Normal difficulty for the record.  Light swearing in the video.  Goes for 21 turns.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUmST_-PHKg&feature=youtu.be

It's about 30 mins of rambling (and the background sound starts too high, sorry it gets better), but within the first 15 or so I show off how to get the Voydani off to a very strong start.  I did get extremely lucky this game with a god start (a reverse PANCZASU if you will), but I still played hyper inefficient and have basically run away with the game before even leaving the first Era.

I know there's probably some issues with what i'm doing here, especially on higher levels or with an aggressive enemy in the constellation with you, but since I see so many people struggling even on easy, I thought this would help players understand the most unique race in the EA build at this time.

Again I can't stress enough that while this start was exceedingly good, I do go over what you should do if it isn't, and have played games with much less powerful starts and been fine, at least assuming normal.  

Edit- worth noting that i'm technically wrong about how the population mechanic works.

For the purposes of buildings, a voydani system with 5 planets and 1 pop, has 1 population.  That one population will work all 5 planets (as long as you can colonize them) as if you had 5 population and 5 colonies built, but for the purposes of hero skills and buildings, it counts as 1, not 5.  This doesn't change much, but makes certain buildings less attractive (basically just focus flat boosters in the early game).

Text guide from another post (video has more detail really):

1. Make your hero governor and get the system bonuses.  His system options are just flat gross.  Start with the industry one and max it.

2.Start exploring.  The moment you find planets that you can leech, do so.  Getting that first arc is so so so important.  It's worth noting I did VERY little exploring as leeching planets was my primary goal (i wouldn't recommend a second scout ship for example, as leechers the moment you have a target become very important).

3. Redesign your arc.  First design it so that it has all your support slots filled, and then if you don't get a new arc, keep that design until you can upgrade your starting arc.  I recommend filling them with the industry and then dust or science boost.  Once that upgrade is done or once you're ready to make your first arc, BLING IT OUT.  Arc's alwasy take 1 turn to produce regardless of ship systems, so make sure every slot is filled with the highest tech toys you have.  There is no reason your second arc should ever leave the homesystem without a full set of weapons and supports (defense wise I include 1 shield system and 2 armor systems since the AI seems dumb and I'm not sure how the game handles shields, so it can't hurt to have).

4. Redesign your combat ships.  I personally like to make sure they all have an essence module.  Lets them sit there and gain essence while you blockade a planet or wait for a truce to end.

5.  Sometime before your first arc you're going to want to build some leecher ships.  I leave them as total stock (you could change the weaponry i suppose) and then start making as many as possible when I don't have system upgrades.

The #1 goal is getting that first arc out, even if you don't have a planet for it to go to.  I had a great start at first with a minor race 1 jump from my home system, and got a t18 arc.  I then had literally no where for it to go as the starting systems were all hard to colonize, so I just used it as a warship.  They are INSANELY strong (mine had 1 missile launcher, 1 "close only" beam, and then in the 4x slot the long and medium range lasers), and will easily solo fleets of enemy ships while also making invasion much easier (high manpower and huge siege potential).

For record by the time I started my first war I had 1 arc, 4 attacker ships (can't remember), and a couple of leechers.  I'd eventually get another fleete of attackers.

Once you get off the ground things spiral fast.  Whenever you don't have something to produce on your capital make a fleet of leechers and when you have 4 send them out and go drink a planet.  I had about 500 essence a turn by turn 70ish and I'm sure that's probably slow.  The key thing being that leechers are super easy to make and will level up your hero very fast, which gets him to his even crazier bonuses (+1% fids per hero level being your ultimate goal at around level 12.  Which is nuts, but you'll be running away on your good systems far before that happens).

RESEARCH:

Colony techs are godly:

The reason being is that if you have an arc anchored on a system, it puts 1 population on EVERY planet you can colonize.  Get to 2 population and it will put 2 population on EVERY planet you can colonize.  Now they might not be worth rushing (depends on what you see in your early scouting), but make sure that if you ever see a system that could have 2+ planets colonizable, that you get the colony tech for it and get an arc around it asap.

Era 1:

Personally for tier 1 i got the infinite supermarkets tech at some point, the industry boosting tech's (because more industry is great with their arc bonuses), all the colony techs, and some of the dust stuff (not the one that lets you buy out, but I probably would have in hindsight since some of the colony tech was meh). I know i grabbed a few science techs as well.

I skipped hyperium weapons and titanium weapons flat out because the AI is dumb and arc ships are godly.  I was however playing on normal so you may want them. 

Science stuff is mentioned again because getting to era 2 asap is important.  Basically your only goal right now is make more essence and do the bare minimum to keep your starting colony happy and producing.  So industry, approval, and science are your gods. Weapons you care less about because arc's are monsters.

Era  2:

This is where a lot of the good colony tech stuff is, but the very first thing you should do is retrofit your arc to ALL tier 2 stuff.  It will cost a lot to upgrade your current arcs (about 500 a pop, which at least in my game I could easily afford but it did wipe out my stockpile),  but every other arc you build will now come out with it, and be basically unstoppable by the AI .

I grabbed all the colony tech (although mostly because I was feeling too lazy to check the planets that were out there, it did payoff massively though) and then was heading for the tech 2 ships because I wanted to see what they did (no real strategy behind it).

Mid game colonies:

At some point your arcs get very expensive, and your essence income should be very high.  It's worth noting that you can make a pop by using essence, and this is powerful for new systems.  Again my income is around 500 essence a turn, so when I anchor a new system with 2 or 3 planets in it, spending 2 turns and 750 essence (250 for the first, 500 for the second) to gain essentially 4-6 highly productive population is absolutely worth it and jump starts the system to being instantly able to build upgrades.

What to do if theres no viable colonies early game:

This happened in my current game, and the answer was "kill everyone".  You might want to leave one minor race for your racial quest so you can brainwash them, but I'd invade them after that.  Again your arcs are the center of your armada, with 110 manpower and often doing -60 a turn on a siege, they're the fastest way to invade a planet.  You may not be able to colonize it, but at the very least you'll have breathing space, and down the line you can pick it up later.  Worse comes to worse if you really have nothing to grab you can alwasy take other peoples systems, so do that.

Basically right now the vodayni feel very very all or nothing, in that in PvP i'm guessing it'd be super easy to punish them with strike fleets designed to murder their arcs, but vs the AI it's generally a breeze to get off the ground and just run away with the game.

UmbralReaver wrote:

Youtube says the video was deleted for being too long.

Yeah forgot this account wasn't verfied.  Fixed it now, video is up.

Edit- annnnd youtube had it set to private.  NOW it is up.  I swear.  I triple checked.

RageMcGeezaks wrote:
Thanks for uploading, was able to get a quick start using this :)

It probably gets changed in the future, but how are you dealing with ground invasions at the moment?
Do you have a guard fleet stationed at each Ark, or do you disconnect it 'on time' if you see a enemy invasion fleet coming.

I'm testing a few things there, but mostly i've found just moving the arc once you have more than 1 to work really really well.  Obviously this doens't work as well if you don't have a second arc, but unanchoring and just moving to a different system to anchor to until the threat is dealt with certain seems viable.

Edit-

So i had a save in the same game, but later, where the cravers went for one of my arcs and invaded it, and I was going to use that to show off how to handle things.  Sadly they decided they didn't want to fight this time, so i'll have to do it another time.  In the meantime though I think i'll get my stream back up on twitch for endless space, and if anyone has any guides or things they want to see, let me know and I'll try to knock them out.

SirBagel wrote:
One thing I noticed that you could do, if you have fleets in orbit but get invaded, is that you can Minimize the window with the invasion notice. If you kill the fleet that tried to invade your ark and then reopen the invasion window to deal with the invasion afterwards, the game will calculate it as if the AI was invading with no army (or whatever forces it has left if it has a surviving ship). After resolving, the results window shows the updated amount of AI ground forces and gives you the free win.

Yeah this is a lifesaver, but it does make the whole system feel annoying since it means they can invade you, but you can kill them first.

Anyways followup video showing how the game ended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Us5tOaf6L4

It's turn 125, so it's a lot more of me just showing why my economy (again with me totally half assing my play) looked like + my thoughts on the combat/fleet/weapons systems.

Edit- sadly all the ship footage has the engine sf which I couldn't actually hear in the room, but apparently was picked up on the recording, so i'll just do a weapon combat video later.