Stellaris From Nan-yikes to Nan-Mights

The Problem

Nanite ships are weak.

Nanites, unlike almost everything else in the game, is strictly limited by time. No matter how many Nanites you are producing, you're more than likely making far more with your free ships you get every 2 years.

Losing Nanite ships is rougher than almost any other ship. You can replace them nearly as easily, and if you lose your whole fleet you're basically stuck waiting until your swarm builds up again.

These are the major problems, and this guide will hopefully help and inspire you in your own journey to mastering Nanites.

The Plan

The plan comes in two main parts:

1. The initial Unity rush needed to get Synthetic ascension as fast as possible, Since time is an essential part of the nanite build, its extremely neccasary to get your nanite harvesters online ASAP.

2. The Government reform following your ascension, where we switch off Unity production to maximize our fleet power. We'll do this by refocusing all of our resources into Energy to compensate for the eventual cost of nanite harvesters, and research to get more starbases, have better ship components, get more civics, etc.

Origin Options

Arc Furnace: it’s just too good. No need to worry about mining, provides tons of resources and will provide even more with some investment. It’s GREAT. Machine templates in the cherry on top, and lets us get creative with our initial pops versus our produced pops. While this does nerf your home planet quite a bit, we’ll be expanding so much it won’t matter in the long term.

I've messed around with other possible origins, but due to how limited the pool is for machines, this is by far the BEST option. Of course, you can go with prosperous unification for a good early buff or Here be dragons for anti early rush, but they pale in comparison to Arc furnace and all it provides.

Traits

Eternal Machine - this one is VITAL to our build. it’ll ensure our leaders live forever, and so when we level them to max we won’t have to worry about them anymore. This means that our biggest build component - Time - is working with us and not against us. Beyond that, feel free to tack on extra leadership experience or something else.

Since we will start the game with machine templates, we can change what our pops will be and do beyond our initial set of pops and leaders. I encourage you to remove eternal machine, and add on pop assembly speed to your pops post-game start. Remember not to apply the template to your starting pops, just make it on your planets.

Civics And Government

Here’s where the real choices come into play. We’re looking for two main things as a future nanite empire: Unity and ship buffs. With that in mind, I’ll start by locking in on spiritualist and militarist, going fanatic militarist just because its nice. You could go something else, but this has worked well for me. Imperialism is the best choice here, as although it’s kind of counterproductive with our nerfed homeplanet, it’ll still help early game.

Onto the civic options:

Unity:

⁃ Beacon of Liberty: good buff but we don’t want to bother with elections.

⁃ Citizen service: bad for us mostly

⁃ Exalted priesthood: a potential reason to go dictatorial, but not that impressive

⁃ Imperial cult: not good enough

⁃ Parliamentary system: amazing, but not for us sadly

⁃ Police state: not good enough

⁃ Byzantine Bureaucracy: we’re spiritualist so this one is out.

⁃ Death Cult: A VERY strong choice for unity rushing. Sacking pops for unity boosts and having worker jobs that make unity is a big deal. This is absolutely an option, and a civic to consider. Make sure your secondary robot population has assembly speed traits to slightly counteract the death rate.

⁃ Vault of knowledge: nice early game buffs, some extra unity, a cool building. Great choice.

⁃ Genesis guides: by far, in my opinion, the BEST option for Unity rushing. Establishing colonies grants you huge sums of unity and uplifting your pre-sapient species gives even more unity. It basically allows you to convert society research into unity early on. I will be taking this always for my play style. It also gives you a bit of a tech rush early on, and every uplift is 3 free pops! Does dilute your leader pool.

Ship Buffs:

⁃ distinguished admiralty: literally amazing. Commander buffs and ship buffs.

⁃ Crusader spirit: not quite good enough.

⁃ War bots: the army version of distinguished. Less helpful buffs, but awesome bonus to commander starting level!

⁃ Vault of knowledge: no ship buffs but a boost to starting skill level for leaders.

So based off our options, I’ll be going with Death cult and Genesis guide early game. These will let us get lots of pops, lots of unity, and hopefully speed our way towards ascension. We’ll also have lots of our early resources dedicated into research for uplift technology, which means less building replacement after the civic switch. After getting Nanite ascension, I’ll switch over to distinguished admiralty and war bots, with vault of knowledge as the third civic. This will give us a whopping 4 leader starting levels, 5 with vault of knowledge, 6 with the supremacy tree, and 7 with a leveled martial federation. That means you can get destiny trait commanders at will once you’ve gotten all this, making getting 4-5 genius armorers pretty easy!

Ruler

Make sure they are a commander, then their trait is up to you! They are gonna live forever, so make sure you lock in the correct type.

Early Game

You'll spawn in to a likely pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥ homeworld, with some death priests and not much more to write home about.

First things first - make a new machine template and switch over pop production to it.

In terms of edicts, get veneration of saints going along with sacrifice: togetherness. Get a second scientist going ASAP to find you planets for colonies.

In terms of market, buy additional alloys, maybe minerals, and consumer goods, but keeping enough energy production to stay pretty positive. Remember you need energy, consumer goods, and alloys for your colony ships. start building towards these immediately.

For your first society branch, I recommend Statecraft first, a wild card second, and supremacy third. Statecraft is nice for training our forever leaders, and will pay for itself in terms of unity as you'll be able to get some free research in uplift technology after you've established your first colony.

You can immediately switch to isolationist for the unity buff, but expansionist will allow us to save some alloys which will be needed for the pricier colony ships, starbases, and eventual nanite harvesters. I tend to switch over after establishing 4-5 colonies.

Priority number one early on is habitable planets. GET THEM. The more the merrier, and if you can put a colony ship on it it is worth doing. Tomb worlds, and barely habitable worlds are still essential. Grab them. Your science ships should just be surveying and finding you worlds early on. The first colony is the most vital, as it'll give you progress on Uplift tech, some nice unity and get you on the path towards your ascension.

Your homeworld is likely maxed out from the start, with 1-2 building slots and maybe an open district. Clear some blockers if you have excess energy, add another research building and a unity building as you see fit. Going to three sacrificial temples is usually a bit too much on your economy, so I stick to two.

Whenever your colonies are built, add a monument statue if you have the minerals. These are quite efficient and an easy thing to tack on and forget. Build city districts and at least two luxury homes on every planet regardless of your plan for it - they will help later on when you subsume the world.

SO at this point, your unity should be going strong, your society research should be goin swell, and you should have or nearly have uplift tech. Once you've finished your third tree, start saving unity to get as much of the nanite tree as possible once you've finished the situation.

Mid-Game

At this point, you've likely just ascended to nanites, but haven't quite finished the nanite tree.

Uplift all your species, this gives free pops in the world they are uplifted on, so make sure you have jobs ready for them.

If you havent already, start building starbases in viable areas. Look for larger empty/barren planets, as these give the biggest ceiling for nanite production. As soon as your starbases are ready, get nanite harvesters online.

In the same way, start subsuming worlds as soon as you can. This will wreak some havoc on said worlds, but you can mostly ignore the effects. Just add some luxury housing as needed, and they will fix themselves over time.

Once you have some nanite production, make sure to activate both the edicts for monthly alloys and energy credits. These will be helpful long term.

Our nanite swarms arent being mass produced quite yet, but we're getting to that point, so make sure you have Strike craft tech, afterburners, and as much thrusters researched as possible. These are the main components we will need to make great ships. Turn off auto generation in the ship designer, and create your strike craft swarmer ship.

Once you've finished the nanite tree, your nanite harvesters will officially start growing, and your first ships will trickle out over the coming years.

Now is a great time to reform the government, and make a council of 4 commanders and a head of research. Recruit commanders, and level them to 8 for their destiny trait. If genius armorer is not an option, promptly dismiss them and try again. Once you have 3-4 of these, your nanite ships will have become immensely powerful.

At this point, upgrade your arc furnaces as needed, and basically take a seat and wait.

Keep researching better parts and pieces for your ships, search for that third civic so you can 5 or even 6 generals on your council. Find starbase capacity, and don't be afraid to start selling alloys to compensate on your energy income as needed. You'll barely need alloys this game at this point.

Late Game

Once you've gotten a council of genius armorers, have ships coming in guaranteed every two years, and have roughly 2-4k ships, you have succesfully entered nanite late game. Have fun.

The only thing t note is that losing ships hurts a lot, so do your best to keep death stacks over a scattered fleet. Kill leviathans and other fun stuff for free relics and loot.

Make sure you planets are making you energy mostly, and going neutral on everything else.

Continue to build more star bases as possible, getting more and more ship production, although you likely don't even need it.

The game will continue to spit out ships for you, so you can make your system impossible well defended and just research your heart away as you please.

You also get a very, very fun little boon - the galactic community. Due to you ignoring naval capacity, having the supremacist stance, and each nanite ship having an extremely high fleet power, you'll notice in the galactic community that you will have far more diplomatic weight than anyone else. That means you can pretty freely:

- Boost your diplomatic weight from fleet power by passing bills

- become the custodian

- establish the galactic threat committee

- Declare people the crisis just because

- Create the galactic imperium for more civics

- make yourself exempt from galactic law

- Ban all robots while laughing from the throne

Even at 25x crisis strength, you should be doing pretty ok. Nanites rule

Th Other Problem

Prior to ascending and getting your fleets going, you are a bit on the weaker side.

Use diplomacy to your advantage. Neutralize AI neighbors with friendly relations as possible.

Offer to subjugate yourself if required - it isn't that big or a deal in the long term.

If you playing mainly against real players, accept that they can and might kill you. That's a weakness of this build, and even protecting your home system with a dragon origin doesn't quite protect you long enough to get nanites truly going. Make a federation, make friends, subjugate yourself to them, etc. Do anything you can to secure a small little empire with 12-14 systems that are adequate for nanite production. That's all that matters in the long term.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3261715169

From Nan-yikes to Nan-Mights