What strats/builds are you testing?

[TheGrinningMan]

I want to follow up on Celestian Vanguard as a combo, having won a game with it because, wow, it's really great despite the Vanguard's lack of dedicated psionic mods. (If you really want such, befriend Psi-Fish or, as I did in my last game, Spacers.)
Soulburn/Enlightened is such a good synergy with them! Soulburn debuff gives Enlightened units a +20% accuracy against the Soulburned, and when long-range firepower is your faction's gimmick, that's a bonus you want. Slap a Shield of Remorse on the units you expect to take a lot of hits -- Light Bringers, Assault Bikes, your T3 and T4s -- and you'll get Soulburn on your enemies, while they get to watch their morale collapse. For good measure, take the doctrines that focus on messing up Soulburned or simply non-Enlightened enemies.
Tenets of Tranquility is a worthwhile buff for your Troopers; it's not the most awesome or flashy trick, but it's a step towards stagger immunity, you'll never worry about their morale again, and it gets them that aforementioned potential +20% accuracy from Soulburn.
Vanguard Light Bringers. You've now got a mass-producible melee brawler. That gets shields after their Assault Dash. They're expensive when you give them the mods they need to improve their survivability -- the nanite healing thing is particularly worthwhile in my experience -- but just one of them falcon punching your enemies can change the flow of a battle. Especially if the unit taking the falcon punch is a squishy support unit that expected to hide behind their beefier minions while taking on the stereotypical rigid Vanguard firing line. Also great for hopping up onto turret mounts in city battles and disrupting the enemies who were planning to rain fire on you from above.
Crits. Your units' morale is just going to be flying upwards as a side-effect of you making sure your grunts can take advantage of a conditional +20% accuracy boost. I'm not convinced one can build a strategy aound crits, but it's certainly nice to have when a unit that was going to barely survive is sent to the scrapheap instead, freeing up the unit that was going to finish it off to do something else.

 

[Foofmonger]

I've been testing out the Assembly in general, so basically all the techs and then within the techs different strategies. I'm focusing mostly on Voidtech, as I've found it the strongest pairing so far, but I still have yet to test out Celestian. Synthesis is also very good.

Overall, I think I prefer going for Firearms over Arc on Assembly, depending on your secret tech. Early game, the firearms units are generally stronger then the arc ones (Scavenger and Vorpal Snipers), and by the time you hit late game you can start getting some arc mods quickly with all your research so in my testing thus far I generally prefer to go Firearms early and Arc late. I've tested the opposite and it just felt weaker overall.

As far as secret techs go, Voidtech and Synthesis are both strong and have a lot of natural synergies with Assembly in terms of damage types. Voidtech is my favorite so far, the ability to control the enemy position on the battlefield is very strong once you get Phase Manipulators and Rift Generators. I like voidtech as it's a good all-around secret tech, giving boosts to survivability, damage, crowd control, and mobility depending on what mods you use. Synthesis is probably overall much stronger vs mechanical based armies, but tends to trend much weaker then Voidtech against biological armies.

Xeno can oddly enough, work on Syndicate. You need to play 100% aggressively at all times though, as you want to use both the early research on kill doctrine combined with the xenophage units to just snowball out of control and gain an early tech/unit advantage that you can just use to slam through your enemies. Basically you will be at war constantly. This strat is very good when it works, but if you have a rough early start it tends to never recover so it can be very all or nothing.

I was underwhelmed by both Psynumbra and Promethean, most of the mods don't work well on the Assembly units (or just don't work at all), and overall they don't bring anywhere near as much to the table as Void/Synth and don't have the natural synergy of Xeno with the Assembly playstyle.

I haven't tried Celestian yet but it's on my to-do list, I've heard some good things from the forums.

General Assembly Strategy:

Be aggressive. I highly recommend the commander tech that give 2 free techs at the start randomly. Assembly is all about having a research advantage over your opponent, and if you get lucky and get the research on kill doctrine on turn 1 you are in a ridiculously good shape to snowball. Even if you get other techs, it still allows you to start off with a tech advantage and then snowball out from there once you get the research on kill doctrine (I forget the name). You want to constantly be fighting with your armies, what you are fighting doesn't matter. Your armies should always be looking/marching towards another fight. Don't be afraid to get into wars early, they are a great way to keep snowballing, weaken your opponents, and snag a bunch of new territory without having to build colonizers.

As far as military tech/build orders go, I like to try and get the first firearm research, the first void, and reverse engineers asap (basically in that order, you can swap void and firearm around), when playing voidtech. Same concept will be applicable for other secret techs, although you may want to get the defense tech instead of the secret tech sometimes. Don't be afraid to jump to higher level research early on. Yes it may say it will take 7-12 turns to complete, but if you have a bunch of fights coming up its going to be much quicker then that.

Per your army composition - A good early game 6 stack would be: Hero/2 Scavengers/2 Vorpals/1 RE/1 Flex slot (can be another hero, a secret tech unit, or another re/vorpal/scav). You have two basic ways of playing - advancing or holding ground and letting your enemy advance (depends on what their army composition is and what the cover situation looks like). Either way, what you basically do is use your vorpals to lay down blinds/concussions on priority targets, then move up your hero/scavs into range to start blasting before they close to melee (if you have a melee hero, if you have a ranged just go pew pew), your RE stays in the backfield most of the time, creating constructs and healing/rezzing your damaged units, occasionally attacking when needed. Once you get your scavs up into meele range, the fight should be basically over as you swap your vorpals to do the vorpal shots for damage. The snipers shooting plus the Scavs meleeing is a ton of damage early on. The exception is versus other melee based armies, where you are letting your enemy advance. It's basically the same strategy, but you want to draw them in with the scav shotguns and you may want to even keep using the shotguns instead of closing the distance with your scavs (let the enemy close the distance and not have full AP to attack). This is usually how you play vs Kirko early on, as by the time their melee units reach yours they are usually pretty beat up and wounded from the shotgun/sniper fire.