Wilderness TL:DR Analysis & Tips and Tricks 4.0.5

[snuttypie]

First of all, this has been my general experience going straight in Stellaris 4.0+ as Wilderness (eve-online curve)

With that out of the way, here comes a TL: DR list as possible for better gameplay experience from my testing:

Growth

• Actual pop or biomass is correctly displayed in Outliner when you hover over planets or in the Empire size menu sections for pops. The biomass shown on planets always lags behind in calculations one or even two months unless you're doing something simple as building.
• Base pop growth is now 1.0 (not 3.0!), this means at PERFECT planet capacity vs number of pops (biomass), you can achieve at maximum +1,5 + modifiers pop growth per month. This requires +30% pop growth speed to match the +2 pop assembly from the Cradle of Rebirth. This also requires you to keep a sizeable chunk of biomass at each planet, meaning it will never be better to save biomass instead of building even a single Cradle of Rebirth.
  • Ironically, the average minimum biomass you'd have to "resettle" to a new colony at around planet size 15-18 to not get less than 1 natural pop growth is around 400 biomass.
• The ROI in a Cradle of Rebirth is 400/2/12 = 16,67 years at default price. Do everything you can to reduce building cost to increase ROI.
• +Job effienciency affects Cradle of Rebirth, but not "+from jobs"-modifiers.
• "Smuggle Population" espionage mission is a good way to boost your biomass incoming without being a Devouring wilderness or having unlocked Genotype Regeneration in Purity ascension. Pop amount can be anywhere in between a full 100 ("1" pop, for example 223), this means 200 pops will randomly be assimilated over all your worlds over at least two months due to calculations and conversion into biomass. The leftover 23 pops in the example will be "saved" (seen in species tab) until you may get pass the threshold of 100 if you Smuggle Population again. Dunno if intended. Sometimes I've gotten less than 100 pops.
• +Biomass per month indicator in top bar does not reflect additional growth from assimilation when pops are turned into biomass, but it does happen.

Colonization

• There is a steep biomass cost when trying to colonize planets by transforming them into your native one. It's always better to simply colonize the planet at the lowest 500 biomass cost and then to terraform it with Energy credits after it have been colonized.
• The same can be done for much easier if you're going a Ocean starter world with Hydrocentric using Deluge Colossus weapon.
  • After you've expanded your said planet to the maximum size of 30 using "Expand Planet Size" decision, you can expand the planet +3 more times using the aquatic counterpart.
• Hydrocentric and World Shaper ascension perks reduce the terraforming cost of -25% each. This will save you biomass.

Planet / Empire management

• It's generally a lot cheaper to build districts than buildings in terms of ROI per biomass.
• Buildings and upgrading buildings should mostly be do done mid/late game due to the biomass restriction.
• You should take every tradition to reducing empire size from colonies;
  • Imperial Prerogative −50% Empire size from planets
  • Expansion's Limited Autonomy −25% Empire Size from Systems −25% Empire Size from Planets,
  • Purity's Heightened Attributes −25% Empire size from planets −25% Empire size from districts.
  • Divided Attention civic −25% Empire size effect.
  • Maybe even finishing Statecraft for -5% size.

Military

• It's much cheaper to add the module that allow ships to grow into their upgraded version instead of building the upgraded version directly.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Base pop growth is now 1.0 (not 3.0!), this means at PERFECT planet capacity vs number of pops (biomass), you can achieve at maximum +1,5 + modifiers pop growth per month. This requires +30% pop growth speed to match the +2 pop assembly from the Cradle of Rebirth. This also requires you to keep a sizeable chunk of biomass at each planet, meaning it will never be better to save biomass instead of building even a single Cradle of Rebirth.

• Ironically, the average minimum biomass you'd have to "resettle" to a new colony at around planet size 15-18 to not get less than 1 natural pop growth is around 400 biomass.

You should reset your settings. The default logistic growth cap is 5, now: growth is supposed to scale from 0.1 to 5.0 depending on population, not from 0.1 to 1.5.

Before job efficiency and growth modifiers, you get roughly the same growth from around 800 biomass as you do from the Cradle (2/0.0025=800). Though with planet capacity, that will be more like 1000. Effectively, you're trading a building slot and some food to get an immediate +600 biomass, when you build a cradle (turning 400's passive growth into 1000), and then setting it aside to be untouchable by future building.

• The ROI in a Cradle of Rebirth is 400/2/12 = 16,67 years at default price. Do everything you can to reduce building cost to increase ROI.

This is true in general. Building cost reduction is everything for Wilderness, since they expand as fast as they can build.

• There is a steep biomass cost when trying to colonize planets by transforming them into your native one. It's always better to simply colonize the planet at the lowest 500 biomass cost and then to terraform it with Energy credits after it have been colonized.

Whether this is better or worse depends on how scarce biomass is for you and how much you value the time it takes to get things going (though this conclusion makes sense, given you had logistic growth turned down so that biomass would be very scarce).

• The same can be done for much easier if you're going a Ocean starter world with Hydrocentric using Deluge Colossus weapon.
  • After you've expanded your said planet to the maximum size of 30 using "Expand Planet Size" decision, you can expand the planet +3 more times using the aquatic counterpart.
• Hydrocentric and World Shaper ascension perks reduce the terraforming cost of -25% each. This will save you biomass.

Yup, Hydrocentric is crazy good. The wild expands.

However, you can change your species preference to Ocean and add Aquatic after you have Purity. You don't strictly have to start with it (though it's a good trait, so why not).

• It's generally a lot cheaper to build districts than buildings in terms of ROI per biomass.

Considering that districts cost 0 biomass... yes.

You should take every tradition to reducing empire size from colonies;

• Imperial Prerogative −50% Empire size from planets
• Expansion's Limited Autonomy −25% Empire Size from Systems −25% Empire Size from Planets,
• Purity's Heightened Attributes −25% Empire size from planets −25% Empire size from districts.
• Maybe even finishing Statecraft for -5% size.

These are arguably less helpful for your empire than they are for everyone else (except for Statecraft), at least until other empires get ecus and other super worlds. Though these are all quite powerful bonuses, regardless.

-50% empire size from planets shaves off 5 size per planet. No more, no less. The fact that you have +200% empire size from planets doesn't change that, because they're additive: -50% from planets takes you from +200% to +150%, rather than cutting the final result in half.

What does matter is how much economy you have per planet, which balances the tradeoff of "-5 empire size per planet vs. a +10% boost to e.g. unity". And Wilderness generally has more, not less, than other empires. They can fill every planet to the brim because they don't care how many pops they have, which gives them a higher economic value per planet ratio, generally.

But you should be trying to reduce Empire Size Effect and empire size overall.

 

[snuttypie]

You should reset your settings. The default logistic growth cap is 5, now: growth is supposed to scale from 0.1 to 5.0 depending on population, not from 0.1 to 1.5.

Could be true, I'll try that but I do hope Paradox reset all these settings with such a big patch. So many players will have such a horrible experience otherwise

Considering that districts cost 0 biomass... yes.

A district costs 50 biomass, it was 0 before

-50% empire size from planets shaves of 5 size per planet. No more, no less. The fact that you have +200% empire size from planets doesn't change that, because they're additive: -50% from planets takes you from +200% to +150%, rather than cutting the final result in half.

Yes your second sentence is correct. Thus the importance but to less effect than other empires.

What does matter is how much economy you have per planet, which balances the tradeoff of "-5 empire size per planet vs. a +10% boost to e.g. unity". And Wilderness generally has more, not less, than other empires. They can fill every planet to the brim because they don't care how many pops they have, which gives them a higher economic value per planet ratio, generally.

But you should be trying to reduce Empire Size Effect and empire size overall.

Yes and yes .

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Yes your second sentence is correct. Thus the importance but to less effect than other empires.

Yes and yes .

My point was that, when X gives less (relative) benefit to you than it does to default empires, "You should take every tradition that gives you X" is not great advice.

 

[snuttypie]

Before job efficiency and growth modifiers, you get roughly the same growth from around 800 biomass as you do from the Cradle (2/0.0025=800). Though with planet capacity, that will be more like 1000. Effectively, you're trading a building slot and some food to get an immediate +600 biomass, when you build a cradle (turning 400's passive growth into 1000), and then setting it aside to be untouchable by future building.

It's worth noting though, that you can change your species preference to Ocean and add Aquatic after you have Purity. You don't strictly have to start with it (though it's a good trait, so why not).

 

[BookHermit]

So what are the builds people have been trying with Wilderness?

My first couple games were a Plantoid Aquatic + Budding Wilderness with Natural Neural Networks and Void Hive so I just expanded and grabbed systems as quickly as I could build stations and planets as quickly as I could find them and colonize them into Oceans (which, as noted, is probably better done after being settled as I could have used energy instead of biomass).

My build order so far tends to be getting two Cradles up per world as quickly as I could to get the colony to re-pay the biomass cost of settling it and start producing more for the empire, and then 4.0 normal planet build up after I started having spare biomass on the planet. The biomass cost is painful to get the two Cradles up, but if it is only 16 years to payback then for at least my earlier planet settling - if I can afford it - it feels like a worthwhile investment to try to jump ahead some on pop going into mid-game (makes me wish normal Hives could build multiple Spawning Pools actually).

But I am looking for more efficiency, and now I am thinking N.N.N. + Aerospace Adaptation instead and parking fleets over worlds to get that bonus job efficiency, the sticking point I expect will be having enough Naval Capacity to be able to have large enough fleets over each world for the bonuses to matter.

Any good civic choices I am overlooking that I should consider?

I have been eyeballing Planetscapers mostly for the fact that it would remove that block of Society research cards so I could get the meat ship cards I wanted faster, but the other perks it has might make it better than A.A. (less efficiency but more pops, and blockers are cheap to remove with all the energy I'm not using for terraforming) but still undecided.

Edit: It is called Cultivation Drones for hive minds and Wilderness is blocked from being able to use it, so no Planetscapers after all. Might still be good for non-Wilderness meat ship lovers, but won't fly here.

 

[GnoSIS]

I got bitten with high aloys cost and naval capacity towards the mid game, and got slowed down. Do not underestimate those two ....

Also wilderness using biomass to terraform to specific class (not colonise) was/is a trap. Either it is a bug or they would/should change colonised planet terraforming to cost biomas. They could also revert the terraforming change to cost energy.

In general this thing plays wildly differently (pun intended!)

 

[GnoSIS]

Starting with any wet preference also works for switching to Aquatic later on. Deluge colossus can target your own colonies at peace, and adding the aquatic trait on wet planets will not penalise you.

If you can do this asap it's really powerful and fast with devouring wilderness, sice the only thing stopping it is habitability.

 

[Nakkivene]

"I'll pick Egg Laying, sounds funny because I'll produce a bunch of food anyway."

derp

 

[GnoSIS]

@snuttypie After expanding planet size with wilderness and ice from aquatic, can you also stack mastery of nature on top???

 

[Abdulijubjub]

"I'll pick Egg Laying, sounds funny because I'll produce a bunch of food anyway."

View attachment 1294413
derp

Biomass is pops, so you need to maintain a stockpile if you want it to breed more by itself and use base growth (instead of assembly/bonus growth). If you spend it all as soon as it comes in, you're essentially keeping your planets at/near 0 population all the time. And then you'll be very dependent on the Cradle for assembly.

Once you lock away your biomass in buildings, they cease to be real pops, so they no longer reproduce.

 

[Shadeseraph]

Yeah, most of the pop growth comes from bonus growth, unless you let it grow on its own, and then you start getting diminishing returns due to the country growth scaling. Just go for production improvement bonuses. You'll refactor it once you get the purity tree anyway.

Late game I'm getting +250 biomass from cradles

Honestly, I'm currently in a wilderness and it feels fairly straightforward: max out cradles in every planet, colonize every single thing in sight, prioritize districts except for the few performance boosting buildings.

Single point: natural neutral networks feels like the best bang for your bucks civic, followed by divided Ascension. I tried the plantoid civic that converts planets on Gaia planets but doesn't mesh well.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

@snuttypie After expanding planet size with wilderness and ice from aquatic, can you also stack mastery of nature on top???

Of course.

Adaptability, Expansion, Hydrocentric, Mastery of Nature... All the districts.

The Wilderness expands.

 

[Nakkivene]

Seems like purging doesn't produce biomass

 

[BookHermit]

So from what I understand, the Body Snatchers civic should allow us to steal population from neighbors and convert them into Biomass?

Being able to launch the Espionage thingy to help with planetary conquest is nice, I guess (I generally make a giant army doomstack and throw that around as needed), but mostly looking at this as a way to grow biomass at my neighbors population expense by stealing pops and converting them to biomass.

Could you do this to Vassals? Conquer and split up a neighboring empire into a lot of tiny single world vassals whose loyalty you don't really care about as they exist to be tiny population farms for you to snatch people from to get around the Espionage action cooldown from having a single larger neighbor. Envoys would be the limit then, so still a limit on how many operations you could have going at a time for farming people into biomass.

Has anyone had much success with these as a strategy and is it worth the civic slot?

 

[InvalidToken]

Seems like purging doesn't produce biomass
View attachment 1294513

Purging no, but assimilating yes. Assimilated pops are biomass (Does not require purity ascension by the looks of it, unless that's a bug). It's like 75 pops to 25 biomass pops by the looks of it? (although I may have had some modifiers that affected it).
Only Genocidal / Devouring Wilderness is able to purge into biomass.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Purging no, but assimilating yes. Assimilated pops are biomass (Does not require purity ascension by the looks of it, unless that's a bug). It's like 75 pops to 25 biomass pops by the looks of it? (although I may have had some modifiers that affected it).
Only Genocidal / Devouring Wilderness is able to purge into biomass.

FYI: they were talking about Devouring Wilderness. This thread is old enough that the bugs people were complaining about have been fixed. 4.0 moves fast.

 

[Sweeze]

This is not a great guide. Let me quote the most important parts of playing advice for Wilderness you can get, courtesy of the most handsome and intelligent member of this forum:

!!!!!IMPORTANT!!!!!!
This is where the actual magic to Wilderness lies. Traits are practically irrelevant compared to this.

You *NEED* to stack -construction cost as hard as possible. -construction cost is effectively how you boost growth, and as a subtractive modifier it gets exponentially more powerful the more you stack it. To do this:

1. Initial ruler as Official
2. Neural Vaults and Empath Civics for +2 starting official levels
3. Take prosperity for -10% and then get as much leader XP boosts as you can from wherever you can. Architecture focus 3 is -15% cost per official. Statecraft should probably be your 2nd tradition (though I also kinda like unyielding for station resources and turtling)

The sooner you make those cradles cheap the faster your biomass snowball will be. Getting their cost down to 160 food/160 biomass isn't too hard by midgame.

Once you've got your construction cost bonuses down you probably want to switch to Natural Neural Network/Divided Attention/Elevational Desires.

Also I think you overemphasize empire size decreases from civics and stuff. Getting a -10% or -25% to something really doesn't matter that much when you're sitting at 300% for that empire size source. It's the -25% empire size effect civic stacked with your government that makes the big deal.

Also note that the "best" way to manage planets is to just make 1 food/energy/mineral district on all planets and spam the buildings for base resources. That way you get tons of resources at minimal district usage and all jobs are filled instantly anyway. You will probably need a few more base resource districts at one point or another but this is a good baseline. My empire ended up with 2 alloy planets, like 48 research planets, and all resources were filled to +5k a month with only 1 district apiece per planet. Eventually the FE buildings are the best to run since more jobs = more stuff. Theoretically the ultimate play might be to delete your districts to reduce empire size and rely on research jobs from FE buildings, but I'm not sure on that and its so late game that your game is probably unplayable at this point anyway.

Also Also there's a problem where if you spend too much biomass some planets will have 0 left and won't be working jobs. You need just 1 biomass per planet to work all your jobs since it gives +99999 workforce or whatever. The ability to overspend like this is kinda stupid. To fix it just build a new building at the depleted planet and immediately cancel it. To avoid it you can keep a bit of a biomass reserve and avoid spending it down the nothing, but I'd only do that by the midgame since in the early game you absolutely want to spend it ASAP to start snowballing.

 

[Raiwons]

i have question, how is

Of course.

Adaptability, Expansion, Hydrocentric, Mastery of Nature... All the districts.

The Wilderness expands.

there was specific order or it bugs out, no?
first was expand planet size by wilderness tradition, then mastery of nature addition of districts and only then ocean expansion as last? did i get it right?

 

[Archael90]

There is a steep biomass cost when trying to colonize planets by transforming them into your native one. It's always better to simply colonize the planet at the lowest 500 biomass cost and then to terraform it with Energy credits after it have been colonized.

Iirc that was the case in earlier iterations of wilderness, but at some point Devs changed that and cost depend not on planet new type vs current, but rather planet new type vs homeworld? I'm not sure, I stopped playing it unless weird pop curve for wilderness will be resolved.
Right now, at the start if the game, You have almost no biomass, and spend everything whenever is enough, meaning almos 0 empire size from pops and diplo weight from pops. Game req to build as many craddles as You can.
Later You swim in biomass without any way to spend it on anything. Even without craddles they multiply faster than You can spend, especially near endgame... And You can't cease pop growth.

There was a bug for a while where biomass was not using housing and amenities, which was great IMO, and should get back.
But also, empire size and diplo weight from pops (and pop growth?) should be counted based on biomass in buildings and districts. Also no cost reductions should affect biomass cost, and craddles should be capped somehow.