Stellaris – Ultimate Guide to Economy Rush

Economy Rush Guide

Setup Explanation

There is a reason for every pick. First, racial traits:

• Adaptive: this would turn those yellows into eye-pleasing greens.
• Thrifty: a bonus to energy, and later cg and unity.
• Conservationist: extra sold consumer goods for extra energy credits.
• Fleeting: as you are gonna swim in energy, leaders dying a bit earlier is nothing.
• Unruly: by the time sprawl becomes an issue, you should be able to solve it

Second, origin: of course Mechanist. Put more robots on it, everything is better with robots.

Next, ethics: of course Corporate government with:

• Private Prospectors: that is how you are going to colonize a planet the moment you find and claim it. 500 energy is much cheaper than the standard price, and it doesn’t uses up alloys.
• Brand Loyalty: to get Expansion traditions somewhat faster.
• Materialist: obvious, thats how you get the origin prerequisite.
• Authoritarian: for Stratified Economy saving even more cg for sale early (later you will be swimming in cg as well and may switch to a more generous policy) and slavery. You won’t be enslaving anyone, on the contrary, you will be buying slaves for half the price everyone with slavery forbidden pays and liberating them into full citizens of your glorious Conglomerate.
• Xenophile: more friends means more Branch Offices, and extra envoy to put into your Federation.
• Game settings: I highly recommend max empires and full starlane connections to keep the experience close to 1.0. To “chokepoint” a huge tracts of land is imo pure cheeze.

Gameplay

First things to do on start:

• Pick up techs leading to building unlocks, like Fusion Reactor. You will be needing them very soon.
• Demolish Commercial Zones. Just like that. You will be worker starved for much more important jobs for quite some time.
• Save 300 minerals for Mining District, only after that start building mining stations. Delay building research stations until you have extra minerals for it.
• Sell food and cg and queue Private Colonizer right away, it should be finished about when you claim a guaranteed planet.
• Take Expansion tradition for key bonuses like bonus pop upon new colony and outpost influence discount. Plop a Corporate Culture Site to boost it, and start rabidly colonizing all that is green.

Plop Robot Assembly Plants the moment a colonization finishes, with your huge energy income you can afford the maintenance, buy minerals if needed.

Then proceed to make all kinds of districts your economy requires, of course only when there are workers available. Do a little math and time district completion with new pop growth.

Take a clue from your First Contacts and decide if you need a fleet asap or can keep up expansion spam. Either way, by this time you would need Alloy Foundries in your capital to fund it and can afford some more research ships – or not, if things look grim.

After establishing relations with all the neighbours, build up all worthwhile systems – get migration treaties for races with different habitability types and spam some more colonies. Or just spam fleet. If you are lucky, you can get a derelict cruiser or Caravaneer destroyer.

Put some Lithoid on it. Everything is better with Lithoid.

Around this time you need to choose between establishing a Trade Federation or grabbing second capital from a rival, which should dictate your next tradition picks.

If that succeeds, congratulations! The year is around 40 and your Biggest Boy position is secured. Now you can start upscaling your research by building labs into free slots on planets and branch offices and prepare for midgame.

Trade in Early Game Economy

I’ve been experimenting a lot lately with using Thrifty+Mercantile+Xenophile Traders in the early game, and I’m convinced that it is far more powerful than other economy sources. With the tech changes prolonging the early game and making it more difficult to rush production boosters, I think its even better. From some spreadsheet analysis and in game experience:

In the early game once mercantile is unlocked (only takes a few years with a decent early unity source), a Trader can expect to be making ~(8+2)*1.7 = 17 value on a dedicated world, plus some Amenities that makes entertainers not needed. This is about 50% more productive than a Technician with the energy building and Capacity Subsidies, before counting their Amenity output. They are about double as effective as a Miner with the mining building and Mining Subsidies. As specialists, the Traders contribute more Unity from factions, and because the empire does not need to run either subsidy, they can spend their edict points on something else.

The output of Traders does not diminish from low habitability worlds like generators/mines/artisans etc. The upkeep increases, but because they are only penalized once and have low upkeep to begin with, they are still very productive (and more than other jobs are). This means that it is very economically profitable to immediately colonize 20% habitability worlds and use them as trade centers.

Personally I think going for the half energy credits, half consumer goods is the best trade policy unless there is a very good reason to really rush early traditions. Even then, the exponential nature of traditions means there is (quickly) diminishing returns on staying with unity as compared to the effects of consumer goods (below).

The best impact of going consumer goods is that it eliminates entirely the need for Factory Worlds and drastically cuts the needed minerals! In my games I usually need only a few mines or even none, just relying on stations and the market 40/month.

As an Example: I have a game at about ~2230 with 115 minerals surplus with only 5 miners (on the capital) and not using the market. I could phase out those miners but I’m stockpiling minerals for a building spree that’s coming up.

Needing few miners is a huge boost in productivity itself: they are the worst job other than unboosted clerks (and with this kind of build clerks aren’t half bad!).

With no Factory world needed, if there is even one low habitibility world nearby (and the 2 good starter worlds), then the player can immediately build 1 research world, 1 forge world, and 1 (low habitability) trade world and be specialized right off the bat.

One slight side effect though is that it becomes worse to build industrial zones on the capital because it leads to way too much consumer goods. So I like to build research labs and possibly some mines there, if more minerals are needed.

One downside to this kind of build is that Thrifty really is a gigantic boost: other incorporated races are just not going to be as good if they don’t have it. This might crimp conquest plans a little or make it needed to use population controls to keep other species off of the trade worlds.

I hope you found this useful!