Trade Only Challenge Build

June 3, 2025 by Solar Cross

The following empire build is exquisitely formulated to excel under the trader jobs only challenge from my collection of challenge run ideas.

The main rule of this challenge is that, after a short grace period, pops will only be employed in jobs that produce the trade resource. Specifically, this is traders, merchants and civilians. This means no miners, farmers, technicians, artisans, metallurgists, entertainers, bureaucrats and researchers.

A less strict version of the challenge could allow enforcer and soldier jobs. A very less strict version could allow those peculiar non-standard jobs enabled by origins, civics or ascension paths.

In any case we will allow politician jobs and other jobs created by colony headquarters building, since we must have those.

The grace period for converting the starting colony to trade only jobs can be something like 15 years of game time. It is doable in less.

This starting colony was fully converted to only trader jobs in just 11 years.

The easy part of this challenge is replacing the jobs which produce resources that we could buy on the market. Trader jobs produce trade and that trade can be used to buy these resources, and with stacked multipliers on trade this can even be efficient.

Another easy thing is providing amenities. If we take the mercantile tradition then trader jobs and civilians produce amenities as well as trade.

The challenging part is in sourcing sufficient research without researchers and unity without priests or bureaucrats. Enter the Moocher Acquisitions empire build…

Moocher Acquisitions Trader Empire

The Moochers are a people with fine trading instincts and a keen eye for the value of things. However, although they are very intelligent, they are too lazy and easily bored for the tedious grind of research and administration.

The Moocher Acquisitions Empire Build Summary

A Detailed Guide to the Moochers Empire Build

Everything about the Moochers is about maximising the sources of research and unity without employing any pops so that all our pops can work as traders.

The Moocher Species Traits

Given our pops will be employed almost entirely as traders we will take the Thrifty species trait of course.

Conservationist reduces the consumer goods upkeep which in turn means we have to buy less consumer goods from the market. Also we can generate some unity and research from civilians if we run with the Utopian Abundance living standard available with egalitarian ethics. This living standard is very expensive in terms of consumer good upkeep so conservationist helps here too.

Talented makes our leaders a bit better and we will be using them a lot with the Antiquarian Expertise civic and Archivism tradition to get our early research and unity from the anomaly hunting and archaeology game. Talented will also make our admirals a bit better and they can potentially earn some extra resources from hunting space fauna for resources, (enabled by militarist ethics). Admirals are also valuable for clearing out leviathans for relics.

We take Quarrelsome and Decadent for the negative traits because they penalise jobs that this empire does not use.

Megacorp Government Type

The starting civics we want have both megacorp and regular organic empire equivalents. However being a megacorp gives us another way to source research and unity without using pops through branch offices. Megacorps also has better synergy with a trade resource focus.

Starting Civics – Decentralized R&D and Antiquarian Expertise

The two starting civics, Decentralized R&D and Antiquarian Experise are all about creating resources of unity and research without research or unity jobs.

Our population as a whole can indirectly generate research through the factions system by using the Decentralized R&D civic which swaps out unity for research for faction output. This civic also buffs the Private Research Enterprises corporate holding which we will want to use in our branch offices. In addition, this civic enables the Umpire of Ideas council position which further buffs faction output.

Fun fact: with this civic different factions produce different research types and like unity the amount depends on faction support and approval. We can potentially alter balance research types through pleasing and promoting different factions.

Antiquarian Expertise is complicated and does a lot of different things for this build. The first thing is that the Antiquarian civic along with Archivism boosts boost the Grand Archive mechanics. Specimens of the Grand Archive can provide non-job based research and unity.

Also this civic gives us an additional bonus of unity whenever we research anomalies and complete archeology digs.

Antiquarian Expertise also gives us the decentralised research edict which lowers researcher output but doubles orbital research station output. If we are not having researcher jobs then this is all good.

When we can take a third civic then Free Traders is a solid choice.

Governing Ethics – Xenophile, Egalitarian and Militarist

Decentralised R&D forbids being fanatic in anything. Xenophile is obvious for a megacorp that wants open borders for science ships to find all the juicy dig sites. Do not forget, Archivism allows archeology sites to be researched even if we have no outpost on them.

Egalitarian does a lot for us. It boosts specialist output and our traders are specialists. It also boosts faction output which with Decentralized R&D is a good amount of our research. Finally it enables utopian living standards which can allow our unemployed pops to generate some research and unity.

Tributaries, Prospectoriums and Scholariums are another potential source of non-job produced resources but we do not really have to be militarist to get those. However, we do need to be militarist to get the option to hunt space fauna for resources.

Origin(s)

This build is fairly agnostic about origins. Very many different origins will work with it. I chose Imperial Fiefdom (Bulwark) here because Bulwarks get a little resource subsidy from the overlord and the penalty to our base resource production does not apply to trade. It also offers early branch office targets.

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