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[Cruxador]

I'm gonna go for a crime syndicate

Gotta say, I'm impressed by the balls of this response to the precinct bug.

[Cthulhu]

I have glavius mod, it fixes precincts

[Telgin]

New game, this time I'm going to the spiritualist achievements. The empire is taller this time and is much more manageable with 3 colonies. A stupid neighbors claimed system and declared war, hilarity ensued and he's now a vassal.

What should I go for after I ascended? My endgoal is to snatch the holy worlds from a fallen empire for the Deus Vult achievement. For this I may use a few more colonies. I could go for world shaper and turn a couple of meh worlds into gaia. Or maybe I can use galactic wonder and use a ringworld instead? Maybe both and hallow the future gaias?

You definitely want at least one ecumenopolis if you're limiting yourself to only a handful of colonies.  Add in a ministry of production, galactic stock exchange, research institute and fill the other building slots with research labs and you can be producing nearly 1K of each kind of research on top of the alloys and consumer goods they produce.

A ringworld might be useful if you need the food or energy production, but if you're trying to keep empire sprawl low they really suck because of the enormous number of districts compared to building slots.  Habitats are technically better for that but suck in their own way.

World shaper is thematic for spiritualists and will help make other worlds better, so it might be worth taking too.

[Cthulhu]

I also don't think consecrated worlds is very good.  Spiritualists already get the Declare Saint edict, I don't see what consecrated worlds does better than that, especially for a perk slot.  Spiritualists are already good at all the stuff it gives you.

Edit:  Not a fan of crime syndicates, even without the bug.  Going for more of a cyberpunk feel with my new setup

Of course I got another god damn hive mind, and this time my two expansion paths are both blocked so I can't do anything without killing the hive mind.  And that's impossible of course because gestalts are the worst.  Attacked them at pathetic fleet strength, beat them up for a couple months, all the sudden we're equivalent and I just can't make any fucking progress against them.  And war exhaustion is useless against gestalts, even winning every fight they always had lower exhaustion.  I think I know what I'm doing wrong, but we reached forced peace and now I can't hit them for another ten years unless I want to reload my save and try again.

I think I will though.  I think I've got a feel for subjugation wars.  I'll reload and just skip their two starbases, start taking undefended starports and beating up on their fleets instead.

Redid the war and won, skipped past the two starbases to avoid getting slowed down and ran all over them.  I think I got some useful experience winning wars, but I'm probably still gonna drop this game just because of the expansion issue.  I can spend 600 influence to get expansion started on the opposite side of my new subsidiary, but that's a band-aid considering the travel time, trade disruption, etc.

[Boltgun]

You definitely want at least one ecumenopolis if you're limiting yourself to only a handful of colonies.  Add in a ministry of production, galactic stock exchange, research institute and fill the other building slots with research labs and you can be producing nearly 1K of each kind of research on top of the alloys and consumer goods they produce.

A ringworld might be useful if you need the food or energy production, but if you're trying to keep empire sprawl low they really suck because of the enormous number of districts compared to building slots.  Habitats are technically better for that but suck in their own way.

World shaper is thematic for spiritualists and will help make other worlds better, so it might be worth taking too.

I only have Utopia so Ecu is out of reach. I'm in energy deficit but it is compensated by quite a high mineral and food income. I simply lack a good energy world.

There is a few meh worlds in my domain that I can colonize. I'm already turning one into a tech world and another into a trade world to compensate for the energy. I think habitats will be more efficient at this point, plus I get to chose where they are and a good fortress habitat at the border might be a good idea.

I also don't think consecrated worlds is very good.  Spiritualists already get the Declare Saint edict, I don't see what consecrated worlds does better than that, especially for a perk slot.  Spiritualists are already good at all the stuff it gives you.

Yeah, by the time I'll have two slots to spare for consecrated world and world shaper, I will not need the unity. Unless ambitions get super costy, in that case I will go for it.

My only fear is that I screwed up the game settings and I'm already at post end game with ~15k total fleet. If the pretoryn knock at the galaxy's door it's game over.

[Il Palazzo]

Consecrated worlds is great, imo. Even without Gaia worlds you get up to +18% unity and +9% amenities (and some spiritualist attraction, but who cares). It's much better than any of the initially available traditions.
When playing spiritualist, you want to leverage the unity gains. You'll want as much income as you can get, as soon as you can (while the sprawl is low). Min-maxing unity, first, lets you power through the traditions tree in a very short time, which improves every aspect of the empire decades before your profane competitors see them.
Second, by the time you finish unlocking all traditions, you will have researched the ambition edicts, which give further - and very large - boosts to your empire. Want +5 influence? There you have it. Somebody attacked you? Here's +40% fire rate and double construction speed. No living metal? Here's an equivalent edict with a planetary construction bonus.

[Rolan7]

Ideas on what to do with the First League capital this time?  I expected it to be of mediocre use, since I'm a machine empire, but it's pretty much solo'ing my alloy and goods needs.  And then some:

Spoiler: Screenshot (click to show/hide)

Aside, I do love that Planet Alpha Centauri has a low magnetic field.  It's currently my main spilloff for human bio-trophies.  At least until I have more habitats.

5 machine worlds are nearly done terraforming, mmmn.  It's nice not being mineral-starved, like, at *all*- even before any machine worlds, just by being machines with Rockbreakers civic (+1 per miner, possibly before multipliers?)

But back to the Ecumenopolis, my issue is of course all the crime and amenities-demand.  Clearly I need to relocate the biotrophies, which reduces both problems...  But the planet is only about half developed.  Absent advice, my plan is to continue making it half-and-half foundries and industry, no residential arcologies.  It might be sketchy, but I think I'll have room for enough sentinel posts (precincts).

What about housing?  Ha, Organic Paradise buildings create 20 housing - and not just for bio-trophies.  Those 20 "jobs" will sit empty, but- well, it's kinda hilarious that we still *get* "drone housing" for 4 housing per building.  (3 free amenities too, but still!)

[Telgin]

I've never played a machine empire of any kind and don't really know how rogue servitors play, but a fair balance between alloys and consumer goods sounds like my go to with them.  I'm not sure about the housing though.  Do you not have any other buildings that would be a better use of the building slot?  I admit I actually never build housing buildings except on resort worlds, where you can't build districts for housing.  Housing buildings always felt like a waste to me.

[Paul]

Is it normal that I was able to modify my self-modified pops now? I thought you couldn't modify the template and could only modify them back to normal.

I started a game as life seeded. Nearest world was a tomb world so I colonized it and shipped the pops back to my homeworld as they grew for a boost in pop growth on the homeworld. Ended up with a biology scientist and quickly got gene modding very early.

Next thing I know, my pops are self modifying to Tomb-World Preference. And it lets me modify their template, so I was able to make my entire species Tomb-World preference with the traits I wanted.

It did kind of glitch out, though... For the rest of the game there was fighting between the modified species and... themselves? I occasionally had terror bombings and such on that world. The best part? After I had finished modifying my species after biological ascension, the pops on that world suddenly self modified themselves to be stronger due to the infighting - which I quickly applied to the entire species again. Which ended up with me having a species that was both Strong and Very Strong and several points over the max with 100% habitability on single planet type.

[Baffler]

Consecrated worlds is great, imo. Even without Gaia worlds you get up to +18% unity and +9% amenities (and some spiritualist attraction, but who cares). It's much better than any of the initially available traditions.
When playing spiritualist, you want to leverage the unity gains. You'll want as much income as you can get, as soon as you can (while the sprawl is low). Min-maxing unity, first, lets you power through the traditions tree in a very short time, which improves every aspect of the empire decades before your profane competitors see them.
Second, by the time you finish unlocking all traditions, you will have researched the ambition edicts, which give further - and very large - boosts to your empire. Want +5 influence? There you have it. Somebody attacked you? Here's +40% fire rate and double construction speed. No living metal? Here's an equivalent edict with a planetary construction bonus.

The real problem with Consecrated Worlds is that you can't colonize them. If you're enormous that's not a huge deal but I find the opportunity cost for small empires is very high.

[Il Palazzo]

You must be playing the game very differently. There's always enough low-quality planets in my empire that I'm not interested in colonising.

[Cthulhu]

There's lots of attractive uses for small planets.  I'm playing barbaric despoilers and I have a ton of slave pops so some penal/thrall worlds would be very nice on small planets.  I'm hitting the point I have to use population controls to keep the aliens from outbreeding my citizens.  I'm also grabbing up a few to use as building-heavy planets, like forges.

Despoilers are pretty fun, though their mechanics could use some tweaks.  Despoliation cassus belli is pretty weak and only really serves as an excuse to raid planets.  The 1000 energy/minerals you get for winning won't even cover the cost of fleet repairs.  That may be fine.  Raiding itself is crazy powerful, pops are everything in 2.2 and stealing them is a double whammy of boosting your economy and draining theirs.  So maybe it's no big deal if the CB itself doesn't do much.

Tributary mechanics are pretty irritating though, at least against the AI.  The cycle goes something like this:

1.  Aliens are equivalent, can't demand tribute.  They get free shit for being AI so you'll never outpace their economy or tech unless you're outrageously ahead of the curve
2.  Use a despoliation war to wreck their economy and their fleet strength.  They drop to pathetic
3.  -1000 malus for hostile attitude means they won't accept tributary status
4.  You're on truce so you can't subjugate them until they've had ten years to rebuild
5.  GOTO 1

[Teneb]

Wait, could you wipe out a civilization by abducting out all of their pops so you don't need to bother with bombing them into Tomb Worlds (takes time), using Superweapons (takes extra time), or conquering everything (not always a good thing)?

[Broseph Stalin]

Wait, could you wipe out a civilization by abducting out all of their pops so you don't need to bother with bombing them into Tomb Worlds (takes time), using Superweapons (takes extra time), or conquering everything (not always a good thing)?

Raiding abducts pops instead of killing them like ordinary bombing. Instead if sparing the last 10 pops it only spares the last 1. You can't wipe them out but you can THOROUGHLY fuck them if you're a bad enough dude to bomb every planet they have into oblivion.

[Telgin]

It did kind of glitch out, though... For the rest of the game there was fighting between the modified species and... themselves? I occasionally had terror bombings and such on that world. The best part? After I had finished modifying my species after biological ascension, the pops on that world suddenly self modified themselves to be stronger due to the infighting - which I quickly applied to the entire species again. Which ended up with me having a species that was both Strong and Very Strong and several points over the max with 100% habitability on single planet type.

Were you playing xenophobes, or is this just a normal part of the self-modified species events?  The self-modified species event is annoying enough that I specifically avoid researching glandular modification for as long as possible to avoid it.

No idea if being able to modify the species afterward is normal.  I haven't seen it in 2.2 to test again.

You must be playing the game very differently. There's always enough low-quality planets in my empire that I'm not interested in colonising.

At 1x habitable worlds I generally end up colonizing everything eventually, but there's usually 1 or 2 planets that are bad enough that I put it off for a while.  I guess those would be worth consecrating, except that you'd probably end up with a low value consecration.  From what I gather, the results vary depending on what you consecrate.