Community Scenario: Back to Basics

Seeing all these people finishing under 100 turns on Serious makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong. Might just be different speeds. Anyways, here's a turn 144 victory on Hard.

WARNING:  A stupid amount of broken combos and abusing AI behavior went into this and might be considered going against the spirit of the game.  However, speed running is basically finding these and exploiting them to the maximum potential to achieve victory as quick as possible.

Tried really hard to achieve a sub turn 100 science victory, but only managed to win by turn 106 while pulling out all the cheese, exploiting AI behavior, and min-maxing I knew.  In the process of this speed run, I discovered several more broken combos and AI behavior exploits, that if you beelined towards, can probably give you a turn 80-90ish science win or a turn 70-80ish economic win.

The main limitations are the low amounts of antimatter for F-Reality institute spam, lack of tier 3 science luxuries, and small map resulting in accidentally winning via conquest from just 19 systems so you can't snowball science by conquering most of the galaxy.

The third problem was easy to solve: form an alliance with the Sophons so your alliance now requires 35 systems to win conquest.  I conquered and then traded for all of the Sophon's systems except for one, allowing me to have a maximum of 33 systems.  (33 of mine + 1 of Sophon puts me at 34/35 for conquest).  Allies will generally trade one or two systems for a piece of technology, so you basically get these systems for just the influence cost of the deal.  The alliance also helps with the science victory since you can win by just researching Endless 3 techs, and then trading 3 of them to your ally to get the 6 total techs required.

My main source of science and win condition does not kick in until lategame:  Gas Giant systems with food production heroes and 2x tier 3 food system improvements, convert the thousands of food into industry --> convert 50% industry into science with Urgent AI Research --> Multiply the science with the +40% system science per pop on Gas Giants.

I decided to go with Imperials instead of Mezari, since production snowballs everything else and being able to get enough influence and dust (doubling Imperial's Industry --> Influence trait at 50 pop) to rush essential science structures and my win condition immediately upon finishing the research is stronger than Mezari's 15% science and -10% tech cost bonus.  The massive amounts of influence Imperials gives you also allows you to do a lot of diplomacy manipulation.  I also had a the +0.5% industry per level on ALL systems on the starting industrialist hero and wanted to keep that bonus.

So some of the cheese and AI behavior exploits I discovered and abused in the process behind optimizing this run:

1)  AI will continuously attack your fleets and won't stop no matter what if they are trying to invade a given system.  I exploited this tendency by taking a system in the middle of the Cravers and turtling on it.  I baited the Cravers into going mass short range slug ships by initiating with pure torpedo ships, and then I defended with a fleet with mass Improved Reactive Plating (+0.01 XP per damage absorbed), which gave my heroes a lot of experience.

NOTE:  You need to have enough torpedo ships so that the AI will continue to make slug ships, and your Improved Reactive Plating ships needs to be the strongest fleet on the system so that it will be the one to defend and feed XP to your heroes.

2)  I sold heroes for gold upon reaching certain checkpoints to rush buy essential structures on all my systems.  A level 25 hero, which is possible in around 5 battles from this strategy, sells for 50k.  For reference, the cumulative galactic gold production at this point is probably less than 1,000.  I then dropped my happiness levels and ran a gold deficit by taking all the reduced gold laws, which lowered the inflation so I could buy a LOT of system improvements and ships with the 50k gold.

3)  I got the tier 4 industry law (+6 industry per pop) by turn 66.  I rushed Xeno Anthropology to allow me to switch governments early on and stayed at a low amount of systems for low costs, and constantly swapped governments to force elections.  I did a swap to dictatorship at turn 55, which gave me a turn 60 guarenteed industry election, followed by a turn 61 industry election from the normal election timing.

4)  Trading AI useless systems within the sphere of influence of another one of your systems will give you a lot of diplomatic pressure against them, letting you do advanced demands on them for gold/science/techs/resources every few turns.

End of game victory screen:

The dips in the graph are from when I sold a high level hero, and the recovery next turn is from when I spent that gold the next turn (after reducing inflation) buying out system improvements and ships.

Nice Skeezi :)  I agree with you too small map for a supremacy / conquest as it will be possible way fast. Still impressive to see on standard speed and loving that you timed for the quick movent hero.

I did one on endless with 10 competititors "back in the days" https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/forums/65-general/threads/31512-glorious-ada-arr-overview-thread?page=1#post-269815

I think Supremacy and Conquest victory should be disabled for these challenges since they're too easy to quickly win by just spamming ships and exploiting the AI's lack of ability in fighting.

With that said, I had a turn 46 supremacy victory on my first attempt without knowing the map:

The gameplan was to aggresively scout, rush to Hunter Ships and just run to each faction's capital and taking them.  The limiting factor for this strategy is movement speed to get to the 3x capitals, so I needed to get a high level seeker for the +5 fleet movement bonus in addition to double free movement.  Fortunately, the UE main quest chain gives you a lvl 5 seeker very early on in the game if you plan towards it.  I saved curiosities until turn 5, then timed the 10th curiosity to be right before hitting 75 relations with hacked yields on a minor faction to complete the next stage in one turn, and was able to get Petra Mandzukic by turn 15.

A significant portion of my dust and research came from minor factions, and I stockpiled influence + dust to instantly get 2x Hunters upon finishing the research.  Influence buys 2x empty Hunter hulls and the gold upgrades them.

I made a several suboptimal plays:

1)  I rushed the market but it was a waste since there was nothing to buy to get a quick system upgrade.

2)  I colonized too many systems early and got a lvl 2 system level before turn 20, which gave me industrialist as the main party instead of science, so I couldn't unlock the Star Boogie bill for +3 movement speed.

3)  Hunter class ships wern't needed since the AI's fleet by the time I hit the capital were weak enough that tier 1 ships would have been able to beat them, so there were some wasted turns on that tech

I did several more speedrun attempts (one for Supremacy and one for Conquest) after knowing the map/minor faction positions/curiosity rolls/etc with a more optimized build after learning from my previous mistakes.  I got a dust to dust quest which gives you a 50/50 chance of getting either 50 titanium or 50 hyperium on the second part, and I save scummed it to get the hyperium reward.  I got a turn 37 Supremacy and a turn 52 Conquest victory on my best attempts.

Will try to speedrun a science/economic victory at some point in the future.

Oh look at you, you got yourself a devblog, hell I am in!
So first playthrough using the DLCs save, no peeking, turn 67 victory, will provide vid after it uploads.