Let me start by saying I Love this game, I think it's remarkably well done and easily the best 4x I've ever played. I enjoy it so much that I've even been doing achievements (which I normally don't care at all for) just to give myself more content. I seem to be having a problem overcoming the difficulty of Impossible and Endless though. I can consistently stomp Serious and below while randoming my race but no matter what I do on the 2 last difficulties the comp just murders me. If I go to war early and try to leverage my early army the computer inevitably has 2-3x the amount of military I do and even if I can get to a point where I can almost take out one of my opponents a different faction goes to war with me with an overwhelming amount of military. If I try not getting aggresive then the AI surpasses me in science by such a large margin that I have no hope of winning.



I'm wondering if anyone has general advice on how to beat the highest difficulty levels and curious if I have to do incredibly gimicky things to beat the AI at that level. Thanks in advance!

Honestly I would suggest using custom factions developed around your preferred playstyle. However there are a number of people that post videos of games at high difficulty. I suggest you watch Panczasu's videos. Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDOAdHZlVHz7ShxJysoo_kA

Is there even a playstyle other than "military might to crush the ai" that works? I've never come remotely close to an econ victory and generally speaking in all 4x games the only way I've ever found to "win" is to have such a big military that I Could just win via that but I choose to win a different way. The only exception might by Draken to force peace/alliance and win via diplomacy points.

With custom faction you can go for an eco victory. Diplomatic victory with Drakken is also a possibility.

Any recommendations on how to approach custom factions? Generally speaking custom seems to mean "take all the production bonuses". I tend to find that production is more important than science since quickly teching doesn't help when production can't make the buildings near as fast as I can research them.

Basically the most OP trait you can take with almost anyone is cellulose mutation - it allows you to build cities twice as big at the same cost.

Like you said, industry is the strongest FIDS so industry bonuses work as well.

WW work quite well as a wonder victory faction since the last unique tech they get from their quest is -25% building production cost (and you need the quest for the wonder anyway). Plus, their quest is really easy.



Food/Industry/Dust efficient also depend on the starting biome of the base faction. For WW Living towns + Industry Efficient or Food + Industry efficient work the best (1st option is more powerful for the starting region, but the 2nd gives you more choice in terms of expanding). Other good eco traits are Advanced Diarchy (Empire plans are very powerful, but make sure you have a plan on how to get enough influence) and Imperial Coinage (you can buy luxuries early quite cheap and they greatly help with snowballing). Cull the herd is quite cheap and very good too, esp for regions with 3 villages. Dust efficient + Businessman 3 seems like a powerful combo, but I haven't tried that out yet for an eco victory. But Cellulose mutation + Industry efficient + whatever you feel would work better for you is definitely a working option. Try experimenting yourself, I'm sure there are some undiscovered strategies.



Some additional advice for WW: colonise your 2nd region and do faction quest ASAP for visions of glory -> this will give you enough influence while expanding. The optimal BO might be founder's monument -> Mill Foundry -> settler or founder's monument -> Mill Foundry -> district (for extra industry) -> settler. Use your 1st hero as a governor, industry efficient helps a lot. Research Mercenary market and build & sell units when there's nothing else to build for dust. Age 2 research imperial coinage (if you didn't take it as a starting tech) and start buying luxuries. Apart from obvious FIDS ones you'll want +100% XP on heroes. Since heroes get XP for construction and you build a lot your heroes will level crazy fast. Get a governor for each city ASAP (Cultist and WW work the best). Think that's it.

As a general rule when is the right time to start building districts? I generally find I don't start those for quite a while as I'm usually trying to manage my happiness for a good chunk of the early game and until you can build enough districts to not be net negative they seem like a liability. Is that wrong? Should I be making distrcits whenever they are available to build? How do you prioritize starting builds like Seeds or Library vs more settlers?



I've hit the point where I'm relatively advanced but not advanced enough to necessarily have "build orders" sorted out.

Cellulose mutation changes your district considerations quite a bit, since you only need 4 pop to start building districts that give +happiness so I'd try to get there ASAP in this case. For districts vs improvements - it's basic cost vs gain, consider tile bonuses you get from a district and what you get from improvement, weighted by their respective costs. Also on the happiness problem - If you have luxuries that would help quite a bit so imperial coinage might be good (done it without it though). In terms of settler production - I like to "chain colonise" since because of progressive pop cost -1 pop in bigger cities costs you more than -1 pop in smaller (exception is if it's much faster to build and colonise from a larger city). Try to adjust your expansion to empire plans - ideally you want to colonise just after you've picked one (For WW you want your 2nd city ASAP though since you actually lose very little this way bc of visions of glory). A common mistake I've found myself doing early is producing settlers after building seed storage - seed storage does nothing for you when you build a settler. Also for your initial settler - you don't want to build him for too long, since you'll lose a lot of food, so ideally you want to start building him if it takes no more than 3 turns (build a district if not enough industry). I usually start building Libraries if I see that my research falls behind too much - An indication would be techs taking 5 or more turns on normal, but that's rather empirical.