The Vaulters/Gameplay

Inquisitive and fearless, the Vaulters seek traces of their past and sources of knowledge across the galaxy.

About
**Gameplay**
Traits
Ships
Strategy

The vaulters have a few major twists on colonization, and movement; once settled on a planet they're fairly "vanilla" in their gameplay and planet management. They also have a big twist to "system development" which is normally done with luxury resources.

## Involuntary Nomads (colonization):

The Vaulters don't have colony ships. They have one, single "master" ship for colonization, called the Argosy. Most factions will "consume" their colony ship upon founding an outpost, making it necessary to build more; the Vaulters instead will have the Argosy become disabled for a few turns immediately after colonization, in the hangar of the new system.

The act of colonization for them is instant; there is no "outpost" period. If a system isn't occupied by opponents, the selected planet will *immediately* become a full, operational colony. It's worth noting that for balance reasons, they can't do this if any enemy has an outpost on any of the planets; if they could, they could time it right to waste the very large amounts of effort most factions have to put into food shipments to get really earlygame colonies, and thus could bully an enemy that spawned immediately adjacent to them into struggling to actually complete any new colonies (this would be an issue in i.e. random map layouts).

They can choose to eliminate any enemy colonies the same way any other faction does - by moving in military ships and blockading it, and once this is done the system is free for you to colonize.

They're gated in their colonization speed by a special "extra cost" to colonization - after colonizing a system, they'll be able to use the argosy again in a very short amount of time (2-3 turns), but if they want to actually settle with it, there will be an enormous additional cost of  (usually a few thousand), and a cost of  and . Every turn this cost will decrease substantially, until after about ~10 turns it has reduced to zero.

What this means is that there's a hard ceiling on how quickly the vaulters can colonize, but there's also a much, much more imposing "soft ceiling" that can be overcome by picking some clever settlement locations and securing an enormous supply of the two strategic resources - that, and dust.

## Involuntary Nomads (homeworld):

The vaulters also don't start on a unique "home system". In fact, they don't start out with a system at all - they start out with their Argosy colonizer, sitting on top of a special anomaly, and have to manually seek out a system to actually settle. This gives you a bit of flexibility in your choice of system. The unique anomaly is a "regeneration field"; if this is overlapped by your influence circle, it provides a modest amount of dust and a powerful amount of ship regen.

## Involuntary Nomads (golden ages):

Since the Vaulters may be forced to wander around before colonizing, they're also given a bonus that tallies up for every turn the argosy is technically ready to colonize, but during which you haven't yet colonized. This is really just a "consolation prize" for taking a while to form a colony, and also exists to help keep their colonies from starving due to their "Black Thumbs" food malus by giving them a boost during the period of time it takes to erect e.g. Drone Networks.

The specific bonus given by a Golden Age is:

+25  on System, +25  on Empire, +15  on System, +10  on Empire, and +5  on System, as well as -50% Influence Conversion Rate on System.

## Metafolding:

The vaulters can build portals. Portals are either a building, or late in the game, a capital ship module, which allows special movement. Specifically - any fleet can travel from a node with portals on it to any other node with portals in a single turn of movement, no matter how far away. Like a wormhole, this will immediately consume all movement points.

Allies are allowed to use your portals.

Portals are useable by military ships, and by the visible civilian ships that transport population units (the vaulters probably have the single safest means to shuffle their pop types around). However, they cannot be used to link together trade routes.

If you give a ship movement orders, it will default to using the shortest possible path offered by the portal network, rather than the shortest geometric path (which is to say, the ships are clever about optimizing your path for you). Portal usage is automatic, and just part of plotting regular ship movement; it's not an explicit fleet action that needs to be performed.

## Corsairs (privateers):

The vaulters can perform the same "privateers" action other factions can, by disguising their ships as pirates. This allows them to fight battles, even with allies, and even against ground targets (if invaded and defeated, an enemy system will become a "hunting ground" that's fair game for settlement. Unlike other factions, they can do this with more than just the ships bought off of the marketplace - they can also do it with their faction-unique ships as well.

The most important thing about this is that it can be done immediately from the start of the game; it doesn't require teching to the rather late-game point at which most other factions can get the tech.

## Corsairs (pirate relations):

The vaulters can perform a special action, called the "Non-Aggression Pact", with a single buyout of influence, to force a "Cordial" rating with the pirate league. This does not alter your actual "friendship" rating with the Pirate League; if they're unhappy with you, the cumulative value will remain at a low rating that would normally result in hostility, but the actual behavior will be hard-locked to a "cordial" setting for a temporary period of time - 10 turns on Normal Speed.

You are still free to befriend the pirate league via the regular method, that of dust-based bribes, which all other factions have access to.

Regardless of which method you use, there's also another special Vaulter-only bonus to befriending pirates: if you're at a cordial rating, pirate bases act as useable portal nodes.

## Material Expertise (System Development):

This is covered in a separate wiki article ( Luxury Resources#Material Expertise ), but essentially the Vaulters can choose to use a Strategic Resource, rather than a Luxury Resource, as a System Development upgrade.

There's a certain strategic danger in trying to use Hyperium or Titanium - unlike the later resources, those are in demand, for the Vaulters, to power their instant colonization mechanic.