ES2 Community Scenario #03: Everything Ends in Fire

An actual custom scenario? Nice! A for effort!
Although the color pallete could have been chosen more wisely. edit: nvm it's random everytime you load - could be adjusted I guess. I had cravers and vodyani pretty much the same color, it was annoying.
Given enough patience with the diplomacy screen uniting the galaxy against cravers for an early supremacy victory with minimal participation seems like the "fastest" approach turn-wise, but starting conditions do not make that so easy.
I have a turn 76 win. I guess I could push it somewhat lower given some reloading and optimizing, but I am content with the outcome,vid will follow shortly.

Will attempt this weekend.  I think the fastest victory would be through conquest by colonizing 19 systems on your side of the map.  A quick way to do this would be through vineship spam while not researching any military techs, since each new tier adds 100 production cost to the 200 base production cost of a vineship.  So a single military tech researched would increase vineship cost by 50%, and 3 techs would double it.

Conquering by destroying the Arkships is faster than cultural conversion, since the Unfallen can instantly colonize.  Because we are avoiding military techs, the way to do this would be by baiting the Vodyani into arming themselves with missile weapons, and do a quick swap to Koyasil Kinetics (51 dps slug from quest, doesn't require military tech) before declaring war and conquering.

-----

EDIT

-----

This one took a few attempts, but I eventually got a turn 31 conquest victory on the 3rd try.  The original strategy was to spam vineships while being allied with the Vodyani, and once I have 19 systems entwined, declare war, kill all the Arkships in a single turn, and instantly colonize the system.   This was foiled really hard by the Vodyani module that prevents Arkships from being attacked in space battles.

The main challenge is how long it takes to conquer a Vodyani system via invasion -- even with 1k+ manpower invasions with 100% of them being armored units, it still takes 3-4 turns due to the amount of extra defenders the Arkship provides.

As such, the 3rd attempt was trying to rush down the Vodyani Arkships before they could get the space battle immunity modules, but I still wasn't fast enough and had to manually invade a system, which was the main bottleneck and slowed down my conquest victory from turn 29 to 31.

Tech Order:   Xenobiology --> Baryonic Shielding (important for colonizing the 2 Savannahs on the home system) --> Xenolinguistics -->  Behemoth Blueprints (build an empty behemoth hull immediately and then upgrade to have +FIDSI modules) --> Galactic Commodities Exchange --> Atmospheric Filtration --> Mission Flexibility (this is your main source of production) --> Tier 2 ships/Colonization techs/Autonomous Materials (for wormhole travel to entwine the 4 systems in the middle)

The key to finishing this scenario quickly is to avoid researching military techs until you have already produced all the ships you need.  This is because each new tier of military tech unlocked increases the base production cost of ships.  A Vineship starts at 200 production, and quickly increases to 300 at tier 2 and 400 at tier 3.   A Hunter/Coordinator ship starts at 150 base production and increases to 225/300 at higher tiers.

This difference is huge, since we are min-maxing our production by only producing the base hull and then using dust to manually upgrade the ships.  Once we have our production base set up with an upgraded economic behemoth, our home system reaches around 400 production.  With the Lower Fleet Costs law, a vineship hull costs 160 production and a Hunter/Coordinator hull costs 128 production.  So our home system can produce 2.5 vineships per turn or 3 tier two warships per turn.

So basically:

1)  Set up production base on home system by rushing a stacked Economic Behemoth and maxing out the population.  For the tier 1 system upgrade, I went with the +60 food since I got a +20 RedSang curiosity and someone sold a bunch of RedSang on the market, allowing me to buy them up for cheap.

2)  Mass produce vineship hulls and manually upgrade them afterwards.  At fast gamespeed, it takes 8 turns to entwine a system.  I stopped Vineship production at 16, with 4 fleets of 4 Vineships that each took 2 turns per entwine.

3) Temporarily accept the Vodyani's truce offering and make peace afterwards so I could preemptively entwine the Vodani's systems that I'll take later on without having to defend my Vineships.  The only thing that can kill Vineships on this map are the pirates, and I stationed a ship on each spawn point to kill them as they spawn so there wouldn't be any pirates roaming around.

4)  Stay below the colonization limit to maximize happiness -- we need a lot of dust and research and the +30% bonus from 100 approval is huge.   Most of our production and science comes from solely the home system anyways, so extra colonies are marginal for us.

5)  Plan out which systems I need to get 19 for the conquest.   Rush out hunter/coordinator ships to kill as many Arkships as possible before the Vodyani gets their meditation module to make their Arkships unattackable.  I was able to kill all the Arkships I needed to clear enough space for 19 systems except for one, which I had to manually invade and bottlenecked my victory.  This system took 3 turns to completely capture, even with an invading force that started at 1500 and ended up at 3000.

I had two lucky events that happened in my run.  First, I got an Impervious Gear module (+50 manpower deployment limit) from a curiosity, saving me a bunch of techs that I would have needed to research towards the end.   Second, the Vodyani researched Hardened Alloys (+3 to fleet capacity and allows fighters/bomber modules) and traded it to me for a research agreement and some resources.  I immediately declared war on the Vodyani after getting this technology.  Being able to put two hunter/coordinator ships in a fleet instead of one was huge for taking down Arkships.

Attached is the start of turn 31 save file.  Decline Vodyani's truce offer, invade the Omdor system (note that I refitted nearly all my ships to manpower deployment modules and consolidated them there, ending up with a 4k invasion force), and then instantly colonize all 19 entwined systems.

Unfallen Challenge Turn 31 Conquest.sav

It may be possible to shave a few turns off this victory by rushing the Unfallen quest and savescumming the part that gives a free tech until it gives you either the Hunter or Coordinator ship techs so you can start killing off Arkships earlier.  The conquest and entwining routes could also be optimized a bit to save a few turns as well.

How do you convice to un-war you so quickly?
How do you produce T2 hulls without titanium access?
Damn what am I doing wrong, it's a neat thing about that vineships + military tech connection. Wish it said so somewhere, but it does make sense in the EL fashion.

The Vodyani gave a truce offer around 10 turns in.  I think this is due to me immediately killing the Vodyani's leecher ship at the start of the game -- there is one heading to a system right next to your home system.  I had my hero guard the system and kill it.

There is titanium on a planet 2 systems away, but you can use invasions to convert manpower into Titanium/Hyperium.  Invade a pirate base or other system and deliberately suffer a lot of losses while losing using blitz, and then retreat after a single turn.  This will leave behind a ground battle remains curiosity which you can explore for a good chance at 30 Titanium or Hyperium.  This can be repeated forever as long as you have manpower that you're willing to sacrifice.

Also, I start most of my games by prioritizing scout ships and heroes with (titanium) exploration modules, and prioiritize exploration power in my tech order.  Heavy scouting and curiosity revealing almost always gives you at least 20 Titanium/Hyperium every game, with possible quest rewards of 50 Titanium/Hyperium from quest rewards that usually spawn at some point.  Curiosities always give the same thing on a specific turn, and I try to remember curiosity timings that give really overpowered rewards (Hyperium/Titanium, strong weapon modules, etc), so subsequent runs always gives me superpowered starts when I know what curiosities to explore at what time.

Edit:  The curiosity timing highlights on this map:

Turn 1: a curiosity on the Bundus system next door gives 20 hyperium, enough for all the Coordinators you need to conquer your side of the map.

Turn 4 or 5: a curiosity on the Menys system (with the Pilgrims faction) gives you a Pulsos population, giving +5 science production on planets with Anomalies.  Since both of the Savannahs on your home system have Anomalies, this is pretty huge.

Turn 9 or 10: A tier 2 atmospheric curiosity on Mintaka gives AGN Slugs (54 dps slugs), allowing a hero ship to single handedly kill an Arkship in two turns if you bait them into going missiles by initially outfitting all your ships with lasers and energy shields.  Combine a Slug-outfitted hero ship with a Coordinator/Hunter outfitted with missiles, and you can destroy Arks in a single turn.

I just noticed the 59 turns of the predominant policy, and it shows up in my other runs of this scenario as well.  I think this is due to the display not being normalized at the end from the fast (2x) game speed.  i.e. 1 turn on fast speed is equivalent to 2 turns on normal speed.

Anyways I did another attempt with savescumming to get a free tier 2 ship tech by turn 11 (had to wait until after the first election to colonize a 2nd system so I would get a militarist party instead of industrialist for the 15% cheaper ships law), and got a turn 28 victory.

I think this is close to the limits of how fast this scenario can be won in regards to the mathematics of how much production and entwining uptime is needed.  The Vineship routes have been heavily optimized with minimal traveling for the Vineships and maximum Vineship uptime:

1)  There are no wasted vine 'units'.  It takes 8 total turns to entwine a system -- if you have a solo ship entwining for 5 turns and then a fleet arrives to make it 4 vineships on the final turn, you end up with 9 turns of vining, with one of them being wasted.  In these situations, I split up and send the vineships that would have been overkill and wasted on the next system.

2)  Every travel to another system takes only one turn.  If it takes 2 turns on the vineship's 8 movespeed, I have a seeker hero ready at the location to escort the fleet so it only takes a single turn.  This actually becomes the main roles of my two seeker heroes after destroying the Vodyani's arkships.

Unfallen Challenge Turn 28 Conquest.sav (note my 32 total vineships at the end)