Determined Exterminator Setup Guide
By Techwiz_101.
The Build
- Government: Machine Intelligence
- Civics: Determined Exterminator, Spyware Directives
- Origin: Ocean Paradise
- Species Traits: Waterproof, Adaptive Frames, Research Assistants, Luxurious, Bulky, Repurposed Hardware
- Ruler: Official, starting trait is Spycraft
How It Plays
Most genocidal empire play wide, a natural consequence of access to the total war casus belli that causes them to absorb the territory of everyone around them. While this build can still do that, the way I’ve played it flips that on its head and makes a tall empire.
This empire, rather than conquering lots of territory and wiping out the disgusting organics through pure military might, prefers subtler, underhanded tactics, made possible thanks to the second civic, Spyware Directives. You start with cloaking as a guaranteed research, and thanks to always spawning in a nebula due to Ocean Paradise, you will always have a source of exotic gasses within your borders to run your cloaking devices.
Your enemy will be wholly unprepared to frigates and corvettes magically materialize within their home system the moment one of you declares war, and this capability can often win wars for you outright.
Meanwhile, spyware directives massively improves the intelligence access of your empire, and in the games I played with this it wasn’t uncommon to have full 100% intel on all of my neighbors and even their neighbors by midgame once you start stacking things that give extra envoys.
Traditions/Ascensions
Subterfuge is the first tree I took when playing this empire in all of my games. While probably not a great pick, it guaranteed that I was neatly in position to begin my spying the instant I met my neighbors, and let me get the ball rolling on my devious plots earlier in the game. It also in turn insulates you from enemy intelligence gathering, as 90% of empires will be entirely unable to keep up with your encryption.
For the ascension perk, I went with Mastery of Nature, as the Ocean Paradise homeworld starts with a massive number of resource district slots, and MoN pushes that even further and lets you easily turn your capital into a hub for unity and energy (tech will be handled on a separate planet). Supremacy was the next tradition tree. War is still important, and access to the hit and run doctrine for your frigates and corvettes provides an immense survivability boost.
The ascension perk I took next was Enigmatic Engineering. While not a particularly powerful perk, increased cloaking strength is always helpful to do what you’re doing even better, and it also prevents the enemy from stealing cloaking technology off your ships when you inevitably lose a few in battle. Finally, your next pick should be either Unyielding or Diplomacy.
Unyielding increases your defensive capabilities, making attacking you a difficult proposition for all but the most well-prepared empires for most of the early-game, while Diplomacy grants you more envoys, and therefore more spy networks.
It also gives you the ability to make federations with other machines, if you can avoid upsetting everyone around you with the atrocities you’ve probably comitted during war. From here, take Virtuality as your ascension path, and Become the Crisis for your 4th perk, as menacing corvettes are unsurprisingly an extreme power boost for this empire’s military strategy. What else you take afterward is up to you.
Precursor Note
While you can’t really rely on consistently getting a certain precursor, the adAkkaria are particularly strong for this empire due to the shenanigans a cloaked science ship can do with the Tempest Invocator relic.
If you’re able to sustain cosmic storms, you can create a Nexus Storm over an enemy world via relic and keep sustaining it until the world is so destabilized and devastated it rebels.
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