Being A PARASITE & Exploiting Overlord Mechanics | Stellaris Guide & Gameplay

[Music] minus monthly gain resources they have negative tech greetings you lovely human-shaped parasites and welcome back to stellaris with me lathrix and of course welcome to a video where i'm going to show you how to exploit the vassal ai in order to turn a potential overlord into a host a host you will slowly devour from the inside before potentially needing to move on to other hosts destroying empire after empire which works better the stronger the other empires are because this game really doesn't understand how to deal with you asking to be a vassal and there's a lot of exploits when it comes to your economy which will make other empires far more willing to accept you and because of that we're going to get straight into the game i'm going to show you exactly how to do this because it is bordering exploit territory and it will only work in single player etc but it is super fun so i'm just going to be testing out with this empire here the pleasant parasites they have empath and everything else just to make us a little bit more friendly but that's not really important i just want to show you how this works we're going to allow all the advanced ai because once again it's more fun the stronger they are and let's see how we devour other empires from the inside and so we begin at the top of the galaxy so what is our goal here so our goal honestly is just really rapid expansion there's a very real possibility once we find our willing host our expansion ability is either going to be compromised in fact we have to spend extra influence to give to our overlord to move around or completely removed depending on what type of overlord it is and how much it wants to give us what we want if we're lucky we can expand normally even after we get our host if we're unlucky well we're gonna be completely stuck so we begin just expanding and blobbing out no real goal not even exploring just grab everything in sight so i'll be right back once we hopefully find a neighbor so i can showcase just why the game really really wants you to have everything you could possibly dream of hi everyone futurelathrix here so in this video i do explain how to become the parasite how to jump from vassal the vassal ultimately how strong it can be even when you're a very small empire not in the best position well afterwards just for a bit of fun this is like 10 hours later i've been playing a quick iron man mode just i want to grab some of the achievements and doing the exact same idea this is how it looks if you get a bit luckier to begin with so i started off by infecting the planets becoming their parasite their vassal then we jumped over here weakening the regime which have now been eaten by these fellows well at least broken up by those fellows and in a second i'm jumping over to them i am just about to hit 20 000 research i have a booming economy and absolutely everything else and i am building two megastructures already it's currently 2292 i still wouldn't say this was the best look possible but just to showcase it can be better than how i get in the rest of the video it all depends on the initial starter zone thankfully i'd empires which really love me here and yeah just absolute blast becoming the parasites i just wanted to make sure it could become this ridiculously powerful not the best way of playing the game perhaps but certainly very easy one well we've already found our neighbor hopefully they're friendly well actually not necessarily what we want is either an empire which will instantly become friendly and protective over us giving us a modifier which makes them want us as their parasites or we want them to be domineering over us and they want us as a vassal to serve them and we still get the exact thing we want what we don't want is isolationists or purifiers both of those really really really really don't care about us in ways we want them to care about us like really bad ways no good okay so this is the empire it is a harmonious collective and is instantly protected which means we don't need to do anything to make them like us more than we do so straight away has to be the subject and they are really willing oh straight to vassal that's surprising i thought i'd be protectorate um your protector if you don't have enough tech i really i'm surprised by that so straight away as you can probably tell it's not gonna want to give us what we want which is minus 45 and everything because it gives us what we want now to showcase ways to get around this so first of all let's do the usual stuff we'll give you all the holdings you want we don't really care about this it's fine we will support you in all of your diplomatic ways and now we're kind of stuck there's nothing much else we can do here i actually want them to support me in conflicts i don't want to support them in conflicts that makes it even weaker so what do we do here well the first thing we can do is just negate some of these the big one is this it really really doesn't want to spend all of that actually it's slightly less bad than i expected well we could get 30 which is pretty insane so straight away we could get almost everything we want but not quite so how do we get the full 45 and everything because at this point what this would be is that they can build holdings on our worlds most of them are beneficial to us anyway they have to fight when we say so we never have to fight when they say so and expansion is a bit more expensive in return they give us 45 of all of our income well currently it's minus 167 but how the ii is figuring this out is our current income the amount we are producing not the amount that we are overall getting sorry so not the overall monthly gain it's the production so i'm no longer making energy i'm no longer making minerals you know i'm not making tech alloys what are those not making any of them i am spending a lot however on unity because unity doesn't factor in here uh same over here yeah i want to keep all of you because you're spending so it's currently 167 once a month rolls around i don't think i need to reset this but i might need to yeah i need to reset this okay so let's try that again once again has to be the subject put it all as it was now it is worse because at limited diplomacy it's the same okay so we're too weak yeah we are just too weak right now it's not really paying attention that should change though as time goes on there we go it's now accepting it because now it's figured out look at this there we are because now it's not wanting well we're not demanding the same amount at least that's what it thinks so all i have to do is white it out now for our influence now this is a bit weird there are other things going into this not just what i've talked about and this is more for the late game if you're making a new if you're getting a new vassal later on and you're you've got a large economy it's very difficult for them to want to feed you at this point it's all very small numbers things get shifted around a lot so i'm going to wait until i have enough influence then i'm going to try and do that again now i did rush a couple of these over so grab the unity back so influence back for that and hopefully i'll be able to get what i want very soon they really do almost cause no negatives now look at that so from agreement terms plus 11 now it's only minus 34 for the full 45 difference we don't have to give them holdings but honestly no i'm gonna be loyal anyway i don't really need that uh expansion permitted almost okay so let's give them some more holdings so my expansion is now fine can i have normal diplomacy yes i can will you help me yes you will will i help you no you're never holding and that's it right there that's the main exploit really it's just you can temporarily destroy your economy by just stopping all jobs by doing that the ai will think you are a lot weaker than you actually are so now we proceed with that and it's done so now the ai has no way of letting you go the i will of all the attempts i've done with this the ai has never let me go it's either it can't or it won't and we will continuously get plus 45 to every last thing we are creating now our tech our alloys our basic materials are all now being bolstered by them it didn't even cost as much influence in the end this is actually a fantastic empire to find some empires are a bit more reluctant this is a perfect one because the whole xenophile thing and they wanted to protect us so now we are a parasite forever we are giving them nothing they are giving us everything and we are going to exploit that to the max because we no longer have to consider well we don't have to consider our basic resources very much we are going to focus very heavily on research labs absolutely everywhere in fact most of our synaptic nodes are going to be replaced with research labs maybe all of them and we are going to tech out very quickly and become stronger than them as the game progresses even though they are max difficulty and with the whole advanced start so i mentioned this very briefly and obviously didn't need it in the end but diplomacy is another way to get the points up a little bit easier because of this here improved envoy drones or the non-hive mind equivalents will give you plus five diplomatic acceptance this also works when you're negotiating for vassal along with it with everything else it would simply give a plus five it's not much but sometimes that can be the amount you need when it's on like minus one it has happened a few times while i've been testing now we are annoyingly finding more empires nearby i'm hoping i'll get some more worlds it's not been the best start in terms of our actual empire which is not great as you can imagine i want to grab that uh that's going to cost quite a bit of influence but could i maybe you know what i'm gonna go for it because that is two worlds and a crashed starship okay oh we're back once more times past you can see just how much resource we're stealing from our host now why do i mention so much about tanking the economy and everything for later when that really does affect negotiations later on when you've got more resources to throw around because eventually you are gonna get your host killed you are draining 45 of your income from the host you're gonna become very powerful and stop them from being able to tech up correctly they are going to have their growth stunted by your growth you are truly feeding off them and thus you're gonna need new hosts later on because once they die or you just jump away from them your economy is going to tank unless you've really prepared for it and i normally don't i think i've been cornered in so fast before i guess that's what happens when every single empire is an advanced empire either way though we are already at 500 tech and that's just going to increase more and more and more since we are getting 45 increase ooh i want that leader somewhere else please thank you by the way that's going to increase more and more and more as we continue and let's even had one of you let's actually bother to micromanage since we have such a small empire this means though our empire size is going to be very small so those only 600 tech we're not really getting any negatives yet and again we're going to focus heavily on tech just getting enough minerals to just about supply everything and again that's easy because everything is being paid for the host is our friend you see well here's the issue the autocracy is actually pretty weak we did not choose the correct empire now these fellows aren't as happy with us but they are already protected after just a little bit of bribery and a little bit of friendship you know sometimes people just need to hear the right thing about how their hair is beautiful or their tubes are flexible you know whatever makes them happy so there's a good chance we will have to jump away from the autocracy sooner rather than lighter which is a shame but there are plenty of viable candidates and if we pledge fealty to them there's a good chance they'll attack their empire for us and then like a good parasite our old host gets eaten and then we spread to the new host from one intestine to another could have put that prettier you know what that's live it's now 42 years in we're on about 2.5 k tech every single month and now we are beating every other empire in terms of our tech this is because of our empire size now 2.5 k take at this point in the game is good it is already good but it's not the best you could possibly do but because we're such a small empire producing that much it's insane we have a tech cost of only plus four percent and honestly we didn't get a crazy start in my last attempt i did a lot better than this so that's actually a good showcase to show being a parasite it just kind of works now the problem is this empire is really weakened now we have been siphoning it so much it's no longer paying us everything it's meant to be paying us at least it wasn't a second ago uh is it paying the minerals so we're producing 513. ah that's after the subsidy okay so i think it is just about paying us but i'm not sure with tech either why soon we're gonna need a new host we are just miles ahead of them now and we're about to start producing our cruisers so yeah we're going to go to war soon for our freedom and then either the hierarchy or the messengers over here who both absolutely love us will take us as their vassal hopefully and then i can do the whole thing where just stop everyone from working so my empire looks weaker than actually is so this may be a better ending than i originally intended because what i've noticed is that our host has had to start dismantling their ships they did have a fleet i don't anymore it vanished i checked all the systems i don't know what happened i'm not sure if i dismantled it or simply i couldn't repair it after i lost it somewhere but our host has been completely bled dry at this point although their economy says equivalent that doesn't take into account any negatives they have so i'm going to now simply request independence i've got some fibers off of them they're too weak to really say no at this point so we simply leave research complete but here's where it's gonna get rail stupid okay that's fine how about you become our vassal continue to pay us and we will protect you of course i want all the holdings possible you're going to get involved in all of our wars now this isn't as good as our previous deal obviously being their vassal was actually superior we got more stuff for them but we're going to continue as we were before uh integrating them would be difficult so i'm just going to leave it as that and protocols activated what a perfect end siphoned oh they do have some military forces left oh they had one more than that god that looked six seven k earlier yeah it's either a matter of them not being able to replenish them or having to remove some but they did have a larger fleet than that at one point so that's it then they are now our protectorate we are now their overlords we rule all and if we wanted to we could become vassals of someone else again i'm trying to get the sovereignty to like us a bit more we are now beating them in tech because of course we are but yeah we've got a little protectorate who'll keep on feeding us we're a tiny little super powerful empire tech wise and our fleets we can build now are much higher tech than every other fleet in the game so although we are weak this is still advanced starts we completely killed an empire and we could do it again by just becoming the parasite of another host hey everyone this is future lathrix a lot more future than last clip so i decided because at that point i'd actually quit out the game i wanted to check something i went back into the game i allowed myself to use one of the console commands to take control from the other empires just to check what was happening with them minus monthly gain resources they have negative tech they have been stuck on hydroponic farms for who knows how long [Laughter] that's how weak we have made this empire now admittedly this is without all the benefits they were getting from the difficulties of course there are basically some cheats there for the ai in the maximum difficulty but with the fact that in this and if you take a look what they've researched it's so little compared to where it really should be at this point it's just nothing we just stop them so of course again they should be a little bit higher than this but i don't know by how much in a normal difficulty game they would have just been completely obliterated by now okay so obviously we want to be a subject again so what i've done is i've just removed my fleet probably didn't need to do that don't know why i did that but i did that so we are protected a bit faster this is after i formed the defensive pact with them so they're nice and happy the hierarchy have always liked us but of course we will have the usual problem of if i want everything like i did before it's gonna be very difficult so what do i do then well we're gonna do what we did before in that we're gonna start pretty much every job just maintenance drones so our worlds don't instantly revolt against us would be pretty nice i'm really hoping this works because this was the main idea behind this entire video well i've definitely showcased the fact that being a vassal in this game is really really powerful even if you don't have a particularly good start we are in a fantastic place we are now getting the tech for habitats we're set up brilliantly right now okay so that's everyone protocols activated sure now although our gain has gone up oh of course we're being fed from you aren't we oh there's a problem that's actually here that's an issue they're still feeding us i might have to release them to do this because i'm getting so much resource normally i wouldn't have a subject at this point so i released that subject i turned off all of our jobs and as you can see we're gonna get everything we want again a good example of how this is working is right now i am producing no tech wink because all the jobs are currently off so it's currently minus 27 from agreement terms now it's only -30 because it's only giving us 13 engineering research that's nothing only 142 minerals of course all this is false but they're too dumb to realize that so once again we become a vassal let that take effect there we are we are now a vassal of our new host and then we simply restore all of our jobs on all of our worlds and that should bring us back at the end of next month because it does take a little while sometimes them to feed us everything seems to update in ticks research there we are okay so we're just shy of 3k tech we're getting all the minerals and energy from them as we were before and this is the actual number so yeah far more look at that tech that's actually what they're giving us not 10. they're going to go almost 300 in each deck and that will increase as we get stronger as long as they can afford it which they should do because they're not as weak as our previous host for now for now a little bit light i actually had the tech a bit earlier than i thought i had so i could have been building up um habitats around building the fleet because i didn't need the fleet in the end since we just left the autocracy anyway so if i had paid more attention that would have been a bit smooth though well we are now on 3k and i'm now upgrading my tech building so that's going to be quite a spike in a second as you can see we're already on over 1k each research complete so right now the messengers are fighting the hierarchy i don't know which one's stronger so i've pledged a secret fealty to the messengers and we'll see the how this war ends up if they win we'll keep the field if not we'll move away now i did not need to build that fleet it turns out because of course it was left the autocracy anyway and i did have the tech of habitats for a while so we could have been building habitats we're a little bit further behind than we should have been we are now on much higher than 3k tech already because i've been upgrading my tech buildings so now we're getting loads more brain drones so that war uh is over pretty quickly because the hierarchy was just obliterated and they were even in my territory it wasn't a war for space though like i thought i thought it was just some you know conquer here conquer here it was a war to make them their vassal so now they are vassals of the messengers and we have been moved along with them and apparently they keep the deal by default so now the stronger empire has us as their parasite and i'm now on 4k tech and i am just building me some habitats research complete i don't know if this is the strongest way of playing but it has been a true joy our tech is beating all the advanced empires and we are happy to be the parasitic cyst of the galaxy i do need to wrap up this video soon but i'm almost certainly going to do a full playthrough like this in the future so be on the lookout for that i've just upgraded my species so now they are intelligent and uh where are you natural engineers and now we are about to get the super genes from evolutionary mastery we're 60 years in we are very powerful again not as good as my previous attempt doing this it just showcases this is a really really silly way of playing the more difficult modes because vassals are silly when the ai doesn't know how to deal with them and they never do well i'm going to be calling it here because otherwise i will tend to playing this all day so we are now 75 years in we're at 7k research per month we are doing mostly repeatables at this point and i do have mega structures unlocked if we had the alloys which honestly isn't too difficult because alloys have been super cheap this one we could already be starting the science nexus already which again wouldn't be too difficult just no point we're about to end right now we do have our very first foundry station up so soon that's going to be pumping out a lot of alloys and remember we are being subsidized there 45 a lot of our alloys right now are just going towards all of our habitats but yeah multiple of them are gonna become foundries some of them mining and then our economy is going to explode with the lovely plus 45 to everything we are in a super powerful position so hopefully this video showcased how to become a successful parasite and why it's a super easy way to play the game because you will always have a lovely protector and the protector is unwittingly destroying themselves to prop you up and as soon as one empire goes normally you'd be too powerful to become this parasite again but then you just remove all your jobs pause the game and then become the parasite of another empire and bounce between them so by the time the endgame crisis arrives you're going to have loads of hollow husk-like empires nearby and you are going to be happy and powerful because soon i'd be able to build things like the dyson sphere because we'd be building the science nexus then that would unlock galactic wonders and we'd have the dyson sphere and mata decompressor definitely before the endgame crisis arrives who needs that much space when you have this much research so thank you so much for watching if you have enjoyed today's video then of course likes favorite shares comments all that good stuff helps out me helps out the channel and most importantly shows that stellaris is a series you wish to see continued in the future i will be doing a new full play through very soon which may be one of these glorious parasites although i can think of a few empire types which would do this even better and yes we're gonna be just as cheesy next time to showcase the true power of the parasitic nature of the game it's not fair it's just life

Channel: Lathland

Views: 30,219

Keywords: exploit, gameplay, stellaris, guide, game, playthrough

Id: OdozmFPxM6g

Length: 24min 46sec (1486 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 19 2022