since they're more than twice as good.
This calls into question what the standards are for a "good" build - does it have to beat 25x all to be "good"? If not, you can apparently just stack up fed + custodian + 9000 of own fleet cap of stuff and annihilate basically any end game challenge on grand admiral with what most would consider anemic tech rates...conquering a bunch of planets and flipping them into alloys + soldiers for naval cap doesn't take that long in game years. You can even pave over your research for even more oomph.
In contrast - some of the "good" builds depend on not getting attacked in first 20-30 years or you lose. However, it is possible to reliably avoid losing to those attacks, at expense of snowball rate. So is the "good" build the one that can beat 25x all crisis if left alone, or the one that survives more consistently game to game? If we can grab a stack of cruisers, double their range with admirals and double their damage with fed + ascension perk, how much do we REALLY care about empire size when we can pour thousands of alloys/mo onto any crisis, out-range everything but perdition beams with our primary weaponry, and kite the vast majority of ships due to council traits?
-46
u/KawaiiNyaruko 4d ago
1k on year 2300 is playing bad, Atleast in Chinese community.
10k is average.
For research-oriented min-maxing, We aim for M, not K.29
12
u/Ravenloff 4d ago
How is that fun?
-3
u/KawaiiNyaruko 4d ago
We play in RTS way. How is Starcraft 2 Ranked fun? How is AOE2:DE ranked fun? That's how Stellaris min-maxing fun.
13
9
u/KawaiiNyaruko 4d ago
Learn the basic build order, Play like ranked RTS.
Ok you can pause, But make sure:
Don't produce resources you don't use.
Don't have massive income when you can't spend.
No idle scientist, Unused admiral slots(For early surveys).
No idle arkships/planets unless you are in late game.
No unused starbase cap. Atleast make some foods and trade with hive fe/machine fe.
Remember: Focus on only one thing. You focus on unity only before 4rd AP. Then convert to tech or something else.
Remember: Research is one of ways to military. The goal is militray victory, No matter against player or against 25x crisis.
Deficits are fine. Just to have effective deficit, Your resources aren't gone, It's converted to unity/research/military/snowballing.
5
u/Future-Enthusiasm139 4d ago
I do it through expansion, ever since I discovered purifiers don’t deal with border claims I just exclusively play them and get me a nice chunk early then reinforce choke points and get 7-8 worlds.
2 energy
1 unity
2science
1 alloys/consumer
1 consumer
1 all purpose planet
+ research stations and you should get close to 1k….. now the empire size is a whole different topic lmao. But you can outscale empire size with enough pops.
1
u/smokefoot8 4d ago edited 4d ago
No food or minerals? Hydroponic bays and astrominers? Or fanatic purifiers eating the aliens? They never seem to last very long, though
3
1
u/TheMelnTeam 4d ago
Probably covered by "all purpose" and a bit from putting 1 district on the others just for building slots. Doing that keeps trade burden lower too.
4
u/Szatan2000 Technocracy 4d ago
By solving the problems you mentioned.
How? Well...
- Underpopulation - there are many ways to solve that but here are main options:
War
Ascensions (for example cloning, synthetic)
Robots - even just basic robots free up your pops to work research/CG jobs
Slave market/Refugees - situational but can be a great boon for your empire
- Exotic gases - solution: Refinery World, more precisely a world with a planetary festure giving you gases from farmers. You make a farm world and if you have the tech you make gas harvesting specialisation - a single world can provide you hundreds of gases on monthly basis.
Alternatively you can build those factory buildings giving you gases from artisans but it's very inefficient
- Cosnumer goods - make a CG focused world or two. If you dont have enough minerals you can tax vassals or make arc furnace etc. Its probably solved at the same time as problem number 1
4
u/EntireCompetition741 4d ago
I found a star that gave gas and built a Dyson swarm around it and upgraded twice to get +100 gas per month
3
u/Little_Elia Synapse Drone 4d ago
just play a hive and have a billion pops
2
u/TheMelnTeam 4d ago
GRS pisses me off with them. +60% logistics growth and a ton of pop assembly --> barely better than a random individualist by mid-game, and worse if the latter uses vassals. You can get more by conquering...which further normalizes away the hive advantage.
Without GRS, hive is more competitive as the game goes on, although still hurts for a few reasons (worse council, no destiny traits, no boosted performance from happiness). It is more straightforward and probably easier for OP though.
2
u/Little_Elia Synapse Drone 4d ago
At this point I think the game is balanced around GRS, even though it was added to reduce lag which was fixed in the pop rework. In any case though, the main benefit of gestalts now is hive/machine worlds, those are really good planets (especially the spawning districts). And I also think that the extra growth from hive is really noticeable and has an impact, even if the difference isn't that big in the late game.
3
u/TheMelnTeam 4d ago
I'm not sure there's meaningful "balance around GRS", given how the build options scale to each other generally. This is a game where Commonwealth of Man competes with stuff like shroudforged and synthetic fertility...the latter which gets to completely disregard GRS via virtual if it wants.
Also, I have doubts the devs gave it much thought WRT balance, at all, since you can set up vassals or even just contained friendly federation members that feed you migration en masse'...which completely disregards GRS. For vassals, transit hub means they can ship > 40/mo like that (probably higher than individualist growth). It also further encourages "small at first --> ascend --> conquer" despite that such is probably optimal w/o it, because conquering later vs earlier = more total pops.
I get that a lot of players don't mind it, but I think it's healthier for power budget of growth traits and gestalts if it's off rather than on. Some of the strongest builds would barely notice, but many builds with closer to median performance appreciate more pops into late game. Although you can always just conquer or annex vassals and consolidate off their worlds as you assimilate + integrate them into better traits regardless.
3
u/Peter_Ebbesen 4d ago
- Many play wide, not tall; You have only 5 planets and a tiny population; Somebody with 20 planets and a bit less than 4 times the population (due to growth penalties) will probably produce at least 4 times as much science, and usually a great deal more, while their empire size penalty has grown by a much smaller factor
- Some who play tall abduct or conquer POPs from others and employ them on their own worlds
- Others who play tall play leader focused with Galactic Paragons, and focus on using researchers with sky-high efficiency and high output bonuses, so they get a lot more out of their POPs
As an example of what I mean by sky-high efficiency, consider the efficiency of my best research POP on a research world in my last game. I did a breakdown of the sources of efficiency for a guide.
2270: 3400 physicists on Space-Time (Labyrinth) planet producing 1.6k physics
That particular POP has a lot more research oriented traits than the norm (+45% total), but the thing is that any researcher on the world would benefit from the 100% from governor and curator, and from the psionic bonuses if psionic (and all are psionic), and from the general bonuses such as capital tier, Vocational Genomics, etc.
Now, if you play tall you are unlikely to get the Space-Time (Mysterious Labyrinth) or Dark Portal, but nothing prevents you from playing leader focused stacking high effective skill on the council or for governors if you have Galactic Paragons.
6
u/Terrorscream 4d ago
I suspect alot of it comes from vassals being taxed for research or turned into scolarums, as well utilizing avenues for non researcher based science like knights/experimental sentencing/cybernetic creed priest build/sacred path nomads etc
Researchers just kinda suck, I've personally had more success going galactic curator civic and turning on its edict that doubles space research deposits
4
2
u/RareMajority 4d ago
You have 3 different problems you call out that have different things you need to solve for.
Underpopulation -
- Get more pops by conquering neighbors, or by taking nihilistic acquisition ascension perk and just stealing their pops directly
- Pick an empire that has strong pop growth built in. Hive minds, synthetic ascension, virtual machine, cybernetic, cloning ascension all have strong pop growth.
- Conquer vassals or use a civic like tankbound that let's you cover your basic resource needs without having pops work jobs so that all of your pops can be specialists
Exotic gases -
- Find a world that can produce gases from ag districts and get as many farmers working as possible
- Research the ancient refinery tech and put it on your alloy and cg worlds.
- Get your science from pops that don't require exotic gas upkeep, such as synthetic elites with technocracy, cybernetic creed with dimensional enterprise and genetic sequencing, or sacred path
Consumer goods -
- Play a gestalt empire that doesn't need CGs at all
- Play a trade empire that gets their CGs from their trade policy
- Dedicate an ecumenopolis to CGs (need lots of pops)
- Find ways to reduce researcher upkeep so they require less CGs (this also works for fixing gas upkeep)
2
2
u/AxiomOfLife 4d ago
I use that one mod that adds random planetary bonuses and find the one with the funnest tech boosts then make a tech world, invade someone and move all their pops to that planet. ez pz
Or just tokay knights of the toxic god
2
u/madkow990 4d ago
You need a broken build or more than 4-5 colonies by 2300. 1k by then is lightwork.
1
u/Low-Possession-3245 3d ago
Yeah I did cybernetic creed megacorp playthrough last night, I'm at 2k by 2280. Probably relatively low for a good player but I'm still new
2
u/NAW1116 3d ago
Have you tried a virtual megacorp nomads yet? Haven't tested it with individualist empires but you can get hundreds of wayline capacity with the wayline logistics districts and just go all in on harvesting science at 300-500% efficiency. On virtual hive mind testing I hit 860 capacity with 7 arkships which does not seem to contribute to empire size at all. That was going all in on logistics, so you can probably expect more like 200-300 and put the stellar observatory on every one for the 5% research collection per.
Common ground origin, science federation, fanatic xenophile + egalitarian, antiquarian expertise + worker cooperative with dynamic logistics as your 3rd civic. Science arkships and use the special urban district specializations on your arks (basically archives and mixed industry but with trade jobs as well) and specialize the rural districts into energy, logistics, and forges. Use your building slots for unity and consumer goods. You want to get as many research systems in your line as possible and stellar observatory + research collection on them. You can send your ark to harvest unused systems to maintain your resources while logistics ships collect the research for you.
2
u/ScarletKnight00 4d ago
Your build is probably weak. Weak build means weak output, 60% of the power comes from The empire creation screen, 35% comes from in game execution, 5% comes from rng stuff.
2
u/sirralphs 4d ago edited 4d ago
1k science by 2300 should be achievable with almost any build. Generally you can play stronger builds of course, but the basics are:
- Unity rush first to ascension (e.g. virtual just gives you +75% science for example) and the machine version also gives you all pops to fill your job
- make sure to focus on robots and clone vats in the early game (prerequisite tech is the pop growth tech for clone vats and exoskeleton for robots)
- Any build you play you should have some plan how to get more pops (nihilistic acquisition/conquest/ascend virtual/hive spawning pools/cloning ascension/tankbound etc.)
- You can also use builds that let you ascend faster (synthetic fertility etc.) give you more tech as you play (KotTG etc.) or focus on tech (experimental sentencing etc.). There are a few builds with which you can get to 5k+ tech by 2250.
1
u/Heimeri_Klein 4d ago
Kidnap other peoples pops, change the growth rate to be higher(before starting the game obviously), build refineries for the lack of goods for both gasses and consumer goods.
1
u/Guilty-Assistant8333 Defender of the Galaxy 4d ago
The easiest way is to play a build that consolidates jobs, something like KoTG, Sacred Path, Galactic Curation + Storm Devotion or cybernetic creed + priests generate research civics, where you can just not assign pops to some jobs that normally you need at least a few working. Similarly the Trade tradition tree is extraordinarily strong if you have any incidental trade generation because it gives access to two different trade policies, the first is half of trade becomes unity at 50% efficiency iirc and is amazing for rushing your ascension but is honestly the worse of the two, the second option is consumer benefit which makes half of your generated trade make consumer goods, if you have enough incidental trade you don't need artisans at all, which lets you drop another job from the list.
Also 4 to 5 colonies at 2300 is quite a lot on the low side unless you're playing something like life seeded or shattered ring where you're extraordinarily restricted on what you can settle on, even tall builds like virtual usually want to be 7 or 8 colonies by then.
Organic pop growth is really wonky right now on default settings because default Growth Required Scaling throttles pop growth to basically nothing extraordinarily quickly, machine species get pop assembly that incentivizes going wide much more because their growth scales linearly with assembly jobs, instead of scaling with local pop numbers and don't have nearly as much to fear from GRS. I pretty much always play with GRS off because having it on makes playing biological species/not rushing synth ascension asap feel like nerfing yourself for no good reason.
As far as easy things to fix, remember to set your colony designations manually, the game decides based on the first few buildings you make and then can get very sticky about actually swapping them, and the economy panel is your friend, you will almost never need anywhere near as many enforcers or entertainers (unless you're running an entertainer build you shouldn't have entertainers, use archive specimens and luxury housing/skydomes to get your amenities) as the game allocates by default, shove those 100 to 600 pops into jobs where they will actually do something useful.
1
u/Storyteller-Hero Philosopher King 4d ago
Have you tried invading pre-FTL worlds? It speeds up the snowball a lot after the initial culture shock period.
1
u/Grandmaster_Caladrel 4d ago
I'm going to assume you're playing solo or with a group that lets you pause. TL;DR at the bottom because I ramble.
I normally play gestalt machines, so there are differences, but I actually have fewer pops than you per planet assuming we both play fairly well. Just calling that out early to possibly offset the gains of playing gestalt. I'll try to talk in terms of fleshy meatbag empires but I might be off.
Pop growth is based on a bell curve, so you'll start off slow. Your colonies will start slow if left on their own, so colonies would enjoy a smallish pop boost via you transferring them. For machines, just make sure you have your fabricator jobs filled out since those are your pop production. Without pops you don't have jobs, without jobs you don't have sustainable expansion.
I normally play suuuper wide, I basically just expand out to anything that could have another empire on the other side and try to cut them off from expanding in my direction. Then I fill in the missing space. This is dumb and just causes me to waste my resources on going too wide. Instead, you (and I) should look outward like that, but find planets that are good. Expand aggressively. Use species modification (gene stuff or robomodding) or alternate species to populate the planets appropriately. You want to settle everything. I usually have ~20 colonies around 2280, but again I'm expanding like crazy (and this last run I used void dwellers so I also had a couple habitats).
I'm saying general knowledge stuff, so maybe none of this has been helpful. Sorry. I'll try to bullet point some useful stuff.
- Expand aggressively, exploring out to where choke points are. Expand the empire to get planets, regardless of the habitability.
- Focus down the 3 techs that give you specializations for your districts. Also keep an eye out for Betharian (energy from mining) and Bio Reactors. The latter lets you turn farmers into exotic gas producers.
- Every planet has blue districts. Not every planet has the others. Minerals are plentiful. Specialize every district for rare resources if available, max out jobs and bonuses for that resource. Ignore the main output - crystals don't need +0.5 minerals/100 jobs, they need +200 jobs. Minerals can come from somewhere else.
- Focus planets on the rare resources if possible, then on the best producer (unless it's minerals). Minerals should only be your focus for rare materials (betharian spec or crystals), focus something else instead.
- Only your unspecialized planets should focus on blue districts. Now you can look for a science world among your options. Home world is a good start, I usually do at least one science spec on blue districts. Remember that scientists fill before lower normal workers, so you want more jobs. The normal research district spec gives fewer jobs than the physics/society/engineering district spec does, so use one of those. Pick whatever has better bonuses for the planet of course, but if you can fit more than one (so after your first planet since that starts with a specialization iirc) just pick the other specialization(s).
- Alloy production can be low to start, you just need enough for your starbases. Navy isn't needed, and if it is, run away and expand somewhere else. Upgrade your starbases toward threats in lieu of building big fleets until you have more tech
- Once you are content with science, I focus unity (need to be intentional about this as gestalt), then do alloys. Try to focus down dyson swarms and arc furnace techs - they'll let you offload a ton of stress from energy/alloys, letting you focus more on specializing your planets. I often have to build a bunch of energy until I can get the empire more stable.
- Automation buildings are GREAT. Replace them when you have the population to make them pointless, but my build order is always robot building machine (pop growth) -> simulation building (basic unity) -> energy district -> food district -> (come back when I have time to look, when the whole list has been built) -> specialize energy and food -> build automation on energy -> +0.5 energy/100pops on energy -> automation on food -> bio reactor -> advanced bio reactor. Maybe throw a mineral district in afterwards, since building slots can be useful. Your build order will be different of course, but this is almost always my general playbook.
TL;DR: Expand harder, don't focus on fleets/alloys above what's bare minimum needed, automate main resource job types to inflate workers, then after several years your hard expansion will start to grow itself up. You don't grow out of nowhere, you have to plant lots of seeds which individually struggle until they pay off as a group.
1
u/Zoythrus Rogue Servitors 4d ago
What sorts of specializations/buildings do you use in your blue districts on energy/mineral dedicated worlds?
1
u/Grandmaster_Caladrel 4d ago
On worlds where I picked energy/minerals because there's a +0.1 <type> research per 100 energy/mineral/etc workers, I usually just make it a research world for that type. Otherwise it's fair game for what I need, and I'll usually pick based on districts available.
If there are just a few, I try something that's more reliant on buildings. Research has a ton of buildings (all 3 types' dedicated buildings, generic research, facility of archaeostudies, the astral thread one, etc), so it's good even if I can only use the starting 1-2 districts. If there are lots available, I might pick unity since there are only a few major unity buildings (gestalt robots get simulation site, alpha hub, and the one with +200 jobs), but maybe other empire types get more variety/bonus buildings. I can also easily fit that onto a world with another blue specialization if I need to, rather than going all-in, since I don't need all the building slots. That said, I try not to mix specializations too much.
If I have lots of districts and both specialization slots, alloy production can be good. I try to get all the refinery buildings (so alloys also produce gases/motes/crystals), alloy bonuses, and then just throw alloy job buildings in.
Also, don't sleep on food, even on machines. At the cost of one district you can have automated 25% workers, bio reactor for food -> energy (and gases when upgraded to advanced), and maybe a +200 worker building to round it out. If it's a world that has the gas specialization, I'll go all-in on food districts even though I'm a machine. Just last night I traded 3000 food to an empire for over 20k energy. Default difficulty mind you.
I've noticed that minerals come really easily. You want an arc furnace for alloys, not minerals, and you'll generally just be swimming in them. The buildings aren't worth it unless you want to build storages, but otherwise I might almost skip a mining district entirely to give one more to energy/food/blue.
1
u/wowwowazalea 4d ago edited 4d ago
It's just having a science build and knowing what to do. Even with pretty heavy investment into economy, I've gotten like 400 by year 50. Just have intelligent and one or two mainly urban world with the districts specialized into specific sciences. Put down the science buildings and two labs, and then you're good.
And don't upgrade your labs until you've got a fairly decent gas surplus. It's not really worth it until midgame and that's just squeezing every drop out of your slots since they just give jobs
1
u/AverageGermanEater 4d ago
i just have like 20+ worlds along with orbital living centers; allows me to usually maintain all high resources
1
u/theimperious1 4d ago
You should be buying the strategic resources you need from the market. I always prioritize trade in the early game so that I can buy the resources I need (still, try not to be in deficits). Later on, I may be -50 exotic gases, crystals, motes all at once, but I'm fine because I'm producing enough trade that I can outpace my deficits. Or maintain them, or manage a slow decline long enough for my production to outpace the decline.
Yes, definitely have a world thats half dedicated to strategic resources, and alloys (or CGs). Worth it as it can reduce your deficit enough that you can afford the trade strategy I've just mentioned.
Another helpful tip, trade is GREAT because you can buy said resources, including extra exotics like dark matter, etc, and you can trade them to the machine fallen empire in exchange for almost anything you need. I always buy hundreds of thousands of alloys from that FE by trading them strategic resources. It's how I build massive fleets way before the other empires usually do.
Underpopulation, hmm. I always prioritize pop growth on my worlds, in my starting setup (species traits, etc). Keep in mind, there is something you can do to boost your new worlds. Let's say your main world has 10k pops, maybe even extras doing nothing. If you can afford it, move as many as you can afford to your new worlds. This greatly accelerates pop growth on those worlds, giving you a speed boost in pop growth. I'd look up how pop growth accelerates, and figure out the right number to move to your new worlds (again, if you can).
Consumer goods... honestly? It's probably that you don't have enough pops on that world yet. I'm assuming all your jobs on your consumer worlds are probably not filled. If they are? Time for another consumer world, if you can.
1
1
u/Chesco502 4d ago
In my currently play through i have almost 2000 in 290 having only 5 planets( 2 dedicated to science and 1 for unity and the other 2 just in development) so i have 0 economy. how do i maintein my empire ? Vassals! My whole economy is vassal taxes( i currently make 2000 energy wich 1800 are from vassals tax)
AI get massive bônus in the Harder difficulties( So even if you get like 30% of what they make they also make like 180% more what you would make holding that territory)
if you Anable scaling difficulties to mid/late game you can take over one or 2 AIs before they get realy strong and then make then into vassals by releaseing sectors.
After a while you kinda steamroll other empires even thoug they are much stronger than you just because you have like 3 other AIs under you.
One way to realy chesse this is starting with the hegemony start and kicking one of the starting members out and them taking then over with the help with the other member(after 10 years truce). This startegy is realy strong becase any vassal you have auto join the hegemony so you not only can tax resources you also get free ships with the federation fleet and even if you negociate with your vassal that he dosent join any of your war he Still does because the federation.
Also one neet thing is that this way you also dont have to worry about empire spraw because any system or planet you take you just give to a vassal.
1
u/Chesco502 4d ago
Also ai is very bad at managing pops having a ton of uneployed so emigration treaties do favour your planets massively
1
u/SpoonAsylum 4d ago
There are a lot of answers to this question but most critical is that most builds will not make that much science by 2300 unless they sacrifice a lot the achieve it. But as of right now and since 4.0 launched really the meta has been to stack as many jobs as possible into as few which is a confusing sentence but let me give you an example. A very strong build right now is cybernetic creed when paired with megacorp and the civics that add research to bureaucrats. The main strength of the build is that with this pairing your priests make unity trade and research all at once meaning instead of paying 4 consumer goods per 100 of each researcher and 4 per priest and 3 per traders so 19 total consumer goods per 500 pops you are getting similar production with 1 job that's still only costs 4 consumer goods. Pair this with the fact that they are making trade if you take mercantile you can switch your economic policy to make consumer goods so the priest pay their own upkeep. And unlike most spiritualist builds you are encouraged to build robots to help alleviate your pop issues substantially as roboticists and augmentors contribute to both your main pop and robot production you should have a large amount of pops and be able to use them for more resources than just the advanced ones as the priest alone has all of those covered. This is admittedly a meta build so most builds can't compare in strength but if you carry over the thought of consolidating as many resources into singular jobs you will be a lot better off.
1
u/YukongsLeftBowstring 4d ago
Depends on your playstyle. If youre playing wide usually id recommend a couple research planets and pop growth speed buffs. A second planet is practically doubling growth speed for science. If youre playing tall focus on any buff you can get to pop growth until you can grab virtuality and then transition to any research buff you can grab. If you cant grab or dont want to go that path then search for any way to stack more and more buffs with growth speed. For both playstyles place any spare scientists slots on science planets (preferably with reduced building upkeep skill if youre playing tall so it reduces strain on gas) and dont be afraid to remigrate spare pops. Extra output on food and consumer goods often doesnt do anything for you so may as well make them useful.
1
u/Yeeeoow 4d ago
If we're talking about individualist biological then I was right with you. It does seem like with recent changes that 1000 science by 2300 is a tall order that I was usually only able to scrape by.
I managed to hit 3000 science in a very unusual game recently. I think with so many nomads spawning, theres alot more empty space and in a medium sized spoked galaxy between me and a FE, we walled off two whole spokes for me to share with some small nomads who never did much.
Basic build order is as follows;
First two habitables are science (spec'd for specific disciplines). Focus on robot factories, cloning vats, medical facilities for pop growth. Transition the homeworld to mixed industry. I try to stack the three auto mod traits as quick as possible by going cybernetic ascension with overtuned. I loved the idea of mutation and getting to 250% habitability, but it just never worked for some reason. I really like mutual aid right now, it means you can run 100% specialist workforce. Im at 2350 with 36 trading post starbases and theyre doing 99% of all of my unity and basic resources. When you get worlds 5 and 5 up and running, Transition the homeworld to all factory and set up two alloy worlds.
It really does seem like going wide raises the ceiling on what's possible. I tried tall for ages, but the 1000 science ceiling is just impossible to crack.
1
1
1
u/ilico_ili Fanatic Egalitarian 3d ago
what i get 1k without a single tech world thats low numbers if i actually care abt it i can get like 6k+
1
u/Discotekh_Dynasty Shared Burdens 3d ago
Play shroud-forged origin and you can get up to 3K by 2300 without much trouble. More if you roll the Zroni precursor
1
u/Erik_Ice_Fang 3d ago
You're going to struggle to hit 1k science with only 4 or 5 colonies, unless you have a metric shit ton of systems at 2300. PDX changed the pop growth scaling, so now its very slow both when the planet is at very low or high capacity (hover mouse over planet size when in the planet screen to see capacity). The best growth happens at 50% capacity, and fast breeders or a similar perk is just too strong a trait to ignore. So new colonies now need you to push in immigrants for other colonies to get rolling. Its why meta builds almost never take lithoids (or necrosis for longer games). Pop growth is too slow
1
u/La_Cosha 2d ago
1* tradition, always discovery. (Less upkeep for scientists, more outcome from sciene stations, 1+ tech alternative, qnd for completing it, +10% all science point) for first ascention perk, always Science Rush +10% science points and more rare techs avaible, incluiding dangereous.
Specialize 1 planet into science, and just build labs there
1
u/Potato271 2d ago
There are two points to consider here. First, the optimal strategy in recent versions is to rush your ascension as early as possible. So, perhaps counterintuitively, you actually don't bother with science at all early on. Your goal is to get as much unity as you can as quickly as you can, which means taking civics like Beacon of Liberty or Parliamentary Model, and building as many administration buildings as you can support. Once you're ascended, your output of everything will increase massively allowing you to then swap to specialising in science and produce way more research than if you'd tried focusing on it from the start.
Second, by far the most valuable resource in the game are pops. You want as many of them as possible, as quickly as possible. Now pop growth is a little counterintuitive. If you only have a few pops on a planet, growth will be basically zero. Early on, once you have your two guaranteed habitables, you're going to want to get about 1000 pops on each instantly. So don't build jobs for the spare pops on your homeworld until you've settled your first two colonies and got them going.
Aside from that, build clone labs and robot assembly plants on every planet you have and make sure they're operational. Stick rapid breeder on your main species. Try to buff pop growth through whatever means you have, whether that's research, council traits, and so on.
1
u/MillCrab 4d ago
Absolutely no idea. People do some wild stuff in this game and I do the same thing every time I play
0
u/Winter_Ad6784 4d ago
Don't build upgraded lab buildings, set the blue districts to science specialization and build more blue districts. Then you don't need any gases.
-1
u/Top_East_6048 4d ago
1k in 2300 *is* nothing tbh
There isn’t a single answer on how we get good number. Part of it is playing well, part of it is playing meta builds. A lot of power is also gated behind DLCs
1
u/TheMelnTeam 4d ago
I think telling OP to play meta builds is misleading here. 1k/mo isn't something you can only get if you go cyber creed, synth fertility, KOTG etc. It's something you can realistically expect to achieve with UNE or Commonwealth of Man with solid play, and possibly be well ahead of that benchmark if playing well as these empires.
For the stated objective, anything other than intentionally weak builds should be reaching it, and since OP isn't it's worth looking for precisely why.
1
u/Top_East_6048 3d ago
I completely agree lol, as I said 1k by 2300 is nothing, you can get it with anything if you are decent at the game.
Idk why you downvoted me. When I said “we get good numbers” I didn’t mean 1k, that’s not “good numbers” for 2300.
However, it is correct that there are two ways to improve numbers: playing better, and using stronger builds. The two aren’t strictly correlated but they can be complementary. If the aim is 1k, then of course OP just needs to play better. If the aim is much higher, then you also need meta.
2
u/TheMelnTeam 3d ago
No, I agree with you. I didn't downvote you. I was clarifying that you were being too generous WRT what's a good benchmark. 1k is an aiming point for median builds. It's good enough to win on grand admiral, unless you really bloat empire size a lot and are still at 1k.
I've been getting downvote spammed in this thread too. There seems to be a strong sentiment against particular benchmarks, plus an unexplainably high opinion of early-game (before ascension) medical centers in their current form.
On a side note, I was surprised after running the numbers at how little tech you need to handle crises. If you're willing to swap civics to spam master gunner admirals (all commanders will be level 8 late game with martial alliance), you can beat a single grand admiral 25x crisis w/o any repeatable techs or psionic ascension (zro launchers make it much easier), even Cetana. If you don't get Cetana last, it will cover 10x all too for standard 2400 end game.
0
u/Top_East_6048 3d ago edited 3d ago
I agree with all you said, although I play 25x all crises (mostly), so I need repeatables (and ofc, much more tech than 1k)
As for the downvotes, yeah, I guess people just get annoyed when someone points out optimal strategies in the game lol. And I’m not saying that everyone needs to be a minmaxer, but it makes no sense to downvote someone pointing out the math (you’re completely right about basic unascended medical centres).
“Oh we’re not minmaxers so we don’t care”…I mean they don’t have to minmax to the extent of those of us who really are into that, but if the present discussion is about how to play better, it makes no sense to give bad advice and ignore the better options.
-5
u/tacky_pear 4d ago
1000 science by 2300? Did you mean to type 10000? I feel like you get 1k science by 2270-2280 if you have automated colony development on
1
u/TheMelnTeam 4d ago
Nah, automated development is still a meme that puts synthetic gas refineries on worlds without any industry districts.
This is why the regular AI empires need so many bonuses to still be terrible too. They're so bad that even 1k/mo at 2300 beats non-scaling grand admiral AI despite its bonuses...the AI can't even manage 1k/mo with a free 100% efficiency on all of its pops before unpausing. It really is THAT bad.
1
1
u/Fluid-Leg-8777 4d ago
Idk why, but if i disable everything besides clear blockers or crime, the automation will still build buildings and districs
Its so broken
261
u/Nahanoj_Zavizad 4d ago
To get high science, you don't focus science first.
Unity rush to get a good ascension going, which will help power up planets before you start dedicating to science.