Stellaris – Megacorps on Artificial Worlds

Quick Guide to Megacorps on Artificial Worlds

Combination of Megacorp with Void Dwellers or Shattered Ring origins has great synergies, these builds are not overpowered, but lead to a very interesting gameplay. I played both and it is much more entertaining than just rapid expansion, conquering or subjugating left and right. It is actually challenging on admiral and higher difficulty.

The biggest limitation of Artificial worlds starts is habitability. Your original species can be productive in your homeworld… 0 habitability on normal planets. We need to workaround this limitation. Waiting for glandular acclimation tech to modify habitability of your species is not an option. So what can we do?

Key Ideas

Migration – Brings you species that actually can live on planets. It also boosts pop growth nicely.

Robots ignore habitability. Your robotist produces the same amount of robots regardless of production malus from habitability. Robots can’t colonize, but your organic pops can colonize even if 0 habitability.

Stacking most of your pops on a capital doing industry and research jobs produces a lot of trade. Now every +1% to trade value becomes an interesting addition.

Relatively few worlds? But we can get lucrative branch offices with a very very big income for a tiny addition of empire size. Actually this means less micro albeit slightly less total economy and especially limited fleet capacity.

Trade policy market place of ideas – wonderful for materialists who are generally poor in making unity via jobs.

The Build

So what kind of build do we need to survive and win?

Ethos: Fan Materialist + Xenophile. We need robots ASAP, we need migration treaties, we need xenophile bonus to migration, relationships and trade value. I don’t recommend pacifist as you’ll still need to expand in mid game. Militarists – maybe. Xenophile Materialist Militarist would less optimal but can lead to fun Roleplaying. Authoritarian may be useful for identured assets civic.

Traits: Intelligent and natural engineers are perfect choices that align with rush to robots and also good for materialist ethic attraction. Non-adaptive is good negative trait in this particular build (your main species can’t live on regular planets anyway). Consider Thrifty – it is especially good for Ring world, which have ability to build trade districts. Rapid breeders is also good, it will partly offset habitability penalty at worlds with 0 habitability +10% is effectively +20% because it is applied after -50%!

Civics. For Megacorps there are not many decent choice. I’d pick Brand Loyalty and Free traders. Gigacorp is cool, but not allowed to materialists. Some early edict fund is useful to run “map the stars” and “fortify the border” edicts for free.

General Strategy

There are following common things for both Void Dwellers and Ringworld…

Expand early to take bottlenecks and contact as many neighbors as possible. You need some friendly aliens to:

• Have migration treaties.
• Trade treaties to establish branch offices.
• Set up federation (Trade leagure is very useful).

If you are locked early you, chances are all your neighbors are jerks and bigots (genocidal, zealots or just huge xenophobes)

Have as much scientists as possible, don’t waste time on anomalies, just beeline surveys to bottleneck systems, then beeline constructors building outposts towards the bottleneck that is the most risky i.e. close to AI. Don’t waste influence.

Opener for Science tradition is very useful, taking a few traditions from Mercantile (to enable trading for unity). Then you have enough unity and you can go for diplomacy (save influence on agreements, enable Federation).

If you see a planet – settle it, but don’t let more than one pop to stay. Resettle all new pops back to productive worlds. Once you robots – your single pop should be robotist.

Use your trade to buy raw resources, your numerically inferior pops should be working on research/industry. Also you can minimize specialized unity jobs and instead make more traders, once you have trade policy.

If you have federation – don’t make it big. Instead add association status. A federation of 2 can have all the bonuses. Vassalizing often makes more sense. If you can build Ministry of truth holdings – do it. It gives influence which you always need.

A lot of holdings will be occupied by other megacorps, especially criminal syndicates. But you can declare “hostile takeover” war to get all their holdings in empires you have trade agreements with. No necessary to elliminate/vassalize criminal syndicates. Let them live and continue doing dirty job paying for holdings out of their pockets.

Specific for Different Origins

There are some differences.

For Void Dwellers

I think this pick is easier than Shattered ring. You have 3 jobs per district at home and a boost to productivity at habitats. In the beginning You have a magic building that produces +20 alloys and +10 civ goods out of nothing. And you have hydroponics from the day one. Build hydroponics on every starport and you don’t need any farmers – put them to work in industry and research.

You’ll have enough alloys to very quickly expand – take space resources and beeline to chokepoints. Don’t build habitats early it takes a lot of influence (like two outposts) and very long time to complete. Getting first to the bottleneck systems should be priority.

Later when you blocked some territory – start making more habitats. You not just have bonus to productivity, you also have strong specializations. Research, Foundry, Factory.

For Shattered Ring

You have even more insane trade income. You have access to OP trading districts. With certain tradition they give 1 factory + 2 trader jobs. Even your clerks start to be very useful ramping up trade even higher. But while in trade you are even stronger than Void Dwellers, you’ll certainly be alloy starved – constant proficit of civ goods and tiny surplus of alloys.

Some good news – you have two broken Ringworld segments nearby. Use them to make pops and clear blockers. For 1000 energy you get 100 alloys and 200 minerals, which is useful.

But anyway, migration treaties are even bigger priority than for Void Dwellers. If you don’t get pops that can work on new planets and run forges there – you won’t have fleet and will be eaten.