I'm streaming tomorrow! Set a reminder ;) kzfaq.info/get/bejne/epmVaM9nmpO2eoU.html

I think mercenary companies MIGHT have helped considering they just keep replenishing ships after an initial investment. Allows you to pour more into starbases and defense platforms.

I think an actually beatable version of this is all Fanatic Purifiers and you playing a Rogue Servitor. Force them to get along! You can even pick up the Nihlistic Aquisition ascension perk so you can actually make use of their pops.

On one hand it's crazy hard. On the other... you get to explore the whole galaxy with your science ship and get the most possible rolls for anomalies and digs afterwards ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

He is in grand admiral with 25×crisis ? Yes, yes he is

Odd challenge idea: Galaxy of Determined Exterminators, you are a Rogue Servitor, pre-ftl dial is cranked up to max. Your goal is to save the galaxy's organic population before the other machine races can destroy them.

I feel like clone army fanatic purifiers would actually be the best option for this since you get the best admirals and ship fire rate while you rush becoming the crisis

Isn't putting them on high aggressiveness means that they'd be hostile to each other too despite the relationship bonus they'd get? And as determined exterminators they would have gone for you either way. So to keep them from infighting, you should have set it to low aggressiveness instead?

Alternate title: Can I survive the Dark Forest?

It's good to watch pros play because of the tricks you pick up. I always forget to enable my combat bonus edicts before entering battle.

I got my butt handed to me last night in Stellaris. I had advanced AI starts on my iron man mode and one vassalized me early then pissed off the entire galaxy including a fallen empire and I could not fight a 450k fleet at the time. I’m gonna restart with no advanced AI this time and see what happens lol

On one hand, I was hoping, HOPING you could hold on and survive. On the other, I knew we were both foolish. I knew that once an aggressive enough DE starts conquering other DEs, they're just gonna snowball so hard because of all the Machine Worlds they get. And that is why I made my DE with a Shattered Ring origin (Paperclip Maximizer), so that at least you get something decent you can work with if you manage to kill them. Sadly, you didn't get to kill them, sorry :(

Honestly not a bad go of it considering the absurd difficulty of the challenge. Great idea for a story setting, too, as someone said this is basically the Dark Forest pushed to its absolute limit.

"How much science do we need sir ?" " 0:48 " "ah yes ofc"

I feel like there should be tech to reduce defensive platform cost it’d make having defensive star bases a lot more enjoyable

The first half of this video should be called "Can I beat ONE Exterminator?"

It was good to see the Empire I submitted featured.

Before the ring world nerf I used to do this(vs meta DE) by tech rushing but even then it was very hard and rng based. With the changes to battleships, AI and the ring worlds Im surprised you lasted as long as you did. Also I had figured some strategies out vs normal agressiveness DE. DE seemed to attack only when it had no more space to expand to, so when the first DE found you evacuating the Ginom system could've given you some time. DE doesn't seem to care about whether you have established comms or not. They started pre first coms war with me when I boxed them in before first contact. Once DE can't expand it seems to declare war regardless of whether it can win or not. They also love attacking, going in recklessly even when they will most likely lose their fleet. Strikecraft and hangar bays on starports are a lot less useful because AI uses flak/pd even on their corvettes. My winning strat(I haven't played the last few patches) was rerolling until I get a nebula(for refinery) + good choke point, go as tall as possible, ignore all ship tech except BS+Strike craft, armor(no shields vs DE, they love torps), do everything possible to avoid war until strike craft battle ships.I dont build any ships until at least cruiser, preferably until BS.(AI doesn't seem to care about your military power before declaring war and even if you win early war with ships you still wasted a lot of resources vs a single cheating enemy) If I have to defend before that I use naked defence platforms with hangars. If you dont have enough hangars to survive enemy PD they are basically useless but if you can get enough you can hold quite well until DE gets to bigger ships.

The First Contact update basically makes it impossible for AI DEs to cooperate because they will ALWAYS try to vivisect each other before establishing comms and aggressive empires are coded to Harm relations, even if your relations with them are cordial if they haven't discovered another empire yet. Paradox really dropped the ball with AI Personalities, ngl.

Unyielding is one of my favorite trees. I usually play a trade empire. Generally everyone around me fights and I just profit.

The last time I started on the edge of the galaxy it was 53 years before I met another race, I was starting to think I'd not loaded any ai empires.

they literally can fuse with other purgatory empires they just go to a planet, invade it and they already think like own of their own. So if some IA attacks other IA they just fuse once they get invaded. now u have a single empire that has the power (economically and technologically) of 2 empires combined. And soon after they have even a better fleet and is just 💀

I'd enjoy watching you try again to win, this was great.

can we get a list of all the different empires used and their "specs" so other people can recreate this challenge themselves ?

I'm not as good as you, but I've managed to get something similar to this done with a Sovereign Guardianship turtle in 3.11.2. That council position is amazing, defense platforms full of Ancient Nano-Missile Cloud Launchers melt fleets, Ancient Shield Overcharger, Reloading Bay, and Targeting Uplink on the starbase(you go heavy shields because of the SG council buffing them). Use a scientist with salvager and/or the scavenger civic and you can turn the attritional battle in your favor. I think Reminants is the best origin for this because of the archeotech. Not having the op bypass super spam missiles, shield hardener, and ancient rampart makes it a lot harder, impossible for me. Psionic Ascension for Psi shields preferred.

I always go expansion first. Pop 10 percent early on. Along with the extra pop on new colonies gives a good boost

Pink sand great background song 8:50

13:12 Yeah this is why I usually turn off the land appropriation policy, it can be real inconvenient having your pops auto-resettle to planets they have no habitability for.

Why did she leave me :(

14:38 Actually reason why i disable wormholes completely.

fanatic purifiers might be the only realistically viable one tbh, since those can be of any species so you should be able to integrate them i think.

Rush becoming robots so they don’t want to murder you anymore

should rename this to "Can i survive in the Black Forest"

This was fun!

I'm not ready for prosperity first.. I need to harden myself

Oh boi here I go making vassals from my own species to do my dirty work again

I wouldn’t mind longer form videos, especially with video ideas like this. I guess I can check the vods but idk

You should do this exact ID again but this time with four other players that spawn right next to you let's see if four of you can survive

"The face of a man who has not learned his lesson" That's it. I knew there was a sentence in the English language that described you to a T. That's the sentence.

I'm wondering, what settings do you use for tech costs and such, because you teched up fast and got fleets up fast too... iirc I never get to like 10k fleet power at year 30, might be misremembering, but otherwise I would also play on Grand Admiral difficulty.

I guess next it is ALL Fanatic Purifiers, or how about all Driven Assimilators LOL.

i love this.

How did you get this to work. I tried to set this up but I couldn't get any of the factions to spawn despite the force spawn. Any help?

I think it might be possible to do this with a Ocean Paradise or Here Be Dragons build.

Grand Admiral has bonus recuses.

It was fate.

How are you able to force so many Determined Exterminators to spawn in? I tried making a few and setting them all to "Force AI Spawn" but the game let max one or two appear. How did you get around this issue?

Have you tried the neceoid survival mod? It's sorta like a wave defense. It's pretty hard too

Yo the title sounds kinda like a movie lol

How about a no tech run in which you don't research any tech? I know it was possible until recently but I don't know if its still possible with the recent patches.

Sorry but how did you do to have only exterminateur on your game? It a setting thing?

How did you force only determined exterminators to spawn? It only lets me spawn one.

How can I make the game where all empires are genocidal? I have tried to do it for several times but I always got half of empires weren`t genocidal

I'm not sure if you were doing this but I think spending more time optimizing your fleet loadout and ship designs could have actually won you the day several times, I recommend getting preferred ship designs built, especially against AI, who like to spam disruptors for some ungodly reason Very fun bideo though! Surprised you made it even that far given your starting point

Can you actually make a galactic community in this scenario? I think there need to be at least 3 members, so if you would make 2 vassals, before finding them all, would it work?

How did you get them all to spawn in? I tried to do the same, with 20 copies of Driven Exterminators with Resource Consolidation, and only 1 did.

Is that outliner from a mod? I love the compact view

i might recommend you try the new survivor mod. I've tried it but failed miserably

how did you start with latent psionics to begin the game?

Ah, so you're in the 40K universe

How did you even last that long on that difficulty? The AI resource bonuses are ridiculous on that setting. I would be proud of my 10k fleet in the early game and then a 100k fleet would show up at my border and I would fall into despair.

It does feel like Grand Admiral is no longer viable difficulty for challenge games.

Offer for challenge: Play with mod Gigastructural engineering & more (plus any ship module mod for better experience) against ALL types of endgame crysis (both mod and vanilla) and midgames from Gigastructural engineering. Any origin except start out of the galaxy (cuz it's most OP for defense)

Have you checked out Stellaris First Contact story expansion?

Is there a scenario where everyone, including you start the game as a crisis.

Why didn't you use dragon start?

WHY OPEN WORMHOLE!?! WHY???? (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

hey Ep3o what is the seed ?!?!

Would the Scavenger have helped you out here because you were at constant war anyway?

I couldn’t quite hear if you said scaling was on or off because of your accent. What’s did you say?

Don’t mind me just boosting the KZfaq algorithm

is there even a new meta now?

Well, that was anticlimactic. That looked to me like a combination of Advanced Start and Grand Admiral resource scaling. I'm not very good at Stellaris, but I feel like any build that would allow a human player to do *_THAT_* by 2280 probably involves some sort of exploit or glitch. They make the Katzenartig Imperium look like *chumps.*

Moooooore

I still have to watch the vid, but first: I think they will exterminate (EXTERMINATE!) each other - thats whats Exterminators do...they, well...

Should have forced contingency as crisis though.

How are you so good 😅 Even tho worm hole 🕳️

Doesn’t killing all the exterminators when there are only exterminators…. Also make you an exterminator?

determined exterminators are a bit too strong in my opinion

Are you using a mod to have an all-exterminators galaxy?

Dark forest play through

Don't play in grand admiral with scaling on, we all know how it will end

Ep30: *badly losing war and economy is on fire* Russia simulator 2023 lmao

Now that is a great challenge. Just one suggestion, mate: Your video could be 10 minutes longer. It feels so rushed and is hard to follow for someone with another mother language than English.

i'm going to make a foul of myself , but the fact that he knew he was destined for war and TW at that and didn't pick first thing first Unyielding tell me he lost this one too . +15% fire rate in your territory , and when you are in TW all territory will become yours , and all bastions will be extremly more effective and cheap , and evrytime you conquer a starbase , it will become stronger... its just better than supremacy , if you know you are going to be on the weaker side.

Entire galaxy teamed up against you and you have the worst traits, ethics, and civics (or no civics) possible. Do it. You won't. Don't have to keep everything the same from the start. Bonus points the harder you make the galaxy settings

is it just me or is it a bit desaturated in colour?

The waffle house has found its new host.

You didn't do mercs bro, big mistake.

Lol ... the settings alone = you would lose for sure. DE with that much bonus economy = no chance to out build them. You lost to the very first you saw ... and entire map hade them. I dont know why you thought you hade a chance.

The waffle house has found its new host

He is cheating, yes he is! That's the only reason why Ep3o, Montu and Aspec can win those scenarios. You can even see in the settings, that ironman mode is off.

The Waffle House has found it’s new host

The Waffle House has found it’s new host.