Stellaris - Ultimate Guide to Economy Rush

How to make AI’s inferior and pathetic by year 40.

Economy Rush Guide

All credit goes to Hairy Plotter!

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.