First time playing them has been post launch and I was lucky that the system right next door was a minor faction.  I can't even imagine how I'd be able to keep up with the AI let alone humans without a minor faction being relatively close.

I just feel the Vodyani rely too heavily on RNG, if you are unlucky and have no minor or major factions close to you unless you are expert level you are screwed, but on the other hand if you have 2 minor factions and a major fairly close by its super easy to snow ball early.  

WeaponizedCaffeine wrote:

Hello folks,

...

But I believe that Vodyani being slower and more vulnerable early on is a good thing to counterbalance their ability to become very strong in good hands.

Well, that's true by the reward is just too much compared to other races, specially:

The pop increase aplies in all planet redardless of their capacity, you get incredible resource amounts from usually low-pop high yield planets.

As soon as a planet is available from tech or ecologist, Volyani automatically exploits it. They skip out lots of turns making internal colonizations on planets.

WeaponizedCaffeine wrote:

The Pirates issue is also more of a random-related problem: Pirates spawns are actually pretty limited now but will can still be an issue if you're unlucky and start with something like 3 Minor Factions in your Constellation.

But hey, Vodyani conveniently start with a Guardian hero who can stand their ground against most Pirates fleets early on :D (and even then, you can reinforce him with Exploration ships until you get to unlock the military ones) 

But I believe that Vodyani being slower and more vulnerable early on is a good thing to counterbalance their ability to become very strong in good hands.

Cheers,

First, it hadn't occurred to me to use the guardian as a way of fending off pirate attacks during that early Essence drain.

Second, I'm currently dominating my Hard game (so much so that I think I might up the difficulty the next time), so while they may have a slow start, they have a strong finish.  I'm less concerned now.

Hello folks,

The Vodyani's slow start and frail early expansion (but with solid bases: since Arks are basically moving fortresses) are part of their design.

However I agree they rely on RNG much more than the other races: a lucky Vodyani starting on a system with 3 colonizable planets from the get go and a Minor Faction in the vicinity will be able to fight off a Craver Empire by themselves, even early on... An unlucky one, on the other hand will struggle to grow.

The Pirates issue is also more of a random-related problem: Pirates spawns are actually pretty limited now but will can still be an issue if you're unlucky and start with something like 3 Minor Factions in your Constellation.

But hey, Vodyani conveniently start with a Guardian hero who can stand their ground against most Pirates fleets early on :D (and even then, you can reinforce him with Exploration ships until you get to unlock the military ones) 

But I believe that Vodyani being slower and more vulnerable early on is a good thing to counterbalance their ability to become very strong in good hands.

Cheers,

C0ldSn4p wrote:

With the riftborn being able to efficiently grow outpost without any support from a developed system, since they don t need food, and the fast outpost to colony speed if you colonize lava or ash planets, since you can and should colonize sterile planets, I disagree on that. Having 10 systems so fast by spamming colony ship without repercussion is godly. Also if you luck out and have a lava planet in your starting system you can colonize it right away, move your pop to it and have a very strong industry from the start.

Yeah, Riftborn ability to spam colonies is quite powerful, possibly is the second most powerful faction, I played both and I feel that way. Need to play Riftborn on release version still to make any solid statement though.

Ninakoru wrote:

To me the Volyani is the most overpowered Faction by far if you know how to use them.

First is to capitalize on ships early, few improvements are worth your time early (the one with +10 industry planet and the one with +10 science/planet, later), I usually skip drone networks until later.

Scout your surroundings effectively, my first thing built is a modded explorer ship with movement engine.

All my focus is to find a nearby minor faction, once you have it, you can secure your only leecher with a few explorer ships, later a fleet of three. Explorers will lose hit points on pirate battles though, but you can replace them with new explorers, and either send then back to an ark to heal at 10%/turn or use them to explore the zone while healing at 5%/turn.

Bad luck and no minors/mayor factions nearby?? Just remove some weapon/armor (to reduce retofit costs) in your staring ark and throw a few essence gathering modules in it. You will get you first ark in 25 turns even if you didn't extract essence from anything.

Once you got two arks is downhill to snowball madness :P

The first part was more or less the tactic that I did.  If you have at least 2 worlds, one of which is fertile/temperate, then you can build Xeno-Industries for +30-+40 production, and then go nuts with ships and once you have a decent fleet going, pick a fight with someone weak, dump a bunch of leechers on his world, and then start building ark after ark.  You still won't have as many colonies as the average non-Vodyani civilization, but it'll work.

"Downgrading" the Ark is an interesting approach (also noted by Astasia). I'll have to try that sometime.

You really only have to be aware of two things to dominate the early game as vodyani and then spiral out of control by mid game.

1. You can move your ark. If you only have one easily habitable planet in your starting system, move to a different system. If you can get to a system with 3 habitable planets, even after the time spent exploring to find it and moving there, you are already ahead of every other faction (except Riftborn). It's better to find a system with 2 luxury resource nodes you can harvest early on though for reason 2.

2. Redesign your ark on turn one, change it 4 passive essence nodes. It costs almost 2k to upgrade your starting ark to this design, so rush for unlocking the luxury market, sell all the luxury resources you've gathered from correct ark placement, then upgrade your starting ark. You are now generating 40 essence per turn, passively, without cost, forever. This will get you your second ark in 25 turns on endless speed without any other source of essence. That's comparable to the speed of an early outpost turning into a colony, and by just making more arks with essence generation you are continuing to generate enough essence passively to create an ark every 25 turns, for free.

Now you can focus on dust production and converting dust to essence. Dust spirals out of control very quickly, which means essence generation spirals out of control very quickly, and before you know it your systems will be generating thousands of essence per turn, without leeching, without minor factions. You can change your arks to dust production or whatever you want later.

Most of this is moot with how buggy and broken vodyani are right now though, and have been for months.

To me the Volyani is the most overpowered Faction by far if you know how to use them.

First is to capitalize on ships early, few improvements are worth your time early (the one with +10 industry planet and the one with +10 science/planet, later), I usually skip drone networks until later.

Scout your surroundings effectively, my first thing built is a modded explorer ship with movement engine.

All my focus is to find a nearby minor faction, once you have it, you can secure your only leecher with a few explorer ships, later a fleet of three. Explorers will lose hit points on pirate battles though, but you can replace them with new explorers, and either send then back to an ark to heal at 10%/turn or use them to explore the zone while healing at 5%/turn.

Bad luck and no minors/mayor factions nearby?? Just remove some weapon/armor (to reduce retofit costs) in your staring ark and throw a few essence gathering modules in it. You will get you first ark in 25 turns even if you didn't extract essence from anything.

Once you got two arks is downhill to snowball madness :P

Mailanka wrote:

Thamior wrote:

I also would like to mention that 1 population unit of Vodyani works all available for colonization planets at once. So it makes sense researching tech for colonizing the rest of the planets in your system ASAP. Best case is you get 4 times working pops and also I believe their yield per pop on 1 planet is more than any other race in the game in all types of production at once (food, science, etc).

The planet needs to be well in reach, though.  I've had it so that all the local planets were stuff like lava and arctic.  That said, it's easier to colonize than ever in the new release, thanks to moving the techs for more difficult planets into lower tiers in other quadrants (such as lava and gas giants in the industrial quadrant).

Late game is going well for me (third time is the charm).  I finally found most of the minor factions and brainwashed converted them to my cause and now I'm kicking serious butt, though what I find interesting is how few colonies I still have, and how very wide-spread they've turned out.

My only lingering complaint is the extreme demand of my current quest, which is to possess 3 home worlds.  I hope the one I already have counts, because there's only 4 factions in my game.  It's sort of "Go kill a pirate, go investigate some systems, go colonize a system, now go win the whole game"

You colonized the system where the Tabernakle was? I just investigated it, which it sounds like leads to a whole different set of objectives after that: after some objectives about senate shenanigans, now I... well, let's just say the last objective requires a final tier tech that wasn't in the game until release, and leave it at that.

I also would like to mention that 1 population unit of Vodyani works all available for colonization planets at once. So it makes sense researching tech for colonizing the rest of the planets in your system ASAP. Best case is you get 4 times working pops and also I believe their yield per pop on 1 planet is more than any other race in the game in all types of production at once (food, science, etc).

I've been playing ES2 since the beginning, and over time things have been changed for various reasons, and the latest release is no exception.  I generally play on Hard, 4-arm galaxy, with 5 competitors.  I've been trying to play as the Vodyani, which I've done before, and I've always found them rather challenging to really get them started (though I find once you to get their claws into the galaxy, they can become quite a force to be reckoned with), but my last two games have been shockingly difficult.

The core problem is, as usual, Essence.  Whereas 250 was enough to get an ark before, that's been raised to 750.  That's a tall order.  And, of course, Vodyani population growth is fantastically slow. This tends to mean that if your home system doesn't have some easily accessible planets, you're stuck with 1 point of population for a very long time.  Most early improvements, like "+1 production per pop" aren't especially useful, and I'm honestly afraid to do much exploration, because they have so many quests that require you to explore things that if you investigate them too early, you shoot yourself in the foot for later quests.

If you can find a minor faction, though, this turns around nicely.  I find I have more than enough influence to rapidly dominate them, and they'll turn around and give me the dust and science I need to finally get something done.  You can brainwash them to get influence (a mere 15 per turn), but that seriously cuts into your dust and science.  Failing to brainwash them might leave them open to assimilation from another faction, but I haven't tested this.

So the ideal tactic is to drop a Leecher or two on a minor faction and start gaining some essence so you can finally hit that 750 essence and really get going, but as before, pirates become so common and leap up to cruisers so fast that all you'll accomplish is the death of your leecher within turns.  Building a new one is very expensive now.  I've resorted to a tactic of building as nice a fleet as I can in early game, but I'm stuck spending 30+ turns doing nothing but working on my fleet so I can maybe, hopefully, leech, before my leechers get slaughtered, but I've yet to see this tactic pan out.

If you can find a new system to take, one with more palatable worlds you can, of course, pick up and move there, which is what I did in the last game, when something very peculiar happened.  Apparently the Unfallen got their first, but they didn't colonize it.  They did, however, drop a population point there, or something?  In any case, when I anchored my ship, it didn't anchor like normal. Instead, I see an increasing bar as you do when you've conquered a system and I see that my happiness is very low, thanks to low ownership (??).  Is this a new standard thing, or is it because the Unfallen got there first?  In any case, the game warns me that my population is having problems, and then it tells me that I've lost a pop point.  This was my only pop point.  No more Vodyani exist in the entire galaxy, and yet I'm not dead.  I now apparently rule over a population of Unfallen, of all things.  A strange error.

In any case, I expect there's some bugs lurking here, but I find the Vodyani extremely fragile. The resources you need to advance in the game are locked behind the impossible barrier of piracy, and without those resources, you can't gain the population or colonies you need to defeat those pirates.  It's a catch 22.

If Vodyani experts have some advice to give me, I'd appreciate it. I'd really like to like the Vodyani, as you can see from my avatar, but I have no idea how to get them to work, other than having a lucky start.

I also haven't played Vodyani in a while, but I remember relying to Alms for Essence when it was hard to come by. I just needed a robust dust income.

Things might have changed since then though.

I'm playing a new game that's going fairly well, though I'm some 100 turns into it and the total essence I've collected is 373.  There was one minor faction in my constellation, but it was extremely far away (in a different arm of the galaxy) and I didn't discover it until very recently.  I literally found minor factions in a different constellation first.  I did find a nearby major faction (the United Empire) and if I'm honest, I find those easier to dominate, because they have a logic behind how they generate ships, as opposed to randomly spawning stuff.  I've had games (before release) where minor factions would spawn seriously dangerous pirates every single turn.

The success of my current game boils down to having a planet with 2 workable planets, one of which was temperate and fertile, which means Xenolinguistics (I forget the name of that improvement) works especially well, giving me +40 industry per turn.  I'm still the lowest scoring faction in the galaxy, but my experience is once you've gotten over the hurdle of dominating someone you can leech, the Voydani take off, and I'm in the midst of dominating the United Empire.

Weirdly, gaining access to minor factions without brainwashing them is also extremely effective, as you get a ton of money, manpower and science from them.

I'm have not played a lot of Vodyani entirely, but for the other factions, I surely feel that expansion is slowed down by the release patch, especially from doubling the food cost of population.

It does give a reason to build food improvements though.

I have started something like 10 odd games and played on until around turn 20/25 and have not found one bloody minor, started a few as the trees, newts and humans tripping over the minor buggers, so is there a way of modding the game so at least one minor is near my vamps?

godman85 wrote:

Also, 20% of their dust generation is converted to essence by default.

This is definitely untrue.  I have 0 essence generated, regardless of how much dust I had coming in.

And I understand that arks are powerful, but you have to have essence to get arks, and to get essence, you need 3-4 solid combat ships, which is at least one tech and many turns away, especially if you have a crappy starting situation.  The problem is not "how do I handle the game when I have 4-5 arks and fleets of warships and several minor factions under my belt."  The problem is getting there.

Though perhaps I could start just by upgrading my starting ark.  That might help.  Seems counter intuitive to go that route, though, but it might work.  I'll have to check.

I still can't believe they didnt nerf Vodyani.

I would have made it where their arks were much cheaper BUT they only started with 1 bonus module and with each CLASS of ship upgrades, they would unlock another. So their regular attack and defense ships would unlock the second, the mediums, the third, and the huge, the 4th.

This slows down their obnoxiously overpowered FIDSI but also allows them to expand much easier.

Also, 20% of their dust generation is converted to essence by default.

I haven't played Vodyani yet after launch, but you mentioned getting stuck on 1 planet on a bad start? If so, the optimal thing to do is usually to leave Tchinomy as soon as you find a better nearby system. Prioritize planetary colonization tech earlier (depending on what planets you find with probes/scout) and move your Ark to a system with 3-4 workable planets as soon as you can.

Also mentioned already by Nizaris; Ark modules are a big deal. Prioritize upgrading those.