The problem with doing to many is that lots of things can still change so the guides will become obsolete eventually

Early stellaris vibes

Love Stellaris to no end but TI is atleast as good. The only good thing about not too many great sci-fi games is that both of these should have enough of a niche they'll both stay around.

Before I abandon a country, I set their their prorities to 2 econ, 1 welfare, 2 knowledge, 1 miltech so it can "heal" between takeovers. Unity damages government and Spoils creates massive inequality and pollution that hurts the global GDP in the long run. Building strong governments and reducing inequality makes countries harder to take over, cost more CP to hold and provides nothing to the AI in terms of boost, mission control or funding. Any research they contribute to global projects just makes *me* stronger. Meanwhile, the countries themselves grow more able to rapidly develop whatever it is the AI prioritizes when it does finally take them over. In turn, when I go looking to expand my key holdings I try to take territory away from the AI and abandon marginal territory that's cluttering my portfolio.

The problem is that Totalitarian states have ineffective military investment production

@@edwardheaney3641 they don’t its the same

@@edwardheaney3641 States with unrest that does not trend to 0 have ineffective military production. Totalitarian states have 0 baseline unrest because having armies and 10 cohesion pushes it to 0. This does not work with democracies because this suppression effect goes down as government score goes up, and not having 5 cohesion harms your science output. If the country has enough armies, that combined with baseline GDP can keep unrest at 0 even with 9 inequality.

Why would you waste your resources to create a military powerhouse nation then gut it for one time spoils incomes that long term grant you nothing. Both making spoils nations and making militaristic nations is bad long term and you want to combine it? Better not. Long term spoiling especially big economies creates a bunch or pollution that reduces GDP everywhere making all your nations less effective, it increases inequality that you have to offset and in this case with armies which eats up your IP directly, and it reduces your GDP. Even a slight unrest makes all military investment ineffective for militec. But what is worse both cash and militec are useless after a while. Monthly cash has it's uses to a point to deal with monthly upkeep, but that is not big before going to total war with the aliens and after that you don't care as you can build a bunch of mission control centers and nanofactories all over the place in Mercury. You can dump direct investment in nations but spoiling one nation to direct invest in another just makes no sense and is not efficient at all. Only other thing you need cash for is getting orgs which you get for free after the first admin org since you just hostile takeover from the AI. As for militec you don't even need one nation investing in it. All armies are useful for is taking territory via military conquest, which the most basic armies you start with are perfectly capable of doing and stopping landed alien armies which you can deal with by means of quantity not quality. Simply put my 6 armies with navies at 3.8 average strength can intercept and beat 3 armies at half strength even at 7 militec. And later on you blow up enemy carriers in space before they land. Perun perfectly explained how to best use nations. Small ones for MC and then funding before unification. Big ones for knowledge investment. Spoils only at the start to get your first admin boosting org if you are for some unexplained reason short on cash, to start using hostile takeover and somethings even that one spoil is not needed.

@@AlexanderVRadev Not saying you wrong but you straight up no correct either. There are some nations on their ratio low on CP to what they give for spoils. It can save you a lot nanofactories and space slots. We would need to do full math per CP/MC/cash ect up to which point spoiling a nation like Arabia/gulf states ect (there are some more ). Also pollution is no big deal , you usually have your other mega nation on min equality anyway and with later tech even small investment negates spoiling. I did a lot of games winning by 2040 onwards even on a full spoil earth run, and having only India as my „proper nation“ running on 0 nanfacotries to upkeep the economy. It saved alot of slots and resources early to speed up the tech rush and resources to create the megafleet with end game drives unlocked to finish off their main bases on the kupier belt

A lot of the science here (I think the gameplay is from his Academy run) was from research campuses around Mercury, which have been nerfed in the current validation branch and I'm not sure when are coming to the main patch. Basically, Campuses will cost more crew and now also cost 1MC each, which makes this level of science far harder to achieve while staying under the Alien hate cap.

@@masiechist you can still go for it. At least on normal you have to reduce your mining facilities in ineffective spots. Like „ I take entire mars regardless and build there every mining.“ Same counts semi for mercury, its a lot more efficient to build space hab’s instead of planetary once, due you have one slot more available. I can see an easy 100~mc build to have enough science to push the important techs to defend Orbit easy. It’s just less resources early as before which leads to longer games. Tbh past games all ended for me arround 2040 … only thing hold me back to finish these was getting ultra end game drives to easy push their last bases on the kupier belt

@@masiechist also in my opinion they should adress aggressive the mc cap issue of alien hostility. Rather to have an „ hard cap „ on retaliation, it should be randomized on % of you overall mc , increasing with more and more. Also it should rather trigger earlier invasion of earth , than going into space assets killing. It gives a strange touch to the game to stay below and mc cap to build up and easy wins the game once time expire depending on difficulty or going over the cap and triggering assaults. It’s a poor game design in my opinion and tbh they doing a great job overall but this concept is bad

As other people noted the science from research campuses he got (as he said in this video) got nerfed. The 9.5K from his India is under ideal conditions. 10 democracy, 10+ eduacation, near 5 unity and 48K GDP per capita are big ones, but he mostly gets that because of the population. Population skyrockets research from nations and he did a bunch of tricks to merge half the map in that one nation. Your usual result will be far lower. Even he can't possible get more than 10K on the new patch at 2036. And big part of that is him not being able to use Mercury research to get all the tecks needed to even create uber India that early in the game.

The "Grid+Adv Pulsar / Zeta Boron+Zeta Helion / Daedalus Torch" path is perfectly adequate. Drives like Neutron Flux or Protium Converter or Pion Torch or whatever can be amazing, but why bother?

@@varthaner4617 New changes to how thrust works for intercepts may change this up. So, maybe he's waiting for that to do a guide...?

@@varthaner4617 Thank you for the answer, I ask another question if it's ok. I know from Perun's Early ship guide how to win against an alien destroyer circling earth. What weapons to put on the ships with thjose drives?

@@henrykri2067 Pulsar era is missles simply because everything else won't cut it. You want 2 vs singular enemy advantage at least, realistically 3:1, eat all alien missles with 1 frontal throwaway ship, then pray others don't get oneshotted by mag shell. Or you could limit yourself to only attacking laser boats, 10-1-1 armor and just make sure to padlock and not get too close. The saving grace here is that alien launchers cycle so fast, they often empty their magazines before first missles can reach the sacrifice (as long as you don't charge frontally like a fool and die from first mag shell). In my experience missles don't reaquire if their target dies before they reach it. Triton Pulse is an era when you can experiment. As long as you push sacrifical small and fast ship to eat missle launches, you can use lasers, rails, or even gen2 missles (if you fight near resupply point), as long as you don't mess up with fleets. But realistically, in this era I just like to keep down, because everytime you trigger retaliation aliens switch to ship production, and those ships won't dissapear when they turn lazy again. Zeta era and onward you can finally chase down aliens and outmanouver them, so spinal medium coils + hull lasers (I like green single slot arc lasers, because those are strongest that don't cost exotics). If you want to take on large fleets, battlecruisers with heavy spinal plasma (because shooting missles and even coils into massively overlapping PD can get frustrating). The reson for multiple 1 slot lasers over larger ones is you want them mainly for PD - a single adv mag canon salvo can maim or even instakill a Dreadnought, so make sure they are set in def stance, you can manually switch them to guardian if alien pass near you, but in my experience you often do 0 dmg. Advanced ECM with alien recognition is a must on every ship. Ofc that's just how I do it, I'm sure others would have different, likely better opinions.

Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere - Bungaloo

I don't the developers intended for you to be able to create a mega India TBH

1&2 You can restart untill you have 1 with great PER, and all others with enough PER and missions to at least grab a small nation. That way you never need to idle, since even if there's absolutly nothing optimal to do, you can always grind Public Campaigns for more global support -> more monthly influence, or take over some crap nation, set it to 100% welfare and abandon it (to help with global warming), or take over, set nice preset, abandon, then retake it 5 years laters when it's no longer crap. 3 You want 1x 25 PER, 1x 25 INV & 25 ESP, 1x 25 CMD, and enough scientists to advise your research meganations. OFC, everyone should have 25 ADM asap. After you reach that, you either invest in CP-generating stats, or safety (ESP to not get detected, and security to not get killed / sabotaged when you do get detected). 4) Orgs, what else? If you see good ones, buy them and steal them. While certain missions generate more XP than others, I generally don't worry about that. Even scientist on permanent advise can be useful when you pile enough good orgs.

The one big difference with the north American union is you can have fusion mil tech armies in a decent research nation. Just make sure to militarily invade instead of federating. It'll be behind in research and dev points but constant attention to military in the US from game start is hard to compete with outside Japan or UK and those two nation have to sacrifice much to achieve it.

But peruns has also shown that 10 cold war Era armies can take an invasion if done right.

yeah building a single space defense for that purpose is a good idea.

That's not _x2._ You're describing _^2._ That is, research income is multiplied by the square of the Education stat rather than the raw stat.

@@boobah5643 yeah, my bad, I just had my wisdom tooth operated out about 2 hours before writing this comment. I'll edit it. Thank you

This. Unless someone else takes a country, any prioritizes you give a country remain in place even if abandoned.

The problem with Unity is, if inequality is too low, your cohesion resting point could go way higher than optimal 5, even up to 10. While there are tools for boosting cohesion, dropping it is much harder.

@@varthaner4617 True, but in this case cohesion in the countries you are absorbing into the mega countries does not matter as that is not absorbed along with the country. The Unity helps prevent coups and makes it easier to retake the country should you lose it.

I don't know if this distribution bonus is an actual thing. You do get some bonus research points for contributing to multiple projects simultaneously, but I've never heard of anything similar for Investment Points. idk

Yes, world unification is technically possible and has been done before. (There are posts of it online) However, the devs recently changed the behavior of a nations capital that's been moved to a different region after conquest and then liberating the former capital. Thereby unifying nations spanning multiple continents is almost impossible now.

Used to be able to, Devs nerfed it.

In my release review for the game I predicted the devs would be running around reflex nerfing everything they found that wasn't in line with how they personally play the games. Sad to see that I was right.

@@Blxz That might be the case. However, this so-called “nerf” is actually exactly what you would expect to happen irl. Of course a country would move its capital back once it has reclaimed it. Also, if you preferred the old mechanic, you can always turn it back on again and play however you like.

Planning to rely more on Earth based research and multiplier pushing than before (and now there is even more demand for ground based MC to maintain T3 research facilities that were useless before)

@@PerunGamingAU I see. Thanks.

@@PerunGamingAU How are you going to cope when they patch giga nations out?

I believe what he meant is "getting the resting spot down is better". Which means reducing inequality and keeping cohesion at 5, because otherwise the resting value for unrest will be above 0.

Your unrest will move towards a base value; this base value is modified by your government type (middle values = more unrest,) how cohesive your population is (more cohesion, less unrest,) and your average income (poor people have less to lose, and are thus more restive.)

There was a guide in steam for that

I think each faction with the exception of Exodus and the servants should have a very late game unlockable tech that allows them to unite the earth and each version of that tech should lead to a unique unified earth like humanity first should get the Terrans Union, the resistance being the most dull faction would get the United Nations, the institute would get something like the United Earth Government and so on and so forth.

If the country produces unrest, you might want to fix it, to spare yourself the hassle of stabilizing it. Other problems can be cleaned too, or they might not. It's easier to fix 1 meganation than a bunch of smaller ones. The point Perun was making is doing MC then unify is better, since 2 nations produce more devpoints then 1 unified nations made from them.

Part of it is that the single, to-be-unified, country will be drowned by the stats it inherits from the bigger superstate. Part of it is that the things you'd probably want to prepare are all more efficiently done by the superstate anyways; that's why you were focused on doing the other things before unifying in the first place. If you're waiting out the diplomatic cooldowns you can do things like prepare most of an army for your militaristic superstate to complete, I guess.

For some countries, If I'm using the peaceful annexation, I'll use the smaller country to "fix" the bigger country. I.E. Average in the Democracy, Education, etc. scores once it is annexed. Though I've only ever done this for Africa. Once mission control is maxed out, it is really just a matter of "what else do you want in the unified country". Funding isn't a terrible choice, as shown in the video. Since it doesn't get averaged, it gets added. Mission control, boost, Funding, don't get averaged with peaceful unifications (or miliary unifications). So you get to keep more of the economic investment points value.

OK, so I have a solid example now. Trying to make the Central American federation, and then unify South America into it, and then in turn unify it into North America. This is something of a hobby project I am doing with whatever spare actions I have, mostly to learn how, but also in hope that it will be worth doing. I am looking at Panama, without a space program. It has two CP, costing me 9.5 cap and should be providing 4.75 IP, but due to the nasty insurrection is only providing me with 1.9. Almost no popularity, high inequality, fragmented, anocracy. Please correct me if I am wrong, but if I just ignore everything and build MC, it will spend 2 years doing nothing but building a space program, which will do absolutely nothing when/if I finally absorb it into something that already has a space program, and then one MC every 2 years after that. I am hoping to in the future move Gran Columbia's capital to it, then grow Gran Columbia with it. Because it is going to be a capital (for a while), does it need fixing more than similar countries that are not? How COULD it be fixed? About a dozen council actions should help with the popularity, and temporarily help with the unrest. Or I could have it spend a year or two on unity and welfare. Would parking a US army in the country help with unrest? Or should I ignore all that and start it on its two year mission to build a space program? I have no idea what to do with a country like that!

@@ChrisDDickey, Sounds like the country was spoiled for a while. If you are planning on annexing it that soon, then it may not be worth trying to fix. In the early-mid game, you can take control of the country to set it's budget, then abandon that country. Its budget will stay the same. In the late game, if you have money and influence, direct investment might be a good choice. 200 direct investments per year per country. 60 to get the space program. 125 into mission control, will get you 5 additional MC. The remaining 15 into MC, then wait 6-ish months while investing into MC to get the 6th MC.

1 Theoretically no. In practice, it will actually drop because of global warming. That's why you can shrink expanded economy if you set it to 0. Above ofc does not include effects of random events etc. BTW global warming is why you don't want to do economy past certain point (40K for Perun). The latter is additive, but the former is multiplicative. Someone calculated that investing in economy in richest nations could require millenium+ for your investment to pay off. 2 You don't? Just don't nuke core economic regions if you don't have to.

1) Pretty much only as the population does, and global warming slowly reduces GDP worldwide.

Balkanizing to reintegrate is inefficient in CP, which is a particularly limited resource, especially early on when you'd want to be doing such a thing. The only real advantage to Balkanizing a nation you plan on keeping is to remove the "Colonial region" tag on spun-off regions (you can't build MC into colonial regions!).

@@zanaduz2018 Colonial regions also contribute less to national GDP and research, IIRC. And it depends on how you manage your CPs/how aggressive you are in gaining CP as to how affordable it is.

@@boobah5643 It's 2032 and I have about 5k influence stockpiled, so I think I can probably afford to be CP inefficient for a little bit. I'll fuck around and find out.

@@zanaduz2018 Why would you only want to balkanize and reintegrate early on? Doesn't it make more sense to splinter a nation after building up its economy so the newly formed nation also has a strong economy? I might also just be misunderstanding how a nation's stats are derived when it's granted independence. I have yet to find a good guide on how all the math shakes out. Core regions and resource regions equate to a higher share of gdp-per-capita iirc, but I don't know if/how that interacts with government/education/inequality.

it almost never happens that your inequality goes so low that it brings you rest cohesion above 5, and a lot of that is because high democracy values are very effective at reducing rest cohesion to 5, and it's actually impossible to get the rest cohesion of a sufficiently large nation above 0 anyway.

@@QuantumSeanyGlass Not quite true, unless you're talking about Meganations. The USA, for example, reaches 5 rest cohesion with about 2.5-3 inequality (if you don't invest much in economy, which is kinda unnecessary with a GDP/p above 50k).

Btw, idk if it is a bug or im on old version of the game, but unifying countries into 5 democracy Eurasian Union does dot change union democracy up or down. this is quite handy cuz i imagine what could hapen with it if it consumed 34.2 million poor totalitarian Uzbekistan. (thats why i decided to make paradoxal decision to democratise Russia before raising its gdp. Hardly raised early game gdp will still be obliterated by Uzbeks, democracy not ((WTF)).

No country can get a claim on India's capital, which means unifying India into any other country is impossible. Best you can do is rip a lot of territory off India...or build India into a mega state like I did. You can absorb the caliphate with India if you go through a lot of steps for example by moving the capital of the caliphate to Pakistan.

Based around a fixed value that scales on what difficulty you're playing at (higher difficulty gets less MC before capping), and can be raised in-game by certain techs (Maskirovka tree).

It's abit more complicated. Used MC creates fixed hate at 1:1 ratio, which is added to temporary hate from alien meter. Once the sum total goes past certain value (on normal it's 100/125/150) they will switch to retaliation mode. If they punish you, they will go back to lazy mode, if you defend yourself, they'll keep retaliating, and eventually go to war. Unused MC doesn't bother them either way.

Nah, Religion control improves the Unity boost, it doesn't enable it.

@@boobah5643 thanks for the clarification. That's good to know. I liked India starts cause once you're into religion you are stuck in like a tick. Does it give faction support proportional to cps held?

Knowledge just pushes it towards 5, whether that means increasing or decreasing it.

no

India + Pakistan is already a stretch as is. Let alone fucking CANZUK.

Devs are already talking about patching what perun is doing with India out. It was never intended and it's essentially an exploit according to the devs.

Man, winning with Academy will be so much fun after nerfs /endsarcasm

Spoils is all shitty crypto scams confirmed

Possibly after early access. They said they want to add an "early future" scenario first for the people who want to be in space from the get go.

I found it's better to take over Gulf States early and set it to spoils+some welfare forever. Sure, it will get Totalitarian and your public support will be 0 eventually, but who cares? About 1K money per month adds up after decade. After you go to space, just rush Antimatter, then build Supercolliders on every Mercury Station, and 1 Atomsmasher on every other station. If you're in need of money just sell antimatter. The Space Tour event typically pops up every few years, if you have at least atomsmasher on chosen station, it will net you 130K$ pure profit per popup.