Hey all,

So I have been loving the vodyani so far, their whole look and feel really appeals to me. Yet I feel that I am not doing it right, and my play style feels Cheesy.

I usually make my first priority to gather as many leechers as I can and park them on top of a minor faction, this allows me to very quickly gather essence and I skyrocket from there. This may be just because we can only have score or domination victories, but I am eager to hear what you all have to say.

My big question to all of you is, how do you roll with the Vodyani and am I missing something that would make my experience just feel a bit better. Also I am wondering how you all counter the Vodyani as I would like to make this race a focus for my playthroughs/multiplayer. (Truth be told im gunna get hyped everytime a major faction comes out lol)

Never played as Vodany, as I never figured out how they works.

But in the my current game, I got to fight them.

They are incredibly vulnerable, gank the Ark with 2 medium sized ship fleets and settle the planet instantly.

Against all other races, I have to invade the planets, which takes time and grinds down on my manpower.

Eventually forcing me to return my fleets to replenish them.

That's an extra layer of defense they are lacking, making them very vulnerable in multiplayer maps.
And if they have a large area of influence, just scout out their space, and send fleets straight in to gank the ark.

Vodyani by far the easiest to cheese the system right now. Fact that Ark require nothing but tribute and build within 1 turn with absurd health and firepower. It literally unstoppable. You still need to gamble yourself with "Will i find some poor minor faction to leech?" if you did find some minor to leech within first 20 turn to crank out second Ark with battle configuration then you will snowball extremely fast. Convert your pop into manpower before the Ark is build then fly it straight into nearest major faction capital. Sit on it for 1-2 turn then invade. It will have 0 manpower in stock but you may fight against 200 manpower from "Local Resistance" tactic. If you do the main Vodyani lore quest and get Saint Speed module then Ark pretty much 11-19 movement battleship.

A good tip with vodyani arc designs:

1. After your ark is settled nicely, remove engines and add modules of your choice instead. 

2. During the first turns remove all your engines and weapons from your ark when redesigning to be able to upgrade it with new FIDSI modules faster.

3. Redesign an ark before building it. It doesn't effect its cost, so use the best modules you can! 

4. Guarding doesn't protect your arks from AI good enough, AI attacks righ befor you stop it, but before you can react and attack it first. In mid-late game always have arcs equipped with good weapons and shield so that it can survive a battle if attacked. Repair it after the battle using money.

Early game don't take minor factions quests yet if you plan to leech them. The quests might get completed occasionally and you'll loose your essence source.

AI's arks can be destroyed and then repaired by you. This way you'll get them without a need to spend essence on them.

Yeah, It's about leechers and scouts, replaced by real combat ships later: going to any minor faction or even an AI empire and leech them out. In cold war you can also leech to other players systems and colonies.

Another option for early essence is to remove weapons and shields and go all essence ark modules. You could place your second ark really fast, and full equipped.

The Vodyani are by far the strangest to play, the msot different; however they're also the strongest endgame race (by far).

Strength:

- Can make late-mid game level of power ship (the Ark) instantly with no monetary cost.

- While yes, population is stifled at growth (-50% food effectivness), each and every pop unit "projects" on all worlds you can colonize.

- Colonization is not needed, just park your ark and your population does all the job.

- Your entire system, population and upgrades, can be moved if you find a way better system.

- Towards endgame you can expand better than anyone. Luminieries does it the easiest, you do it the best.

Weakness:

- Early on you can not keep up with your competitors, you expand very difficultly.

- You need to play aggressive, you need to protect your harvesters.

- Harvesters are expensive.

- Essence is a requirement, but it can be hard to get. It also consumes population, so you WILL end up killing minor civilizations, thus you can't just farm one planet.

- Pirates are your worse enemy, just turn them off.

For me, Vodiany should be played really aggressive, like cravers. You need dust, you need ships, you need to leech, you need to use your arks to brute force stealing systems if you spawn close to another empire. Ah and if you spawn completely alone, you are screwed! Yes you can become self sustaining, no need to leech, but that's about at turn 100-150.

You want to unlock planet types, ship types and weapon types asap. Rest can wait. Use heroes on fleets if you expect fights.

Hope this helps.

I agree with what has been mentioned so far but I would like to point out 2 additional points.

Your starting hero is a Voyadani Guardian which I consider to be the best system administrators (Guardian has +80% Industry and Voyadani has +10% FIDSI per hero level (why this is so crazy powerful I don't know. Closest comparison I have is United Empire Titan of Industry which is +5% industry per level and is in the final tier instead of the one before))

The +Industry modules on an Ark are incredibly powerfull and probably the only ones you should be using.

To give an example here A freshly built Ark equipped with 4 tier 3 (of 4 possible levels I believe) docking on a 4 planet system had more then 1k industry generated. 

Warpfire wrote:

I agree with what has been mentioned so far but I would like to point out 2 additional points.

Your starting hero is a Voyadani Guardian which I consider to be the best system administrators (Guardian has +80% Industry and Voyadani has +10% FIDSI per hero level (why this is so crazy powerful I don't know. Closest comparison I have is United Empire Titan of Industry which is +5% industry per level and is in the final tier instead of the one before))

The +Industry modules on an Ark are incredibly powerfull and probably the only ones you should be using.

To give an example here A freshly built Ark equipped with 4 tier 3 (of 4 possible levels I believe) docking on a 4 planet system had more then 1k industry generated. 

In general i agree too, but would like to mention that i prefer spliting arcs in two types - first one strictly essence farming, second one production. Since Vodyani expansion isn't limited by aproval (every game i slap law forcing everyone to content as soon as i reach expansion cap) you can expand non-stop and by mid game with enough essence farming arcs + minor leech support i spawn an arc every 1-2 turns bulding population here and there inbetween (not worth it waiting for natural growth). 

When you've few high level industry oriented heros in 5 planet systems you're building 3-4 tier 2 ships in each / turn and rest systems production is pretty much an overkill so can as well provide more essence. In last game my core production systems had 16-18K production / turn, even couple of those are enough to wipe all oposition in galaxy, actually was building ships so fast, that i had to create a designs not using upgraded weapons since even with ~30 systems i didn't generate enough strategic resourses to support production. Btw with this kind of ship production my main heroes were at lvls 30+.

Also there's a funny bug (at least for me): even after reaching 9 population with T3 system upgrade food still goes towards the growth so food to production conversion building does nothing with food overflood. If that 3-4K food was properly converted to industry, i can't even imagine what production numbers i'd see (won't be suprised with to see 40K+ after all the % bonuses). 

tldr: lategame no race comes relatively close to Vodyani.