Stellaris NEW Machine Ascension Paths Explained

the age of men is over the time of the orc has come Stellaris the Machine age has brought us three new Ascension paths for machine Empires but what do they do and how strong are they in this video I am going to break them down entirely so you can understand what on Earth is going on without any further Ado let's dive straight in there are only two types of Empires that have access to these new Ascension Paths of course you will have to start the game by picking a machine portrait and then either be a gested out Consciousness machine intelligence that means you are not individualist or you can pick ethics and one of the regular governments and be an individualist machine only machine Empires be gout or individualist can pick from the three machine Ascension paths to begin the process of ascending as a machine Empire it's pretty dancing simple you only need to complete three traditions and unlock two Ascension perks and then as your third Ascension perk you can take the synthetic age this will start a transformation situation which will unlock and pay for the opener of either modularity virtuality or nanotech tradition trees this Ascension perk also unlocks the synthetic age agenda which will grant you machine modification Technologies as a research option allowing you to get more points or traits on your machine species despite the obvious superiority of the machine form our advancement has remained iterative at best self-imposed safety standards have resulted in stagnation conclusion more drastic measures are required we're going to be doing some small scale experiments into nanotechnology modularity and virtuality and as we do then we'll get some cool bonuses here we have the situation at the base level if you pick real time you will lose 10% of your money L Unity if you don't like that idea you can go down to error correcting which takes two points off every month this will slow down your overall transformation by 25 months which will as you'll see in a moment reduce your research output during that period for physics engineering and Society at different times but overall an Ascension does not count as complete until we have unlocked every part of the tradition so whilst error correcting may seem slow in the long run because we're not losing monthly Unity you'll actually get to that end point a little bit quicker though you can also pick overclock getting more situation speed this means we'll complete this 16 months faster than base at only 84 months but you will lose 20% of your monthly Unity as you progress down the first part stage one you'll do some experiments on nanites depending on how much you spend here of your monthly engineering research you will get a different bonus at the end generally I'd recommend taking the partial losing only 10% of your monthly research output and getting a moderate bonus the nanotech discovery will give you a feature producing nanites on your Capital really early on in the game it will immediately give you access to the nanite actuators edict which will cost a hefty sum of upkeep every month and what I probably recommend you do here is save up lots of nanites and then run this for a few years at a time then turn it off and save up more nanites once again the modularity research will take up Society research or you could organize some population trials killing off a bunch of your drones you probably don't want to do that because that will hurt your economy as you can see though this loss in research only occurs while you are in this specific stage once I move to the next stage I will no longer get this malice to my research speed for society mod it will give you access to living metal giving you a living metal deposit on your Capital World virtual probably has the best bonus going here I recommend you always pick top priority for virtual research results when you complete the virtual research you'll get a virtual power plant granting you a large amount of energy and some dark matter as monthly income jumping over to our home World here you can see in the features the three resource deposits we've now gained access to thanks to this situation after completing the research you can then choose which of the three tradition trees you want either the nanom machine tradition the modular tradition or the virtual tradition whichever of these three you pick will double the output of that feature on your Capital world let's start off by looking at the purest and possibly most powerful of the three Ascension paths virtuality this one is going to give you an instant and massive boost to your economy research Unity basically everything and if you're enjoying this video please Ascend that like button in the name of the mommy sah the opener for this tradition will add the virtual trait to your main species you will get plus two code breaking and plus two encryption when you finish the virtual tradition you will Ascend beyond the needs of things like population growth or population assembly virtual pops will be instantly created to meet the job requirements of buildings and districts this means if you have a job open if there is an open position on any Planet at the end of the month that job will be filled with a brand new pop that has just been created so it's a good idea to make sure that you've already created a secondary species before you virtually Ascend that way you will still get access to population assembly and you can use this secondary species to I don't know sell them on the slave market or something [Music] it's all of your machine leaders will gain the virtual leader trait this trait straight up makes your leaders Immortal any planetary Governors will boost research output by 10% on the planet they are governing scientists get increased anomaly research speed archaeology excavation speed and astral Rift exploration commanders get increased ship fire rate and more combat disengagement chance and officials get a straight up boost to monthly experience if they are a representative in the Federation or diplomatic weight from technology if they're in the galactic Community your ruler will get a boost to monthly influence and some encryption bonus for your Empire as well there's also two planetary decisions you'll gain access to will look at those in just a moment plus should capacity is probably the first pick you should take as you go down the virtual tradition tree this grants you quite a special bonus it modifies the virtual species trait by granting plus 17 5% resources from jobs however for every Colony you own including your Capital this trait is modified down by 25% so if you just have one planet every pop with the virtual trait gets plus 150% resources from jobs it also increases the pop upkeep of every virtual pop by 0.1 energy credits per Colony you own so if you have five colonies every pop will have an additional 0.5 Energy Credit upkeep now there's also a few other bonuses that the virtual trait comes with you'll get a reduction to pop housing usage of minus 90% an increase to species minimum habitability meaning your minimum habitability as a machine goes up from 50% to 75% on every single planet and then of course the other bonuses here from the tradition your planet are also very unconquerable as a virtual Empire if any of your planets are conquered all of the pops will blink out of existence and that means you're not a juicy economic Target to other Empires that might want to take your stuff datadriven logic Loops reduces your calculator and coordinator upkeep that means you will be getting research and unity a little bit cheaper you'll also get a reduction to leader upkeep and a modest decrease to Empire size from Pops however your Empire size from planets will be doubled with a plus 100% bonus you might be starting to notice the virtual tradition is a tall tradition pushing you down a tall play style capacity synchronization unlocks the virtual economy Focus this focus is super powerful depending on which Focus you pick research Unity or leaders you'll get a massive boost to that but a small decrease to the others virtual research Focus increases your research from jobs by plus 100% virtual Unity Focus increases your Unity by plus 100% And virtual leader Focus increases your leader experience gain counsel agender speed and effective counselor skill I'd probably recommend you first switch to a virtual Unity Focus to rush out your tradition and complete the virtual Ascension as quickly as possible and then once you've done that push over into a virtual research Focus to complete the research tree the last two picks in this tradition are quite good as well Advanced server maintenance allows every maintenance drone on your planet to give you a 1% increase to resources from virtual pops on that planet additionally your capital buildings will increase the maximum number of districts you can build on a planet at planetary Ascension tiers 1 5 and 10 so a fully ascended Planet increases its size by three productivity simulations means that districts that provide maintenance drones coordinators or calculators now provide additional jobs this is most useful on habitats and ring worlds as those have districts that provide calculators and coordinators here we can see those pops springing into action I have 9 jobs open right now and suddenly we have them all full if you conquer a new planet and you don't want to keep it what you can do is get rid of all of the regular pops on it and then instead of having to pay massive influence cost to resettle the last pop off the planet you can instead shut the server down at a cost of 200 unity and a small time of 30 days and that will decolonize the planet we've looked at the virtual tradition from the point of view of a gashed out Consciousness now let's look at it from the point of view of an individualistic machine CU they have some slightly different bonuses the majority of this tradition is identical however instead of it providing bonuses to maintenance drones and extra maintenance drone jobs it now provides bonuses to clerks and extra clerk jobs clerks will now Provide Plus One resources from virtual Pops in addition to the trade value and amenities they are outputting combining this with the trading algorithms trait on your virtual pops you're going to find you can produce a whole lot of trade value in addition to that plus 1% resource output from jobs that every virtual pop on a planet as an individualistic machine you can also create a humanopolis world which are very very powerful for virtual Empires you'll get a massive amount of jobs from your district and residential Archies will kind of function like a biotrophy archology for a rogue ctor every single clerk here will be giving us plus 1% resource output from our jobs for all those virtual pops the next Ascension path we'll look at is modularity modularity I would argue is probably the second most powerful at least initially because we're going to get a whole host of bonuses to our population from their traits along with this tradition but we don't get instant access to automatically created pops like virtual the opener for modularity will grant us some living metal from all catalytic drug drones in our Empire that is also metallurgist drones so anyone outputting Alloys will now also Grant you some living metal as a finisher for this tradition you'll get the synth trait on all of your leaders minus 15% upkeep from jobs and that's about it the synth trait on your ruler grants plus one monthly mechanical pop assembly for all governors you'll get 5% additional robot output and scientists will get the normal bonus to anomaly speed archaeology speed and astral Rift speed commanders get 10% ship fire rate and armor hardening and officials get a small boost to Diplo weight from economy and plus one monthly experience if you send them to a federation high-speed Replacements the first tradition pick you can have here increases your menial drone pop resource output by 10% and increases the rate at which Auto modding traits are optimized amongst your population every month by four on the right hand side we'll have pacification modules granting plus 10 stability Empire wide which is awesome and an additional 0.25 Warrior drone stability will also get some more army damage as well Advanced tools will unlock the advanced traits you need for your species modification you'll get plus4 modification points and plus4 modification trait picks it also reduces the cost of doing the special project by 50% so you can modify your species a little bit faster liquid metal joints increases your mechanical pop assembly speed from replicated by 0.5 as a Gest out Consciousness Empire we have quite a lot of replicator jobs in our planets this basically takes us from one pop assembly per replicator up to 1.5 that's a 50% boost and it comes at only the cost of 0.15 living metal upkeep let's not forget we'll get a lot of living metal from our metallurgists or catalytic drones so that really should not be an issue for us last up here menial drone pop job output from coordinators is also increased by 2% so you've got lots of ways here of buffing your base menial drone output where this Ascension really shines though is in your species traits modularity is the biological Ascension of the Machine Age here we have a species I have already optimized for Alloy production this species is getting a whopping plus 100% output for all alloy production that is on par if not above a psionically ascended Empire in terms of Pop bonuses the core this is dark matter engines it grants a whopping 60% resources from jobs at the low low cost of 0.01 Dark Matter upkeep per pop that means for 100 pops we need only one dark matter upkeep each dark matter is going to cost us around 26 energy so if we only look at the bonus energy output to our technicians this is basically going to pay for itself I've then grabbed shielded components granting an extra 5% resources from jobs and and extra habitability along with some leader lifespan exotic fuel consumption requiring 0.02 exotic gases upkeep per pop so one exotic gas is for every 50 pops but this gives us another 15% so we've got a base resource output from jobs so far of plus 80% that is great for research that is great for basic resources that's just great last but not least here I've gone for rare Crystal exterior giving us that 20% boost to metal just output and that comes at the cost of one rare Crystal for every 50 pops other great traits we'll have access to include suppressed which is basically the machine version of Nerf staple giving us 10% resources from jobs but this species would no longer be able to generate leaders and they cannot be employed as rulers or Specialists and of course complex drones here do count as rulers or Specialists so don't think you can get away with putting this on your species if you are a Gest out Consciousness it just won't work that way monoform reduces our pop housing usage and gives us a nice 20% boost to Mechanical pop assembly I'd recommend combining this with mass produced to get a nice tidy 35% mechanical pop assembly speed on all of the pops assembling in your Empire switching over from the resource producer to the alloy monkey here is giving us basically an extra seven additional pop assembly speed every month here on the capital that's awesome inquisitive axium should be placed on your Rec research worlds this is going to Grant you a 20% bonus to your calculator output and it will also reduce your leader upkeep and leader maximum negative traits if you can get Leaders with this that's great too we've already covered Dark Matter engines living metal augmentations increases your leader lifespan by 50% and reduces all your pop amenes usage by 50% as well this is an awesome trait to have if you're a gued out Consciousness though it does come with a small living metal upkeep biometic assembly reduces rces your replicator upkeep by 80% but it does give them some food upkeep and any pop with this trait will get exotic gases upkeep mode power tools cost you some volatile Moes and minerals for your pop upkeep and then you'll get some industrial job upkeep reduction of 20% you can pair this with a fully ascended Forge World to reduce your industrial job upkeep down to the minimum of 10% we've looked at exotic fuel consumption and rare Crystal extractor volatile Mot actor grants you more habitability and if you pair it with shielded components you'll get plus 60% habitability that and other technologies will enable you to get 100% habitability on Tomb worlds but what do you think of these new Ascension paths which one is your favorite I'd love to hear from you let me know down in the comments below the last of the three machine Ascension paths is the nanotech Ascension path this one is the slowest to provide a powerful boost to your Empire but if you finally do get it going it can be kind of scary the adoption effect for this tradition grants you the nanite research facility building you'll also get the nanite Harvester Starbase building for your star bases that building is going to become the economic backbone of your Empire starting on the left hand side aggregation systems will give you the nanite research complex building you will get a reduction to your food and mineral base output from Mining and agry drones by one but instead all of your farmers and miners will now produce additional nanites it's a small base amount plus 0.2 but it can be scaled by bonuses to Farmer and minor output unbridled consumption allows you to unlock the planetary decision to subsume a world subsuming a world starts a situation and in the end that world becomes a nanite world nanite worlds have different specializations for example the nanotech world granting you increased building production of plus 15% an increase to building upkeep a reduction of minerals from mining drones but an increase to nanite Output from those miners you can also grab a machine world and a machine World Foundry for nanite worlds you'll almost certainly want to convert all of your worlds into nanite Worlds whenever you can conversion into a nanite world gives you a bunch of tile blockers which produce monthly nanites for your Empire on the right hand side you'll unlock the nanotech cauldron building we'll look at that in a moment and you'll get the nanite transmutation research option that nanite transmuter is the same building you remember paying a little bit of energy and some nanite upkeep you'll get some output of rare resources flood of Supremacy will unlock the nanite swarmer ship we'll get to that ship a little bit later it's very very strange you'll also get the research options for nanite autoc Cannon repair system and Flack battery the final part of this tradition unlocks three new edicts for you these three edicts have a hefty opening cost of nanites and cannot be turned off for 180 months once you activate them they give you some very powerful Empire wide effects though Nano operated Supply chains increases your Naval capacity by a whopping 25% Nano complexes increases your monthly Alloys by 25% and nanoc connected generators increases your monthly energy credits by 50% note that this is an increase to your monthly output and not a bonus to your resource output from jobs so this will scale multiplicatively with the current output production bonuses that you have making it very very strong though it can take quite a while to get up to the required nanite investment to trigger these edicts finishing nanotech allows your nanite Harvester yield improvements to increase every 5 years either increasing the size of nanite deposits or creating nanite swarmer ships this effect is is limited by the size of the planet the deposits are created upon you'll also get a reduction to Empire size from planets of 50% and this will of course stack with Imperial prerogative so if you take the two together you will get zero Empire size from colonies so you can grab as many worlds as you want nanotech is all about going wide the nanite Harvester Starbase building that we unlocked at the start when you build this you'll uncover a size 0.1 nanite deposit on every rocky planet Moon and asteroid that does not have any research station deposits these bonuses can be increased by the ark furnace and every 5 years they will also be increased by the end part of nanotech tradition so your nanite output will be scaling over time it does take some time to get going but once it does get going you can produce quite a lot of nanites when it comes to those other buildings we have the nanite research complex this takes some nanite as upkeep and then it gives you access to nanotech research jobs these jobs produce less society and physics research but produce double the amount of engineering research The nanotech Cauldron has a hefty upkeep in energy and nanites and then it just produces a base output of 15 Alloys I don't think this building is particularly coste effective though if you need some really quick extra Alloys and you've got nanites and energy production to spare you could put a few of these down without requiring any additional pops for the output you've probably been wondering what on Earth the nanite swarmer is well the nanite swarmer has basically one function it is a glass cannon with almost no defenses but it can be equipped with quite powerful Weaponry it has the same size as a Corvette only using up one Naval capacity and more importantly it has absolutely no upkeep so you can build an infinite number of these ships and they will cost your economy and absolutely nothing now you're starting to see why the nanot tech tradition really scales The Wider you get and the more nanites you are outputting you can make these swarmers into carriers with carrier combat computers and advanced strikecraft Neutron launchers which can sit at long range and Pummel your enemies or possibly some close quarter ships with some disruptors that can swarm in and overwhelm a Target you'll get very high evasion and pretty good speed from these ships but as I mentioned they have very low armor and Hull 50 and 100 points they'll basically be taken out in a single shot honestly I think the carrier and neutron designs are going to be your best bet because you'll want to stay as far away from any enemy ships as you possibly can if they can shoot you they'll pretty much instantly kill each nanite swarmer if you've enjoyed this video on the three new Ascension paths we've unlocked with the Machine age but you'd like to see them in action you probably want to see me speedrun becoming a virtual Fallen Empire you'd like to see that click the video on screen now

Channel: Montu Plays

Views: 70,000

Keywords: Stellaris, stellaris gameplay, montu plays, montu plays stellaris, stellaris machine ascension, stellaris machine age, stellaris synthetic age, stellaris machine ascension perks, stellaris virtual, stellaris nanomachines, stellaris modular, stellaris modularity, stellaris virtuality, stellaris nanotech

Id: TS8AXinS0QE

Length: 24min 2sec (1442 seconds)

Published: Wed May 08 2024