Cravers Expert Guide - Endless Space 2 - Turns 1-30

hey everyone this is david from forex alchemists coming to you with another expert guide for endless space today we're going to be doing the cravers the first 30 turn of cravers the galactic plague so here we're going to be starting our normal configuration of 10 competitors endless difficulty huge galaxy and a random size so let's get started so first of all as we let this load in i'm going to talk a little bit about what the cravers are and their what makes them special so the cravers are known as this horrible galactic plague and they use planets and deplete them and that's kind of their special characteristic so we're going to open up their management view so you see that they have an ability called slave drivers which means any non-craver population that's on a planet that has a craver on it gives minus 10 happiness to the system but also produces double fids which is awesome and then cravers themselves as you can see if i open up their starting place produce 1.5 times their original fids on undepleted planets but start but the planets with cravers on them start accumulating these depletion points and once they reach 150 or whatever their max is the max scales on original planet size the planet becomes depleted and it just becomes normal for uh for everyone so what you want to do is have cravers on undepleted planets and uh if you have the spare happiness driving some slaves to crank out that additional system or additional fids the cravers start with the best starting technology as if you've seen our other videos which is xenolinguistics opening up the xeno-industrial infrastructure to get that juicy juicy in early industry and since they start on a jungle you get the nice fertile bonus to get a base of 20 in 20 industry if you build this right off the bat so that's exactly what we're going to do see a little overview of our starting system we have a step which will also give us the extra temperate bonus for our zeno industrial infrastructure so we're going to probably want to rush that with cravers you especially want to rush a starting a second planet in your starting system because as you can see we we start with our original planet the husk mostly depleted already it's already at 112.5 out of 50 gaining two depletion points per turn so we actually have 19 turns until this becomes depleted and our early game advantage um is is gone so we before that 19 turns expires we really want to get onto onto this step planet here secondly the cravers start with three ships two scout ships and they're a colony ship just like everyone else we see that we have three um three uh what are these called curiosities on our starting system so what we're going to do to grab some extra experience is throw our general our hero onto us into a fleet put both of these guys in there and then start using uh oh actually no i'm not going to do that we're going to do one fleet we're going to use both of these to do say this step since that's going to be our first priority and that gets us some red saying and ooh a failed curiosity that's unfortunate and then what we're going to do is change it from the engine and guns into just a normal uh what what my brother and i call the booper which is just a double double probe to give it lots and lots of scouting capabilities and what you can do is you can spend your early gold you start with 100 you can spend 80 gold to upgrade that and look at that boom you get four more probes early game so we're going to spend one more to get that third curiosity and then we're going to switch out oh that's amazing for us for a craver since you're going to want to be going aggressive early which i'll show in a second getting these weapon modules is the best possible thing you can get early game so now that we have all of these curiosities used uh are scouted with this one ship we have our second ship here that still has full movement speed so what we're going to do is remove our our used scout from the uh from the hero's fleet and just switch in this new scavenger right in there and look at that he's got movement speed they've got probes let's send him out on an adventure so we're going to take him let's see what let's see we got a donut shaped galaxy let's take him up in this direction and this guy has still two more probes so we'll send one down there and might as well want to send one up there as well since we have some extras i usually like to keep my colony ship uh if i don't see a good place on the first turn i usually like let them stick around here for one or two turns so that i can get a good place you know starting out to get the best advantage for research as i said earlier we really want to be getting towards this step so we're going to start with um public private partnerships and then move into steps here this is usually what i start with regardless um because getting this early science since we start on a jungle which is a planet and it is uh fertile it's going to give us 20 bonus uh science which in the early game is fantastic it's almost doubling our our science output anyways um so we'll we'll at least start on that and i can discuss other options as they become available additionally since we have our autocracy which is the special craver government where only major political populations can vote and anarchy can't happen that means regardless of how angry your people get there will never be anarchy and your government will never change you'll never have that uh that period of unrest you can make people as mad as you want and you only get the food and influence penalty so what we're going to do is implement some unhappiness penalties to generate some more gold early on since we used it early you might notice that we are generating 47 dust per turn i'm going to interchange dust and gold constantly because i just do that and that's due to uh having an undepleted planet having our cravers producing their 1.5 times and a slave population producing double so that's fantastic last thing we want to do on our first turn is create our first military ship we are the cravers and we have a huge advantage of being of having six command points as our original base that is enormous that's 1.5 times any other race uh so we need we really want to use that early and the way we're going to do that is creating a combat ship out of our original starting scout ships i like to stick with the bug theme so i call these the locusts locust class and awesome that we started with these uh improved lasers so you do two weapon mods weapons an engine obviously and then a defensive mod i usually like to start with armor because most early pirates and that's what you're going to be fighting mostly most pirates have armor plating and not shields so this is actually the perfect combination because we're going to be doing energy damage which will bypass their armor plating and they'll be doing physical damage to us which will be absorbed by our armor our armor plane so now i think that concludes turn one there's a lot of things you have to do for craters on turn one so turn two yep since we're on endless difficulty the other one of the other craver empires always gets 100 dust per turn because endless cheat so let's move our dudes all right what do we got here uh oh another step that's fantastic since we're going to be rushing this anyways that's fantastic for us really good to see um now we'll send our other ship what do we have here and ash ash lava not exactly exciting all right so what we're going to do is send this guy over here and we know that at least for one note in it one note away we don't have any state uh class zero planets here or class zero planets here so we're gonna send our colony ship this way i think yeah might as well we see that our hero levels up and even though cravers are renowned for their battle potential they also have the best overall best early game fids skill which is called forced labor and it's plus it's a two level system that's plus 10 food and plus 10 industry there are plus 10 food per planet and plus 10 industry on the system which is insane it goes up to plus 20 food in plus 20 industry and that's just absolutely nuts is going to catapult us way way forward in the beginning of the game and so we're going to get both of those and then transition to the more militaristic side for this guy because he gets uh plus 40 projectile damage later on 20 health 40 damage you know all of these great things that eventually will make him a military powerhouse but really what we're going to use early game is for this fidds industrial bonus to get us a good start in the game excuse me so uh that's moving everything's moving along i think that's it for turn two see this is fantastic i love finding new um neutral sieves in the early game because since we are um militarists we have our jingoist joy bill as our our base law which gives us plus 15 per war and since there's no real penalty for we don't actually don't have it 20 influence yet um but we don't since there's no penalty for declaring war on neutral civils they're not going to be producing more um pirates or anything so you can just declare war on these guys for free grab free 15 happiness and that's going to help you out pretty nicely we got this guy here we can insert some more curiosities just doing this and we've uh we've had some problems with getting that first person to explore 10 curiosities so i'm going to be counting on this one so now we are at seven with these or sorry we are at five with these two so we have the three on the first turn and we just got 2 more so 5. all right so we're going to continue on our explorations and so we have 5 and now 6. oh that's going to be fantastic i love seeing trans vines because one of the cravers major things is that their slave driving causes a whole lot of unhappiness these trans vines can eventually be used to upgrade your civ your civilization or your system to rank two and you can use these to get a bonus 25 happiness which means two and a half free slaves which is great great great for us and once again we're just going to send out probes down one of these star lanes and then we're going to pick the other one to uh to keep exploring all right this is a little bit unfortunate since i uh made the call to send my colony ship down this way and it just dead ends into a a neutral sieve uh not exactly ideal but it's not going to hurt us that bad in the game uh in this game so i'm just gonna keep trucking along you see that we're making our see our industrial plants pretty quickly which is as always amazing we have our craver industrialism to thank at the beginning we also got this free population from one of our curiosities which is amazing it gives us it basically counts as two since he's going he's being uh driven by slave drivers and it's not putting us into unhappy um unhappy unhappiness yet so bonuses all around all around greatness all right so we'll just bring him back to here because we don't know where we want to send him here what do we have over here another steps all right so so this definitely we now have three colonizable step planets in our general general areas we have one here we have one in our main place and we have a nice one over here this is probably going to be our target for one of our early colonies if we don't find someone something better soon uh yeah so i think we can just keep keep moving on really what we're looking for are civil or minor sieves to conquer early and good places to colonize early so this is the first chapter of the cravers mission and you have the option to destroy this kind of rogue crave craver vessel and get a whole bunch of early titanium or you have to set up a a trap for it and capture it and then you get a random luxury 60 of a random luxury resource which look the specific resource changes every time i have found that capturing it is by far the best option because then you actually get the ship and the ship itself is absolutely incredible so i'm going to click this and i can show it to you in a second oh and we just found the empire where is he oh he's right over here taking the place that i wanted with a taran and a savannah and a snow oh that place is really good um yeah so now let's find this ship where's okay so here's the ship you can see it has 11 movement speed 264 power and 205 defense which is incredibly good with and it cost three command points early game compare that to our locus which have 75 attack power and 56 defense and that's with already finding an upgraded weapon module so this thing is going to blow every other early game ship out of the water and since we have increased command points we'll be able to pair this with three locus and just be the the dominant force in the galaxy very star wars-esque there all right we got a nice mediterranean planet um so this is going to give us access to tundras this one is mediterranean so we're going to grab this one next uh hello there we go gonna grab that one next and then um we'll move we'll see what we wanna do from there all right so the way that you capture this thing is that you have to set up a blockade and let it move into your blockade so even if i set up a blockade right now it's not going to matter because he's just going to move out of it yeah see just like that all right so we got some more curiosities that's eight and nine uh just so we're keep still keeping track so oh i that is the one advantage i didn't think about this before um but since we took all the weapons off of this scavenger 2 the one that i updated it actually can't set up a defensive perimeter so i can't catch this guy with that ship that is something i have not encountered before interesting interesting interesting hmm i don't know what i'm gonna do about that we shall see might make me want to make a couple locusts early and you can see that since they're they're made out of that initial scouting ship there are only 163 uh industries you make them super quick with your uh your undepleted planets so this is really great all righty um so yeah were you that's an interesting situation that i have not run into before usually i have my other scout ship kind of around here and i usually do it with that all right moving right along let's see um [Music] our private public partnerships working on those the big risk or one of the big risks with this freaking ship run around is that he can attack your uh your ships he doesn't do it all the time but i have had games where it just goes kills a ship here and says has 11 movement speed kills a ship here kills a ship here and then next turn kills a ship here and you just don't have time to move or do anything about it because it's just so much faster than you are so picking the intercept option is definitely much riskier but getting this ship is just simply incredible it will it will change the game very much in your favor alrighty so not having this guy being able to make blockades is actually kind of screwing me up but that's okay we will adapt so what i'm going to try and let happen is this turn i'm gonna let this guy go yep so hopefully he does not set up a barricade and since there are no you can see that there are no uh curiosities on this one we're just gonna move through oh i guess he left already anyway so no big deal no chance of dying there as long as he doesn't stay in this next system for the next couple turns uh he'll probably leave somewhere else and then i can come catch him later all right so we have rare earth foams in three turns which is going to give us access to the mediterranean so we're going to move our colony ship right down here and that will be one turn late but pretty good we'll grab this then we'll grab this nice medium mediterranean with this beautiful cyberflora and double strategic resources so we're at turn sevens we're almost able to uh get our hero back and start using that wonderful uh forced labor point that we have earned by exploring some of these things so yeah what he's almost all three right yeah about two-thirds of the way there yeah so that was 10 um right am i losing count i think that was time i think that was 10 curiosities and we did not get the achievement so something's screwy and i don't know what it is interesting so i think this is the empire's main place right here so and then they took this one as their first colony obviously so they're really close to us so this tells me that uh i'm gonna go super offensive very early on with where is it now with this ship and my early power with getting these locusts um i am going to get this autonomous construction as my third tech which is going to give us an additional three command points get putting us up to nine which is over you know double that what they're going to have so we're going to be able to destroy them tanks which are super effective they do double damage against ground uh infantry troops during invasions and the most important thing is going to be this uh titanium a2s slugs and what we're going to do is create a sieging ship which will be able to will very quickly whittle down the enemy's manpower and make our invasions much easier so we can do a serie a quick succession of invasions without losing too much manpower on our fleet hopefully i'll be able to demonstrate that correctly as soon as i'm ever able to capture that so move oh i forgot this guy a little sloppy a little sloppy but we're moving right along okay so interesting another guy down here all right so we got our first locust and the other great thing about these guys is that they're so fast base of six movement speed so we can get him over here hopefully so this guy's this guy's running away it might be a couple turns before we can catch him hopefully he starts coming back here and we can catch him right here would be optimal because then he only has one way one way to get up so what my plan is is that to get take this locus bring him right here set up a blockade and hopefully he just comes back and hit runs straight into it that's the hope whether it turns out or not well that's for the future to tell all right we'll send off a probe see if we can scout something over there and head on out no ships that are idle so i think we can move on oh actually yeah [Music] so after this autonomous construction um as i said we're going to want to work towards steps as quickly as possible i'm wondering if it's worthwhile to switch these two because we really want to get this second planet well we still are undepleted here because colonizing this these stage two planets costs a whole bunch i think it's like 300 yeah 320 um infrastructure and once this depletion once depletion sets in our industry is going to drop considerably so i think it might be worth it i mean even if we delay it for what's going to be a couple turns like four turns four or five turns uh once we also get our our science thing what's it called the public private partnerships that that time is going to go down significantly so i'd say it's probably going to delay us for maybe four turns on getting autonomous construction that should still be fine because we're going to want to get the public private partnerships and then start pumping out a couple locusts to fill out our our attack fleet and only then we'll be will we be able uh or be ready to start producing those those invader ships what i'm going to call termites and i'll show you them uh once we get there so this should actually work out okay especially since we're taking the extra time to catch this ship so i'm that's what i'm gonna do i switched getting our step planet to right after rare earth foams and then i'm going to get autonomous construction after that all right yeah and so we didn't we didn't get lucky we didn't get any uh tier zero planets to colonize so not the perfect start but we should be okay all right right down here there they're nice easy pickings oh perfect so he's coming back this way he does have 11 movement speed but i don't think he can make it here in one turn and since i can make it to my lol however you pronounce that in two turns um i don't know if that's the correct choice because he's going to move here next turn and then i'm going to be there and then only if i can i can only if i get there and set up a blockade before he moves will i get that i think i'm going to take the risk i'm going to try for it all right how are we doing over here this guy's still moving along turn nine so as soon as this guy gets to this planet we can search some more curiosities and then pull him off the fleet and put him in here uh all right we'll have another locust coming down the pipe just in case he gets past our first one we'll uh we'll be there to catch him for with the second one all righty um next thing so we're at turn tens we're a third of the way through the video already uh okay and something that i forgot to do a little bit earlier which i talked about was declaring war on these neutral civilizations because there's really no penalty to them so you want to do it both times and that is 30 free happiness right there and you can see that we are already up at 63 happiness even with two slaves and if we can get one more uh one more neutral sieve or when we declare war on the empire up here that's gonna put these guys into happiness which will give us uh bonus food and influence which as you can guess is fantastic all righty so our guy is here and we can settle settle that mediterranean that we got the uh the tech for and so that's fantastic we already have a whole bunch of money because we're cravers so we're going to obviously accelerate this 13 turns not that big of a deal which will go down significantly since we're producing so much food up here in cert uh where i where yeah we're sending 44 which is really good early game not too shabby alrighty did these guys have anything here nope so let's just keep on exploring alrighty we got this so we'll use our last probe to explore this wow they had a good start i really want this place oh i really want this place now all right so now that we've expanded all of our probes we'll pull him back and throw him in here and look at that 112 industry on turn 10. that is glorious and it's just going to go up by 10 more once he hits level 3 from that second level which is great all right moving right along i don't know why i keep saying that okay so this is an important turn we're just gonna be clicking this move as fast as we can in order to get our guy in position damn i missed it stupid pop-ups yeah so what i wanted to do is get him here oh i might get that in time anyways so now that he's trapped in between these two guys i'm going to catch him next turn no matter what which is great um so yeah what i wanted to do there was get this guy to move get in position and put up my blockade before he moved and that is just a matter of clicking this enough times and then having him selected already and then getting this getting his guard up in time and it's it's kind of hokey because you know the ai is supposed to move before we do but sometimes while they're moving if since i'm in this the only player here i can do it before them and it's it's kind of kind of weird that interaction is kind of weird but i had a whole bunch of pop-ups and uh you couldn't do it correctly yeah so here we found another neutral civilization so obviously we just instantly declare war on them i think that should get us up to happy yeah so that's 10 extra food and influence on the system which is as you know fantastic yeah and again we have no penalty for declaring war on these guys because they don't produce any extra pirates from being at war so alrighty we're going to be able to complete this yep so you saw how he ran into our blockade there so we caught him here got our free 20 blue cat mold and now we have to bring this ship back to our home place which is super easy because it has 11 freaking movement speed so he's there in two turns and we don't need to do this anymore so we'll bring our locust back to join up with them we have our hero who just gained his second level so once again moving up to plus 20 of the on each of those which is great we are almost finished with machine bacteria which means we can start doing this soon um wow that's taking a little bit longer than i hoped yeah so that that that detour into rare earth forms to get the mediterranean colonization early game it was very unfortunate the fact that we found zero level zero uh planets in our immediate area and couldn't couldn't just go straight for the step planets it's really kind of screwing us up so unfortunately we're not going to get our second planet before our our home planet uh becomes depleted so this is going to be delayed a little bit but we've already pumped out a bunch of our locus so you know we'll we'll survive we'll we'll be okay so now we uh battle here yeah you can see that even our basic scavenger that we started with has 33 power which is pretty strong so we can even take on some of these guys usually the general rule is if they are 75 percent of the power and you're 25 or less it means that if you try to fight them they're gonna kill you but if you're slightly more than that you can fight them and and still survive so i'm going to use turtle because they are all physical damage so this should allow me to survive well i guess not that time sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't not a big deal i probably should have just retreated because it would have thrown me down here anyways but i wanted to try and prove a point but i failed alrighty um that's unfortunate a little bit but i'm gonna be sending my fleets over there soon and they'll do the exploring for me so no big deal no major harm i'm done all right and we have the end of the constellation down here lots of nice curiosities to explore there got some xp monsoon and an extra person yeah so now we definitely have more than 10 curiosities explored and still no one has gotten that achievement so i really have no idea how that thing works but it's obviously either something i don't understand or it's just a little buggy i'm gonna err on the side of bugginess but yeah so now we've brought this intruder ship back to our home planet you just disband it and that allows your your scientists to study it so you do that you gain access to this thing called the hive hall which allows uh you to assign heroes to planets for no upkeep costs which can save you some dust later on but the biggest thing is now you have the choice to either investigate this husk that you found or restore it if you restore it you get him as a hero and he starts at level five he's pretty strong his base abilities are plus two movement speed to your fleets and i believe it's plus two armor absorption i don't remember his other good level one but but basically he's a pretty good hero and this is what i started with because i really liked having the two heroes but i've recently moved towards the infinity shield instead and this is kind of a crappy shield it only gives 120 shield capacity and 12 energy defense but the biggest thing is that plus 30 percent health bonus and it's not that big of a deal now but when you apply one of these to one of your uh bigger ships it's a huge it's an enormous health health bonus and you're it's going to make your ships much tankier and much uh much better to survive in multiple battles especially if you uh pair that with um a support ship that's going to be healing them for a percentage of their health either every round or after each battle so i like to go with the infinity shield now um but both are still pretty good choices so now you have to obtain the two marked systems they're usually neutral colonies so yeah it's going to be that one which we're going to take anyways and this one which we'll take on our way through the empire so now we gain control of this freaking super ship this thing is gorgeous so we're going to create a fleet and these guys are coming up that will be your next turn and that will be here the turn after um this just these two ships are still going to be strong enough to fight any pirates that come at us so we're going to move them up and uh start taking orion right now and then these locusts can just meet us up there and we'll just do that alrighty so this guy is not doing anything all right we already used him who's who's not doing anything oh it's still something oh yeah we got our science still making money um how was our happiness yep so good and okay moving all on uh so now we this is kind of the blitzkrieg phase of the of the cravers this is when you want to be pumping out a bunch of ships and really uh leveraging your early game power this early 6 cp and this early super ship right here because yeah this thing is absolutely incredible and i have just dominated both ai games and uh and versus pvp games with that ship it just gives you so much early power it's very very hard to defend against um and it's just you gotta use it you gotta use or lose it so we're gonna use it uh that guy can just stick there i'm gonna wait for him to get one more probe next turn and then i'm gonna send it over here to discover this neutral sieve to declare war on them and get some free happiness because that will put this guy up to ecstatic which which is great oh i made a mistake there you never you always want to have um a queue of things to build because right there um all of my extra industry that the surplus industry after finishing this last locust was wasted where i could have put that towards either another locus or maybe this uh cerebral reality you know something that i'm going to build later on but we just finished our technology that lets us colonize steps so that's exactly what we're going to do yeah so it's going to take four turns where it would have taken maybe three or probably even two with four cravers on an undepleted planet but again we'll survive all right so yeah we've gone towards autonomous construction so that's great remove our stuff um yes these guys are lasers so turtle's not gonna help us but since we also don't have any shields that's not gonna help uh what is it power to the shields also isn't gonna help us so we have to i guess revive and rebuild is probably the best choice um i forgot to switch this out because this thing's kind of crap see we'll just fight this and and our big ship's just gonna absolutely wreck them yeah not even didn't even take any damage really and oh we had two sets so same thing rebuild who i probably should have done probably should have done a turtle there because this guy that guy had some some projectile damage all right so we are now blockading right orion orion or whatever uh so yep so we locate it and we're going to be doing eight damage per turn which is not a lot i really had hoped to have autonomous construction done by now because then we could have our seizure guys that do uh that do 15 but that will have to come a little later all right this guy's leveled up again and since we're going to be going to war super early i want to actually since we got those uh those early laser turrets this 20 percent projectile damage actually isn't going to be that useful because even a since this has two levels it goes up to 40 so even a 40 buff on those early on our starting projectile guns are not going to be as good as our awesome early laser turrets i'll just pull those up so you guys can see what i'm talking about yeah so these laser things do 13 damage and these only do six so a 40 increase of six is going to be a little less than three so these will be doing nine damage or these are doing 13. so we're obviously going to want to stick with these um so we don't actually need him to have our hero to have the increased uh increased projectile damage yet which puts us in an interesting position we can either keep levels start transitioning him for his uh his eventual military role because as you can see uh his end game guardian you know they're they're great military generals or we can keep him that has an economic powerhouse because the craver economic stuff is actually pretty good so you have obviously this forced labor that we've been leveling up you have lucky windfall which gives you more influence you have defending troop health which isn't that great the real big one is this last one which is plus eight depletion points so you're depleted your planets become depleted faster but you get plus 32 fluids on depleted planets so the more depleted planets you have actually use you still get a benefit you still gain benefits even if the planets are depleted um so this guy isn't a horrible economic hero but he's not great but even that being said i think i'm going to stick stick with him in in this case doing the economy since we're a little bit behind because of that mediterranean tech that we had to grab so yeah so we're going to do a meta uh uh economic thing grab some more industry since it's uh plus 10 per system plus 10 per hot and we start on a jungle that's actually going to be uh pretty useful pretty useful early game alrighty so we have our one scout ship left it should have a probe it does indeed all right we found those guys hey guys we're at war now great all right and that's kind of his job job well done guy all right uh maybe we can start setting them up here again start scouting this guy we also want to make another pupa let's see actually you might want to switch those two around let's see how much more times eight turns we have our supply ships coming in so i'm going to guess that that's going to be about turns or probably more like four turns until that's done um yeah then i'll give this a little bit of time to recover we'll see we'll see we'll throw that up in here we might we might uh do half of the step colonization and then pump out a pupa since it only takes one turn and send that up here so that we can take this nice big step with the transfines and start getting them getting those uh okay so moving on let's say we're losing some gold now what happened there oh it's probably military i'm just going military upkeep is yeah really high for this stage in the game because we have so many ships um but yeah so you can see that even you know each ship only adds a couple probably two two damage to their uh guys per turn zero so these these just normal little ships are not very good at sieging we really need those specialists in order to take this down fast so once we get over here um we're really going to want to have that uh that sieging infrastructure already set up so that's something i want to get asap all right not really much to do let's see so after this since we've been building up our we're probably going to want this too so let's see so after that we're going to want to get this hype herein and these uh your planetary network although now we're having dust problems so we're definitely going to want galactic commodities at some point um we'll have to the order of these two will really depend on on our money our dust situation a little bit later down the road but for now we can just put them both in queue and uh and continue on so yeah because unfortunately right now we're not utilizing this uh this hyperion that we have and cancer system uh it's not being put into our our stores because we don't have the technology done obviously all right so now we have this this fleet um which is pretty enormous at this stage of the game 488 power and that's even before we added our last two locusts so we are super powerful super duper powerful yep four turns as i predicted with another one on the way we actually should probably bump that up and get did that say two turns that's probably because yeah um yeah i think three turns should be fine uh because really what we want is to get that uh that undepleted planet as soon as possible and then we can start cranking out some more stuff [Music] so we'll just delay that for one turn it's not going to be that big of a deal and if the empire beats us here i mean again not big not that big of a deal because we're just going to be attacking them anyways all right so that guy's moving there how are these guys doing so i'm wondering if i can spare the manpower i have 85 it's not a lot i'm wondering if i can spare the manpower to take these guys by force and i think i can because this is just going too slowly i really want i have four turns into autonomous constructions done i want to get these guys start starting to be in position to be over here by the time that's done and start killing the fleets of these guys that when my my termites come in my seizures come in that they're they're all prepped and ready so i think i'm going to try invading this now and if it backfires horribly well then lesson learned all right yeah so you can see that they only have 32 guys to my hundred so we're gonna do some preemptive bombing hopefully preserve some of our dudes yeah did a whole bunch of damage to them didn't take much damage here so yeah i think we should be fine and take it next turn this is finishing next turn that's finishing next turn we have the pupa already done so okay yeah so the thing that i'm most concerned about right now is that negative dust per turn that's kind of concerning kind of concerning all right so since now they only have nine people super low we're just going to do a gorilla so we can make sure not to kill anyone unnecessarily or ruin any of the infrastructure they've built up nicely and take minimum damage to our troops and there we go we got them let's see i don't actually know what their thinkers and tinkers plus oh that's pretty cool so what that does is that uh when you have these two technologies linked so if you have this one this one costs 25 percent less but with that thinkers and tinker straight if you have this one this one costs 45 percent less so so it makes these links incredibly valuable or even more valuable than they already are all right so we have two turns left on autonomous construction so we're going to grab all of these guys and get them moving in this direction so we're gonna want actually one more locust interesting these guys are getting oh yeah oh it's because i forgot to switch them over here so they are ecstatic happy so what do we value more do we want the food 105 120 and 94 or yeah i think i think having the ecstatic even though i'm not using my slave my slave driver passive having the ecstatic uh happiness is actually just going to be more beneficial for us in the long term or in the short term and the long term probably all right so we got our cancer first thing oh this is interesting i really wish i had uh plasma metallurgy done because i would have built that instead of the xeno-industrial plant since we this is neither temperate or fertile since mediterranean is the worst of the tier ones so i think i'm just going to build should i just take the 10 infrastructure the 10 industry here i could i think that might get us started i can't really think of anything i think i'm going to do a cerebral reality to get some more science and some more dust because and then just have them pump out some locus until we finish that tech and then then i can get him uh taking advantage of these uh strategic resources because because the uh xeno-industrial industry plan thing is really just not that good for that system and we have this system that we need to do which is a tundra again xeno-industrial plant is not that good it has kessler's want a piece of crap place um yeah so i think i'm gonna do the same thing that these guys are really not gonna be all that useful i actually want a scavenger first and then these guys um so yeah these guys these two places are really not gonna be all specifically this one it's not going to be all that useful until i can get plasma metallurgy and start building these interplanetary transport networks to get four per four people per or four industry per person on this planet and that that's going to be really great that's going to be great and that's when that's going to start being useful but my main economic powerhouse is going to be right here with its massive 120 industry per turn all right so we got our pupa to go take gym construction yeah our scavenger here all right so that's just finding the uh oh wait we're on the ash not the tundra oh my god the tundra is absolutely garbage um so you get this i've i've seen this quest all the time and you either take minus five science for 10 turns or minus 50 science to have an 80 chance of discovering 150 dust or you can just take the 75 dust and uh not worry about it and since we want to be rushing i didn't check how much how close we are here but since we're wanting to be rushing we're a little bit behind on science anyways and we don't really need the dust we're just going to take the the net or now um and not uh not take the penalties yeah holy crap this thing is absolute crap ugh that's one of the worst plans i've ever seen super duper righty uh i don't have that yet so we'll just bring him got all those searched so we'll bring him kind of this way and he can come with us okay um where did all my ships go what the hell are all my ships oh there there that was weird okay um i don't think i need to do anything else this turn uh elections as the cravers are incredibly boring because as you can see we have 100 military support and we will always have 100 military support and only my cravers get to vote so we'll get military support every single time which is fine it's not a big deal but since we're going into our our blitzkrieg super offensive state we really want these lower fleet costs which is going to reduce the cost to build our ships so even our little dinky uh dinky places in orion and cancer here are still going to be able to pump out ships not great but relatively quickly and they're going to have metallurgy in one turn so i'll probably do the plant here right off the bat these guys are producing at least decent 55 not horrible not great but but decent because they're on the ash planet the problem is that they're not producing any food because they're mutinous so we'll see fortunately they still get all the the war benefits but since i just killed one of those neutral places i'm only getting 45 since i haven't declared war on them yet but that will soon be remedied all right got our last locust for our nine person fleet which is going to be great let's start this colony here which will get us some transvine so once we're done getting this we're definitely gonna want that and that so then we can start upgrading to stage two uh systems and i'll probably use the vines the other option would be to use the little bit of red saying that i'm getting from somewhere i guess yeah from here red saying gives additional food per person um and the trans vine gives happiness happiness i think is going to be better because that just gives me more slaves and that will transmit transfer into both food in i mean that will be all fits food industry dust and science so i think that will just be strictly better um trans vine is the cravers are the only ones that i prioritize transfined on in the early stages because you can because you can do that little slave um slavery thing which is pretty great not for the slaves obviously but but for us since we are the overlords alrighty so now we have these guys that is a powerful army at turn 22. um yeah so oh uh one last thing i forgot to do last turn i can create these seizures that i taught i've been talking about so i call them termite termites if i can type termite class you take your normal your normal colony ship that just has these three uh three support modules you put on some boosters and two of these guys and that means each one of these ships is going to be uh doing 30 uh manpower damage per turn and you saw my entire fleet was doing like 12 or something so 30 in the early game is enormous and they're super cheap only 218 and 2 titanium so now that we have those we're going to want to crank a bunch of them out so i think i like to start with four and that you know 120 damage most uh most places only have 200 manpower at the beginning anyways i should tell us here yeah you can see where it says uh efficiency 100 200 of 200 so these four termites will do 120 of that 200 manpower every turn which is just absolutely absolutely absurd it means i can siege for one turn and then invade and take very little damage to my uh my manpower of my main fleet so we are going to move in this direction and get these guys just fighting um the empire stuff um since they really no one can really contest me right now i'm just too powerful too strong these guys are going to be the replacements because my locusts are fairly squishy so they are i might lose a couple so i want to have a few of them in reinforce some reinforcements on their way in um these guys i might have stick around here just to be annoying to these guys uh to the lumaris because yeah that's what cravers do we're annoying all right but we are we are quickly approaching the turn 30 i'm glad i i got to this uh this early war definitely want the study because i believe this gives you a 15 15 industry on all of your places for like 20 turns it's absolutely amazing always always always click study even though it does a little bit of damage to one of your fleets um yes so i'm glad i got to show you guys my early game termite strategy because i came up with that i'm pretty proud of it as well as my early uh locust strategy these this early scavenger scout ship using them as military ships that you can skip the the actual military ships because you need for cravers you need two technologies to get to your uh your normal military ships yeah as i said plus 15 on all the colonies in the empire for 10 turns absolutely incredible so good for this stage of the game it means we're going to be able to pump out those locusts even faster all right yeah so for as i was saying for cravers in order to get to the standard military soldier class ships you need two technologies which is going to put you way far behind i think getting the extra cp and the seizure ships for one technology even though it's a stage two a level two technology is just much much much better and then you can swarm them with these weak ships that do a lot of damage but are really easy to produce and then you also have the ability to take their uh take enemy colonies very quickly and then since all your fleet your main fleet is going to be supported by this uh the big intruder ship who's just huge and amazing um it's really going to work out well i've had it work out very well so now we're here um hopefully we'll i might go a little bit past 30 because i really want to show you guys how fast these termites just eat through enemy defenses um so yeah let's uh let's declare war on these guys since we're militarists it's free so we're at war which obviously gives us extra happiness we can barricade this place so right now my full fleet of 9 cp joy is doing only 18 manpower damage per turn compare that to my one dude over here that's going to be doing 30 damage per turn so this one guy is better at sieging than this entire massive fleet in the early game which is just great that's why those guys are so powerful and why i and that's why i think rushing autonomous construction is such a great early game strategy for for cravers because you start with uh with enway fusion which makes this very easy to get early game oh and one oh i actually don't have any manpower normally i would also switch over from infantry to tanks because tanks do 50 additional damage against infantry troops so so this just makes your invasions easier even easier than they're already going to be with your uh with your amazing sieging to reduce the number of enemy troops uh so we got galactic exchange and then we're gonna be getting multi-thread management fantastic i'm trying to think if there's anything else that we need to queue up um we already have our reduced fleet costs still getting a bunch of extra money but since we're at war with a bunch of people all of our places are still ecstatic look at that plus 60 happiness from wars freaking awesome um we have our xeno-industrial plant but since yeah i might throw that there because really i want this to be uh to be a good place and getting an additional four industry per person on this planet it's gonna be really good moving into the future all righty uh i think that's about it um normally if we hadn't had that little setback and i had taken my hero into the more more offensive route instead of having him as a governor he would be leading the attack so he would i wouldn't not only have seven good ships to begin with but i would also have my upgraded hero on here and and that would give us you know a huge advantage over anything and it still might be worth it um i'm just i'm not sure i kind of want to keep him pumping out those uh those termites since i was a little slow getting there as i've talked about a couple times before oh and i also need to change this stupid revive and rebuild because that's crap all right but we're just going to be turtling up killing these guys without taking any damage because we're super powerful and continuing our blockade i'm gonna do that right now um i'm going to switch to getting lucky because since we use all uh you can i'll pull these guys up to show you you see that these things have a five percent critical chance so you know if they have um guys that do energy damage that we don't have a shield against might as well you know take that five percent chance to do a whole bunch of extra damage so it's probably the best one you know but we're going to be using turtle or power to the shields most the time later game one once our ships have both haul protection and a shield those are the two that i find that i use most often okay we got some more locusts done here which are just coming in to reinforce um as needed these guys are pretty far away they're not gonna reach there no matter what so they're just gonna start stockpiling and uh defending so for our eventual war against these guys i'll probably have a locus army up here that's going to continue and take these uh neutral sieves and then i'll just take the big ship since it has 11 movement speed and pull it down here for the uh the army i'm creating here and doesn't just immediately attack the lumaris here since they're pretty weak and then by that time i'll have baryonic shielding and i'll just move down and then start uh taking this neutral slip down here and start expanding uh into this direction so that's that's my plan right now um we'll see how far we get there in the in the course of this video again we're right now we're just sieging up kind of waiting for our termites to get there so that uh since we have pretty limited manpower we really want to just take these down as low as we can as low as reasonable so we don't take too much damage from our uh from our ship or for our manpower onto our ships because we really we really want to preserve these as much as possible preserve the manpower um because we're going to be doing several successive invasions we're going to be doing here at pavo and then nalin and then rigel and estra or estra yeah so this is four systems all in a row and we wouldn't be able to just brute force forces we don't have that type of manpower so we re it's really important to do the sieging getting them down into the double digits if you don't have the time but i really like getting them down to zero if you have a whole bunch of these termites and it's really just like one or two turns all right so we're we're continuing on with the governing and using him as a governor oh we got another termite cranked out yeah and so since we kept him as a governor we're now cranking out a termite every turn which is great they're only 100 with the the fleet law they're only 180 industry we're producing 150 so not quite every term but but pretty damn close uh since we are ecstatic we can actually move one of these guys over and get some slavery going uh these guys don't have any special actually he's producing additional so we're keeping him on the jungle because he produces additional manpower on fertile and this guy doesn't do anything additional on fertile or normal so we'll move him over and use him as the slave so that we just get the little additional manpower not a big deal but you know every little bit helps um after these two guys we're going to leverage our huge early vids advantage having this undepleted planet after these termites are done to get the wonder so we can produce it in 18 turns which is a very very quick um at this stage of the game it just turned 26 so we're going to leverage our ability to uh to have this huge vids advantage and get this this thing early and i might actually once we start working on this i might move him over um to here and to accelerate this even further or even faster alrighty so we are almost done we got our scavenger here let's move them up here because these are a couple more curiosities that i can uh can investigate for fun all right another uh another another interesting thing that you can do and you can do this with all races is that whenever a colony is being it just finished creating so you saw this one pop up it just turned from an outpost to a colony this turn they all start with zero manpower so if you have a ship and it really it doesn't matter really what ship that is it can be super weak if you have a ship arrive at a place where that's turning from an outpost into a colony that turn and you can just immediately invade it if you're at war with the people and it's super easy to take it's just like a free colony uh that's that's a technique that i've used against uh against both ais and people uh they just don't expect you just come out of nowhere and since if you click on outpost you can see when they're going to be turning into colonies you just arrive right when that happens and you just boom the colony is yours so that's a really nice strategy especially with cravers because you're so fast and you're so strong and you can you can build up that early aggression very very quickly and very effectively so yeah so that guy's moving in and boom it went from eight uh 18 to 50. so that's just so much better and so that's we're gonna probably sit on this this place for two more turns and then and then take it once once their manpower gets down to 46 which is way better than 200 i'm gonna lose many fewer guys or just fewer guys that's some batting that's some bad english right there all right i got some more lucas in the train made another mistake here because i ran out of uh running out of the queue so you don't want to do that so we got some slavery going on they're kind of unhappy um an important thing with cravers is you really want to have two planets because if you run into this unhappiness thing um it's usually because you know you're losing 20 happiness from your slavery so if you're in a on if your happiness challenged then you can just move all of your uh your non-cravers to one planet and your cravers to the other and just segregate them so that you then you can maintain some happiness and maintain your growth um but for just these one planet things it's really not that big of a deal because unhappiness actually doesn't mean that much since you can't go into anarchy anyways so it's fine temporarily and since we want the industry anyways we're just going to leave it like that oh but i do need to select something to build so let's get some more science uh speaking of science we did this so hmm i think i want to get happiness is i'm gonna be getting the uh the transvine happiness for this so that's not that important let's get some food since we have lots of hot and cold planets this might be very beneficial at least in the early game like i think every system is either hot or cold i have very few actually temperate planets yep so let's get that and now we have our level 2 modernization as i said i think i'm going to be going for trans vines because we really want to maintain that happiness and as we start killing more people so like as soon as we take out the empire and these neutral sieves are happy happiness is actually going to be a huge problem what i might do and something that's kind of clever is that you find this uh the empire has three places this place is awesome this place is awesome and this place is a total piece of crap but what i might do is just sit a couple of ships on like a couple of my spare locusts on this colony and just leave the empire in existence to milk that 15 happiness for a little while since they're not going to be able to do crap from that place they're never going to be able to pose a real threat so i'll just have them sit on there for a little while until i get my happiness stabilized and then i'll kill them and then probably evacuate that system because it is just absolute crap a gas a barren and then a snow with with long seasons oh i guess tunnel slip gear is not bad so this thing might be decent not not great not great by any means it's actually a totally scrap i'll probably evacuate that system just that doesn't drag on my happiness later on and i don't really need it for any reason all righty um so yeah oh that was quick um so yeah now we got the farming thing let's let's start moving towards our actual battleships because at this point turned 30 a lot of the other um definitely the uh the ais will probably have uh have real attack ships and maybe some of the more aggressive human players will also be moving at least in that direction so we want to maintain our military advantages we want to keep being aggressive uh when we want to start transitioning our or start leveraging our still nine command point power into those attack ships and keep keep that ball rolling what you really want to be doing is just snowballing your early game advantages using this big ship and your additional um access to command points and your additional inherent command points into that advantage and you really really need to be snowballing early as cravers so as you can see now they're down to 56 or sorry 96 reading's hard and just since this is turn 28 and this is only a 30 minute or 30 turn video uh we might as well start an invasion so you can see i just out outclassed them hugely we're going to do a preemptive bombing because we want to preserve as much of our limited manpower as possible so we're just going to do it they probably did a conscription yeah so they did a conscription so they got 200 extra but since i did preemptive bombing did some damage then beforehand i only lost a couple guys so not that big of a deal we'll continue the invasion and probably take it next turn uh what do we got here this is the scavenger i thought i told you to go over here all righty so we got a termite oh i have two scavengers interesting oh this one's probably one of my original ones that's going to be a nice place uh all right um trying to think oh i probably forgot to do this didn't i yeah i did um yeah i have a whole bunch of gold so even though i'm only going to get half effectiveness so that was at ten turns and now it's five i'm i was only going to get a half effectiveness of this but i really want a second place uh or i guess this is a fourth place but um my second colony i really want that that'd be really nice to have so we have our termites just trucking along still and uh you can see that we'll be ending this wonder at turn 15 which is within our um depleted frame um so we probably won't uh we're not going to deplete this planet before we're done with our wonder which is important having a planet become depleted in the middle of a wonder is really unfortunate because it kind of throws off all of the calculations that you do beforehand so this is great timing's perfect still have this guy over here so we get a little bit of benefit from slave labor but we remain we keep everyone ecstatic um yeah i don't think there's anything much left to do in this uh this turn here we can send a scout down that way just to see what's up maybe over there all right we are coming to the end of this video hopefully i'll be able to take this place and at least start an invasion on uh on their capital look at that got that uh let's fight these pirates you can just see that we have absolute overwhelming force against pirates even these more advanced pirates and especially since we have those awesome bonus uh bonus lasers like so few all of the pirates have um coated hulls instead of lasers and most early people since you know they're going to be fighting pirates they'll also go with the hull protection rather than the lasers so getting those upgraded lasers is the absolute best curiosity that you can get early game as cravers i love it i love that that came up in this game when i'm doing my video so now we've taken his second place and we still have six movement speed left so now we can pop straight over onto his main place fight him here look at that overwhelming force so these are his scout troops with 38 attack power and 63 defense you can see that they have uh armored plating and no shields versus mine which have 75 attack and 56 armor plating so i am just so much more powerful than he is and i have nine cp to his available four so you can see you can see how this overwhelming force just can absolutely snowball out of control and so yeah so there we are turn 29 and i already have a siege around uh the capital of a main place i've taken one major a one minor sieve and one one colony of a major sieve so yeah that's kind of how cravers go or really that that's how i play them and i've found quite a bit of success you can see that yep this has 260 manpower base we're taking out 50 per turn so i'll probably sit on this for i don't know um so we started we did this one at 96 and it took two turns and we lost some additional people probably if i had just continued sieging for one additional turn i would have taken it in one in that and the same so i would have uh sat sieging for one turn and then taken it the next turn so i would have gotten it at the same time but lost less people since i would have only done one invasion so that's probably what i'll do with this one especially since i have more termites kind of in the pipes they're on their way up here so i'll probably sit on this for maybe three turns since we're going to be having more termites arrive so so this number is going to go up very quickly so probably this turn will get minus 50. next turn it will be minus 80. so that's 130 that'll take it down to half and then the turn after that it will probably be at um 50ish so so i'll set it on it for this turn next turn and then i'll invade on turn 31 and i'll probably take it in one or two turns so yeah that is my that that's what i would mark as a good start for cravers taking out then your nearest civilization with the best starting planets at about turn 30 to 35 and that's going to give you a huge advantage because you know if i hadn't done this kind of blitzkrieg attack i would have been stuck with my main place which is kind of okay this place which was kind of okay and then this place which is you know mediocre at best but now instead of just having those three places i took a minor i assimilated a minor sieve by force i have this amazing place that he took with a huge savannah and the terran and then his starting place which is always fantastic with the terran but then this also has an ocean and an arid so so i'm getting kind of his start wow which is really great and my start which is going to let me snowball very quickly if we want to look at the points even on endless difficulty i am the point leader at turn 29 which is you know oh unheard of for any other race i i have never been able to be the point leader so early on with any other race and i don't believe my brother has either so um we're going to be wrapping up this video pretty soon last thing i would want to bring up is so even you might think that i would want to put use my uh my limited numbers of trans vines over here and orion since they are the least happy as if we pull this up you can see that they are the least happy other than my than this place that i just took but i'm actually going to use them here um in in my main place because as i've said a couple times now this this 25 happiness is actually giving me free slate two free slaves and that means i can bring two of these guys or maybe even three i think the cutoff for ecstatic is 85 so i don't think i can bring all three but i can bring two of these guys over onto this planet and then they'll start producing double fids and that actually will help this go faster in the long term even though i'm sacrificing one turn to make this modernization so that's that's what i'm going to be doing and that's why even though these guys are already ecstatic using the the additional happiness here is actually going to have the biggest effect on my empire so just to wrap things up let's do this last turn um one of these these have a terran so let's get this just for completionism uh yeah oh this guy doesn't have anything to do either obviously we want more locusts and that's it so turn 30 the end of the video we are so let's do a little review even though i know i did that just last turn um we are we have built all of the major things in our capital we are a good chunk of the way into the first uh the first wonder probably being able to do it faster than any other civ we have taken a minor civilization one system of a major civilization we already have their capital under siege and we'll probably be taking it in uh not this turn but not this turn not next turn but the turn after that so turn uh turn 32 we will probably own the empire's capital which is pretty incredible also at turn 30 we have the point lead by not a huge but a significant margin we're at 220 and the next highest is 201 we have a path of advance after we take out this uh this empire capital we're going to be moving into taking out these two these two minor sieves which will give us their really good assimilation bonuses plus five happiness again more happiness is great for cravers because that just means you can run more slaves and selfless that that doesn't really do anything for us because cravers are actually incapable of signing treaties so this one's going to be really great this one's just kind of meh um but it will give us some extra people in an extra system um big things that i want to review here are the special ships that i make the locus class ship where you get the the best weapons that you have early on with some uh some movement ooh actually that did i do that wrong yeah i forgot to replace these engines my mistake these are supposed to have seven movement speed uh yeah so you be sure to replace those engines um yeah get that three movement speeds they're super quick so get your two weapon slots i usually use pole plating rather than shields early game because most people especially pirates use uh use slugs rather than lasers and then you can just mass produce these and leverage your early power the early power of your additional cp and your access to this amazing tech autonomous construction to get nine command points early early early in the game and tanks if you can afford them the second thing that i want to stress is the creation of these termites these are the guys with these sieging bits that you get from autonomous construction as well they cost a little bit of titanium but hopefully you've secured a source of that by now um and these guys just let you absolutely wreck um manpower defenses so yeah you remember that when i had just my fleet orbiting this one it was doing something like 12 damage per turn 12 manpower damage per turn but with just two of these termite guys i'm doing 82 and that's just absolutely ridiculous it's so it's so fast that no one who's not no one who's not prepared for this already it's too fast for them to respond at this point in the game that when i started sieging here it that was three turns ago or four turns ago and i've already taken it and i'm already at their place and there's just nothing that they can do to to challenge this nine pound this nine cp fleet with 712 power there's just absolutely nothing that anyone can do so they either have to predict that that's going to happen and already have a big force built up that will slowly whittle you down or they lose and that's just that's uh the craver zergling rush the locust swarm as i like to call it um future on in this game you know if i were to continue playing this game as i kind of said earlier i'm going to take this uh take the empire home world who then pull my big ship since this thing has 11 movement speed and start sending it down here i've already started making troops down here and so once it arrives i'll have a small fleet already ready and then as soon as i'm done with the empire i'm going to immediately start on the lumaris because they're just not strong enough i think they're probably one of the point trailers yeah they're 158 they're in second last place or third last place um so yeah so they're pretty weak they'll have no way to stand up to me and then boom i'll get two or three easy systems from there and then i'll have secured my position on this constellation and i'll be free to start expanding into other ones but this is going to be my base and i'm just going to be able to leverage this enormous early game advantage that i've gotten from my early aggression leveraging my early access to additional command points and my awesome base class scout units and i think that's going to be about it thank you all for watching for x alchemist again i'm david and these were the cravers thanks for watching

Channel: 4X Alchemist

Views: 71,064

Keywords: cravers, endless space, endless space 2, 4xalchemist, 4x, strategy guide, strategy games, expert guide, competitive, es2

Id: bAJ_hirMZsE

Length: 83min 30sec (5010 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2017