Corrupted Wish Empire Builds for Stellaris
If you have surfed the internet like the terminally online then no doubt you have played the game of corrupted wish. A player makes a wish for something plainly desirable. Then another player grants the wish but with a twist which introduces some additional undesirable quirk that defeats the purpose of the wish.
When we craft a devious new empire build for Stellaris we often have some wish in mind. For some examples, we may wish for an empire that is great at winning battles, has great population growth or the ability to rip through the tradition trees. What follows are a number of empire builds with cunning twists in them which corrupt the premise wish.
Leader Builds
I wish for an empire build for leaders with a long lifespan and fast experience gain!
Granted, but they are jinxed.
I am partial to leader builds, so this is a wish I often make. What follows are two different builds that grant the wish for long lived leaders but curse them with the jinxed trait.
Eccentrica Necrophage
The Eccentrica Necrophages are a fun way to try out the new Spare Organs trait introduced by the Biogenesis DLC.
See other Biogenesis builds here.
Spare Organs has a few effects but the one we are interested in is its ability to resurrect leaders who die. Spare Organs is taken with the necrophage trait gained by taking the Necrophage origin. Necrophage gives our leaders +80 years to lifespan. Together these two traits give us long lived leaders that will tend to avoid premature death. Quick Learners gives an increase to experience gain.
The twist is that they also have the Jinxed trait which increases the cap on negative leader traits. Moreover the Dictatorial government type reduces the size of our recruitment pool and Necrophage forces us to only use our primary species for leaders.
To further cement this empire builds dependency on valuable but faulty leaders we take the Vaults of Knowledge and Heroic Past civics.
Fanatical Spiritualist helps with paying the unity cost of a strong leader focus. Militarist is taken to ensure our quirky admirals have a reason to do some work.
Cracked Up
The Cracked Up is, more or less, a Hive Mind version of the Jinxed build above. Venerable with Lithoid gives us very long lived leaders. We also take Quick Learners for more experience gain. As before our powerful leaders here are cursed with the Jinxed trait.
The Lithoid species also allows us to offset the big cost of Venerable with the new Brittle trait introduced with the Biogenesis DLC. This trait increases the amenities cost for pops. We can offset this by employing more pops as entertainers who also produce unity and we need unity to fund our leaders.
The two civics Neural Vaults and Pooled knowledge cement our dependency on strong but glitchy leaders.
The origin I picked is Treasure Hunters. It is not strongly required for this build but it does lend itself well to a leader focused build. Alternative origins to try with it would be Storm Chasers or Riftworld.
Research Builds
I wish for an empire build with fantastic sociology research!
Granted, but they have no use for it.
Sacrosanct Lifeguardian Mandate
The Lifeguardians are an empire build heavily tilted towards extreme Society Research production. However they have hardly any use for this bounty.
Their species trait Natural Sociologist reinforces the Ranger jobs that replace Biology Researchers. The Natural Design civic also adds Society Research to Medical Workers.
Through the Expand Nature Preserve decision Rangers can even replace all worker jobs, indirectly allowing us to run even more Rangers for even more society research.
Rangers consume consumer goods to do their work but the Environmentalist civic offers a strong discount to pop consumer good consumption further reinforced by the species trait Conservationalist. This in turn reduces the number of pops that need to be employed as artisans instead of rangers to support rangers.
The Lifeguardians have the ability to run the majority of their population as Society Research producing rangers.
Great, but what do we spend Society Research on? Society research is for organic pop modification projects, terraforming techs, blocker removal techs and military techs mainly.
Oh, but the Natural Design civic prevents organic pop modification and disallows Ascension Paths. Rangers get stronger the more natural blockers we have on our worlds, so we have no need for blocker removal techs at all. We are pacifist so we have not so much use for military techs. Our species has the Extremely Adaptable trait so we have not so much need for the terraforming techs either.
Finally we do not have too much use for the pop growth rate techs either even though we have the Slow Breeders trait. The Natural Design civic gives us access to Genomic Services Centres which boost medical workers who increase pop growth.
Moreover since our Rangers are stronger the more natural blockers and the more natural blockers we have the less housing and jobs we have, so then we do not really benefit too much from fast population growth.
We should also note that the Fruitful Partnership origin allows us to acquire planets all over the galaxy.
Military Builds
I wish for an empire build with the most powerful armies.
Granted, but they are all suicide bombers.
Toxic Screamer Bombers
In this build we have a pure military build whose pop growth stalls during war and can not conquor without greatly increasing empire size.
One particularly fun synergy in this build is the combo of Noxious with Acidic Vascularity and Spare Organs. Noxious increases army damage, Acidic Vascularity does huge damage to enemy armies when our armies die (I did say they were suicide bombers) and Spare Organs means our armies can sometimes resurrect when they die.
To represent the Toxic Screamers tendency to go full hara kiri during war, we have the Psychological Infertility trait that stifles pop growth during war.
The civics Distinguished Admiralty and Sovereign Guardianship together makes a very pure military build that is discouraged from conquest.
Since we need to be Toxoid to run Acidic Vascularity alongside Spare Organs, this might be a suitable build to explore the Knights of the Toxic God origin.
Ethics are Xenophobe and Fanatical Militarist. The government type is Imperial.
There we go some fun empire builds for Stellaris. There are plenty more of those on this site why not check some more out here?
For more great Stellaris articles see here!
Get the best PC gaming gear delivered to you fast at Amazon, click here.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.