The Best Smuggle Population Operation Empire Build
The Biogenesis DLC gives us a new espionage operation, the Smuggle Population operation. This calls for a new empire build to leverage it. Naturally, we will want a espionage focused build and so I have revised my first espionage build from back when the Nemesis DLC came out, the Skaven Supremacy.
The Under Empire of the Skaven
To be good at offensive espionage operations, like the smuggle pops op, we want to maximise Codebreaking and related stats like infiltration speed and operation cost.
Regular organic empires can start the game with the civics Shadow Council and Cutthroat Politics which both give a +1 to Codebreaking. There are councillor traits like Spycraft which buff infiltration speed and reduce operation cost. We can guarantee the Spycraft trait by selecting it for our initial ruler trait.
Operations cost influence so buffs here are helpful too, such as from the Authoritarian ethic.
A Strategy for Using the Smuggle Population operation
The other thing we want for our build is a good reason for running this particular operation as our staple empire tactic.
Slavery based empires typically have to also be somewhat decent at aggressive war making because war is the fastest path to acquiring slave pops, either through conquest or the slave raiding stances enabled by nihilistic acquisition or the barbarian despoilers civic.
Slave based empires tend to have rather low happiness so migration treaties are typically counter-production, more pops will leave than arrive.
There is the slave market but that does not appear until the galactic market is founded and can be shut down with a resolution by the galactic community.
The smuggle population operation then can be a viable alternative to acquiring slaves through war, or other means, for a slave based empire.
Noxious Multi Culturalism
The Skaven Under Empire employs the Cave Dweller and Noxious trait combo to get a flat 80% habitability on any planet, even Tomb worlds. Noxious has some other interesting properties for a slavery based empire. Noxious pops get a bonus to happiness from other non-noxious pops on their planet.
Slavery with Stratified living standards on our free pops allows us to largely ignore the low happiness of slaves at the price of making our empire more sensitive to the happiness of our elite pops. If our elites are noxious with plenty of non-noxious pops as slaves then we can ensure our all-important elites have high happiness and so positively contribute to planetary stability.
For this empire then, the smuggle pops operation is a way to increase elite happiness as well as increase our slave workforce.
Skaven Build Summary
- Government: Oligarchy (or Dictatorial)
- Civics: Shadow Council, Cutthroat Politics
- Ethics: Xenophobe and Authoritarian (we can only use fanatic authoritarian with the Dictatorial government type not oligarchy)
- Species Traits: Cave Dweller (from origin), Noxious, Non-adaptive, Incubators and Quick Learners
- Origin: Subterranean
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