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[E. Albright]

One planet in a nutshell:

Soak your one planet in unity (and eventually synthetics, but I repeat myself), optimize your factions for ease-of-pleasing and max influence, cover the sky with frontier outposts, and exploit the hell out of everything (especially orbital research things) within your borders. There's a bit more to it than that, especially in terms of maximal cheesiness from the order of your fast-earned traditions and ascension perks, and typically shooting for a few specific techs to ramp up the above nonsense even higher. But yeah, it's all a fairly specific plan of attack focusing on working (exploiting?) particular mechanical quirks (flaws?) of the system so you can be at or approaching "done with traditions and well into repeating tech" by the time fallen empires might be waking up.

(And at that point, you can go crazy colonizing since the main disincentives of skyrocketing unity/research costs are somewhere between not-overly-relevant and irrelevant.)

[Cruxador]

Ok, so we are saying that different people have different expectations, and can therefore have fun with different things according to their own expectations?

Like I'm looking over the last few pages are there is a lot of contradictory things being said. It reads like one of those "I have a strong opinion but I'm going to give it as obliquely as possible so when you guess the conclusion I want I can say WOW THAT'S A GOOD POINT, THANK YOU FOR MAKING IT I AGREE TOO" kind of things. And people get banned around here for being deliberately obtuse. So I want to help cut to the point, you see. No sarcasm.

The point isn't oblique just because you are somehow failing to understand it. Considering how everyone else is understanding what each other mean, I suspect the problem is on your end. I don't see any way to be more direct or explicit than what I already gave you.

[ZeroGravitas]

One planet in a nutshell:

Soak your one planet in unity (and eventually synthetics, but I repeat myself), optimize your factions for ease-of-pleasing and max influence, cover the sky with frontier outposts, and exploit the hell out of everything (especially orbital research things) within your borders. There's a bit more to it than that, especially in terms of maximal cheesiness from the order of your fast-earned traditions and ascension perks, and typically shooting for a few specific techs to ramp up the above nonsense even higher. But yeah, it's all a fairly specific plan of attack focusing on working (exploiting?) particular mechanical quirks (flaws?) of the system so you can be at or approaching "done with traditions and well into repeating tech" by the time fallen empires might be waking up.

(And at that point, you can go crazy colonizing since the main disincentives of skyrocketing unity/research costs are somewhere between not-overly-relevant and irrelevant.)

Yeah I think this is right. I've never done it myself, but from what I understand it's an extremely niche way to play that can often fail depending on galactic layout.

And I think it was mentioned that you were trying this with hyperlanes? I think that probably doesn't work at all. Needs to be warp.

[NullForceOmega]

I'm still a bit peeved that I can't play as benign technologists in synthetic dawn, if I want to co-exist I have to be an assimilator, but I want to be Cybertronian damnit.

[forsaken1111]

I'm still a bit peeved that I can't play as benign technologists in synthetic dawn, if I want to co-exist I have to be an assimilator, but I want to be Cybertronian damnit.

Cybertronians would be ascended synth empires. Machine empires are more like Skynet, all drones in a single AI consciousness.

[NullForceOmega]

So I would have to start as an organic empire then transition to synthetic via ascension perk (or use a mod to start synthetic?)?  I haven't had much opportunity to play with the ascension system yet.

[Sirus]

The first one, I believe.

[NullForceOmega]

Okay, I'll have to give that a try sometime.

[forsaken1111]

As you said, there probably is a mod that lets you start out ascended. It would be somewhat unbalanced but who cares, in single player it doesn't matter much if you're having fun.

[E. Albright]

Yeah I think this is right. I've never done it myself, but from what I understand it's an extremely niche way to play that can often fail depending on galactic layout.

And I think it was mentioned that you were trying this with hyperlanes? I think that probably doesn't work at all. Needs to be warp.

If you set a galaxy option for all empires to be the same FTL, hyperlanes is in a lot of ways easier, actually, because you can cut off other empires from "your territory" that you haven't had a chance to claim yet. If you're willing to cheese a bit to do one-planet, do hyperlanes and 4-spiral. That said, I've done it with all three FTLs... though making FTL symmetric among all empires is definitely a lot more desirable here than a normal game since you have less flexibility than usual. And yes, you can easily lose on turn one trying to do this, or at least have to switch to not-one-planet to not lose.

This was the (then-and-still-out-of-date) guide that I used the first time I tried it: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1169534715

[EnigmaticHat]

I've had solid luck playing tall not doing that.  The idea is to only take good worlds and/or worlds that increase your borders, and use frontier outposts to claim everything else.  You def want to go out quickly and cut everyone else off (I play with hyperlanes only which personally I find fun).  Its not particularly overpowered but its a solid strategy that lends itself well to getting a tech lead.  You'll want to find a way to get more fleet capacity without more planets (be it vassals, federated allies, or the fleet size ascension perk).

[E. Albright]

Sure, that's normal tall. One-planet is mostly just about avoiding the colony penalties (and mitigating the pop penalties) to Traditions and Research. If it plays out well, you can have a research megastructure by year 80 or so, and even though you only have one planet to get unity from, you can typically be turning out a Tradition in <30mo even as you approach Tradition completion. It takes a lot of colonies to get wide enough to compensate for the research penalty, and I'm not sure it's even realistically possible to get wide enough to make up for the unity penalty...

Galactic Force Projection is more or less a requirement for tall, I agree. Otherwise you just don't have enough fleet capacity to intimidate your neighbors into keeping peace unless they're really pacifistic, and tall is not great for continual war. To put it mildly.

[Criptfeind]

From my understanding tech costs increase by addition. Each colony adds 10% more to the cost of a tech from it's base cost, and each pop adds 1% more. So so long as each new colony is on average making enough science to pay for the added cost over the course of time you would have otherwise researched it, going wide will stay science neutral, or even science positive. (With the one planet  strat you maximize your non colony science income so much that the "time you would have otherwise researched it" becomes so low that a colony probably can't pay for it's increase to the base cost. At least, that early in the game. I doubt a fully developed research world can ever actually be bad for research.) Whereas unity multiplies the additional cost from more pops by the additional cost from more colonies. So each new colony and each new pop effectively makes all your previous pops and colonies worth less unity, so you can never outgrow unity costs because it'll quickly reach a point where you loose more per colony then you gain. I dunno what the ideal planet number for unity purposes is. I'd guess around 4-5. Ideally small. Ideally with pops with bonus to unity production.

At least, that's how I understand how tech and unity work. Could be totally wrong.

[E. Albright]

The ideal size for unity is definitely 1 planet. The cost per tradition is increased by 2 per pop, but that's scaled out of relevance by the vast penalty per researched tradition. However. Dear lovely Stellaris has the empire-unique buildings of Ministry of Benevolence, Ministry of Culture, and Psi Corps, plus to a lesser degree Auto-Curating Vault, Empire-Capital Complex, Art Monuments (x5 rather than unique, I know), and leviathan trophies. It's true that once you have all the upgraded and extra unity-production buildings (preferably manned by propaganda synths for that sweet, sweet +35% unity bonus) you'll be getting about 30% of the capital's production per additional planet... but you need a lot of research and unity to get there. For most of the early game, additional colonies will be producing significantly less than the 20-25% penalty.

On the side of tech, you forget a lovely Stellaris quirk: you often will be getting far, far less research from your planets than from orbital resources. So with research, being optimal isn't producing more than 10% of the capital's research output per new colony (which is easy) - it's producing more than 10% of the capital's output and 10% of the orbital output (which is typically impossible). Additionally, you're incurring a 1% penalty to research per empire pop over 10, so while a max-pop capital is getting hit for 6-10% or so, each additional colony incurs 10-25% pop penalty on top of the 10% colony penalty. It's nearly impossible to add 10% of total research per new colony early on and with early tech, and while additional tech makes it easier (but not easy) to hit that, increased pop means you're aiming to hit 20-35% of total research per new colony to stay ahead of penalties. You can get ahead of that with enough tech and width, but it takes a lot of research and time to get to that point.

[EnigmaticHat]

For a normal tall playstyle you def want only the good planets.  A 25 tile 80% habitable world full of happy intelligent pops will do so much more for you than a 60% size 12 world.  You also want to be thoughtful about when you take orbital mines, since your ability to increase your power generation is limited early game.

Side note, but materialist is vaguely mediocre for wide because of the "dull edge" faction issue.  Wide playstyles want to make up for their tech deficit by only taking techs that they need, but taking all techs even the worthless ones is how you more quickly increase your technology comparison with other empires.  Since materialists have so few issues to begin with its going to be hard to get any influence out of them if you can't keep up with the curve.