1) Create a race of individualist machines. Traits don't really matter, Adaptive Frames is always good. Ethics are Egalitarian, Militarist and Spiritualist. Take Parliamentary System and whatever else you want (Master Crafters are always good) that can be removed later. Origin: Life-Seeded so you get a nice big Gaea homeworld. No other habitable worlds will spawn, you don't care.
2) Don't colonize anything else, but find and claim an easily defendable pocket, ideally with one or two chokepoints, and with 5 other planets you can eventually colonize (habitability doesn't matter). On your homeworld, build just enough districts to keep your economy barely above water, and temples. All the temples you can build. You're doing a unity rush. Switch your Vassalization option to Benevolent (it's the only option your Egalitarian faction disagrees with, so fix that) and promote Egalitarian faction. You should be getting 100+ unity a tick and race through the traditions. Do Prosperity, Mercantile and Statecraft, and for perks pick anything (Mastery of Nature is essential, Consecrated Worlds is fine) until Synthetic Age for your third pick. Switch your economy to Marketplace of Ideas when you unlock it in the Mercantile tree. Set your border policy to Cooperative in case someone finds your little pocket of space, and when they show up put an envoy on improve relations. If they're aggressive/hostile, feel free to bribe them (in case you're unaware bribery works *really well*); you desperately don't want a war right now. If they're fanatic purifiers, or declare war on you anyway, uh, restart.
3) In the Synthetic Age situation, pick the option that has the slowest progression/no Unity malus. You'll easily earn enough unity to unlock more traditions, don't and wait instead. On each choice for research, pick the choice that has the highest research malus (because your research is dogsh*t so who cares if it's 25% slower dogsh*t) for the best returns on each. Pick Virtuality as your ascension option.
4) Once the situation ends you automatically unlock the Virtuality tradition tree. You should have enough unity banked to fill out half the tree. While filling out the other half, go ahead and colonize 5 other worlds.
5) Once the tree finishes, you are now virtual - you will automagically spawn virtual pops to fill any job. This is broken and you're going to break it more. Replace all your temples save maybe one on your homeworld with research labs. Build all the research labs you can on your new colonies; build out mining districts if a planet looks good for it, generator districts if a planet looks good for it, etc. Early on put a civilian refinery and some factory districts on each world because you'll be feeding a LOT of labs. Make a note of your largest world (hopefully you got at least a size 20), all your other colonies are temporary. You're now tech rushing to Mega-Engineering (if you don't know, the requirements to unlock it are Citadels, Battleships, Zero Point Power, and four other T4 engineering techs). Your traditions are whatever you want (Supremacy is nice) and your ascension picks in order should be Cosmogenesis, Arcology Project, Galactic Wonders (ideally, repair a broken wonder if you have one, otherwise build a cheap wonder to unlock this), Master Builders, and finally Colossus Project (solely for the ability to do total wars). At some point go ahead and spec out of Parliamentary System and get whatever government you want.
You will have contacted other species by now - do whatever you can to keep them happy, but as your tech starts to boom they should be afraid of you just from your now snowballing pop and tech advantage. Ideally you shouldn't have to build *any* military until you start unlocking Fallen Empire designs through Cosmogenesis tiers (because those are the *only* ones you'll want to build). Hide behind your chokepoints and keep cranking out tech.
6) Once you unlock Arcology Project, turn your best non-homeworld colony into an Ecumenopolis and start cranking out alloys for all the wonders you're going to build. Build Arc Furnaces and Dyson Swarms where they make sense, you're going to need minerals to keep your Ecumenopolis rolling. Once you unlock Galactic Wonders, start building a Ring World. As ringworld segments come online, colonize them one by one, and when you first colonize a segment, shut down your smallest colony. One segment should be devoted to making consumer goods, the rest to research. Once they are all online, you should be making around 12K research from your ringworld and 1K alloys from your ecumenopolis (go ahead and make your homeworld an ecumenopolis/forge world as well if you are maxing out on minerals). You should have 1 or 2 ecumenopolis worlds, and 4 ringworld segments, all fully populated and online.
Congratulations. You won the game. Go ahead and check the Contacts list to make sure, everyone in the galaxy should be Pathetic with maybe one or two Inferiors.
Build resource wonders (upgrade a dyson swarm to a dyson sphere for energy, put a matter converter on a black hole for minerals). Start building fleets. Do a double take when you see your first fleet with Fallen Empire designs has 400K fleet strength. Make a strategic command center so you can make more. The fallen empire buildings you're researching (at this point you may just want to put everything on autopilot with research as it's coming in so rapidly) should plug any holes you have in your economy - you have buildings to make motes/gas/crystals from alloys, you have other buildings to make minerals from energy, and so on. You should only need 2 city districts and a FE happiness building for each ringworld segment to handle amenities. Don't forget to push the button to make every world you have Ascension Level 10 because you are still making tons of unity.
Once you think you're ready (when Cetana spawns in and starts talking smack is a good time) build a Synaptic Lathe and eat the galaxy. Conquer your neighbors, stick all their pops in the lathe, then shut down their colonies (otherwise your economy will die). The entire galaxy now hates you (every pop that dies in the lathe counts as a purged pop and you're going through ALL of them) but what can they do? Attack you? Finish off Cetana when you get around to it. Paint the galaxy your color, do donuts in the backyard of fallen empires, whatever. You won the game hours ago, this is just rubbing it in now. I sure hope you put your research on autopilot by now because once your lathe has hundreds of pops in it you are doing so much research you should be in the 40s or better on repeatables.
Anyway, this is all going to be spectacularly nerfed soon so go ahead and unlock all the achievements you can while you can.
(Edited with some corrections/clarifications)
Lum_ f*cked around with this message at 01:57 on May 17, 2024
