The Lumeris/Strategy

Clever, greedy, and Epicurean, the Lumeris society is built on economic gain and diplomatic negotiation.

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**Strategy**

## Strategy

### Overview

The Lumeris are a fairly vanilla faction with a few critical bonuses. Almost all of their mechanics *essentially* work the same way as other factions.

The one tweak is that a few actions which require influence  or industry  instead, for them, require dust  (these being improving relations with minors, and creating colonies on planets). This primarily has an effect on their very early-game behavior. In the extreme early game, you want to secure a steady source of dust so that these actions are not bottlenecked; that said, though, at least for influence, these essentially act as a bonus to influence gain, since you're free to spend influence on something else, instead.

### Strengths

##### Buyout

An obvious theme with them is that they've got several bonuses to **buyout**; both through unique buildings that reduce the cost of buying out items more than the same buildings do for other factions, but also through a global reduction to dust inflation, which is a mechanic that essentially "punishes" factions that repeatedly buy things out by making the act of doing so progressively more expensive. The lumeris do have bonuses to trading companies, but at the time of this writing they were (dramatically) over-nerfed, and won't be generating a significant amount of income for you. They're useful to have for the dust inflation reduction, and to secure a small amount of luxury resources, but not for dust generation.

##### Dust Generation

The lumeris actually **don't** really have strong bonuses to dust generation, at least, ever since Trading Companies were nerfed. There are a couple of unique buildings, pop traits/collection-bonuses, and unique quest rewards that give modest boosts to this (the Chapter 1 Omokar bonus can give a solid 30% boost to any major/minor faction home planet), but it's surprisingly tame (certainly so compared to thematically similar factions from other Amplitude games, such as the Roving Clans or Broken Lords from Endless Legend).

##### Industry

Unexpectedly, given the faction theme, they've actually got some rather good bonuses to industry available through their faction quest. There are two percentage bonuses available, which can be stacked for a total of +55%  on a system that both has a governor, and is at ecstatic approval . Since governors, themselves, help maintain approval ratings, and since you will likely have them on your strongest core systems, this means you can get a very good boost to industry by taking the "Arakyo" paths in the first two chapters of their faction quest.

##### Approval

The Lumeris have several bonuses to approval, including both a flat +20  boost on all systems, as well as a faction quest reward which significantly reduces overpopulation penalties. This vaguely acts like having a higher colonization threshold, but is a more widely useful reward. By having the first benefit right at the start of the game, their initial expansion can be wider than other factions.

##### Luxury Resources

The Lumeris get a huge boost to luxury resource generation via a faction quest reward. This means that you have access to quite a bit more to sell for extra dust, but it also means that you'll have a far, far easier time than most factions at supplying yourself with the resources to build system improvements - if you find a desirable kind, but only have one or two worlds you're producing it from, you may be making 2-3x the amount other factions would get, and may be able to use that, alone, to supply yourself.

### Strategy

The Lumeris are equally well-suited to almost any victory condition. Before the nerf to Trading Companies, they were unusually well-suited to economic victories, but are now just a jack-of-all-trades.

Like the UE, because you've essentially got a bonus to expansion, it's a good idea to double down on this and aggressively expand early in the game, securing a wide swath of territory in general, and also particularly trying to secure systems with a powerful industrial base. Since you'll be supplied with at least a few Lumeris heroes (which have bonuses to hot planets), try and scope out a few systems with a bunch of hot planets to set up as industrial cores.

Access to "dust buyout" primarily acts as a tool to make you flexible, and to eliminate bottlenecks. Don't use dust buyouts to produce things willy-nilly, like routine production of warships; rather, use it to rapidly bring systems online, buying key industrial buildings and food buildings so a system can rapidly start producing things on its own. In a pinch, dust buyout can also allow you to respond to sudden crises by i.e. mustering defenses in a hurry.

Because you've got industrial and expansion bonuses, act like it - bully your way into early territory disputes, and forward settle desirable territory. You will both benefit from having the territory, and will have a solid chance at early sparring. Secure a solid base of systems, and then scope out a victory-condition goal as appropriate to the situation of the game.