The Umbral Choir/Strategy

Observers and infiltrators, the Umbral Choir seeks to understand--and heal--the galaxy.

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**Strategy**

## Basics

* **Early game**, you want to be sneaky. Expand your network of sanctuaries. Do not engage others unless you really have to. Be patient. Cloaking/anticloak tech is on the military side, and most players would rather research other things early on.
* **Mid game**, start forging alliances with the factions closest to you. Get a trade company established for dust.
* **Late game**, leverage your superior production output. Switch your behemoths to strategic production as the relevant system improvements don't apply to sanctuary systems.

If you're next to Cravers: Find and repeatedly hack their capital to spam Support Revolutionaries. They don't fight fair. Why should you?

## Advanced Knowledge

* Nexus cloak level is linked to system development level. In theory, you could try to wait until T3 luxuries come around and use those, but other humans will kill you before that happens.
	+ Prioritize systems with luxuries for sanctuaries, and/or unlock the Galactic Marketplace quickly so you can buy 50 of any tier 1 luxury and get that system development upgrade.
	+ Higher difficulty pirates will get anticloak very quickly. Pay them off until the non aggression pact kicks in, or you'll find your fleets (and maybe even Nexus) harassed for all eternity.
* Other players can and will notice a suspiciously empty corner of the galaxy with an inconspicuous cluster of special nodes. Keep an escape plan (beacon) charged and ready to go.
	+ Or better yet, preemptively move to somewhere else, preferably right next to or deep inside ally territory.
	+ CAUTION: Transmigrating to an isolated node will sever all trade company routes. Activating that beacon at the wrong time could bankrupt you.
* Hacking is everything for the Choir; it is how you colonize, how you grow, and how you attack. Gaining additional hacks is of paramount importance, so Autonomous Materials and Low Kelvin Sciences should be priority research targets.
	+ The final questline reward will also give you another max hack limit, but only if you chose to UNBURDEN Imane Kyriv.
* Economic behemoths are extremely powerful for the Choir, as all your sanctuaries feed their FIDSI to the nexus
	+ A single economic behemoth will provide its multipliers to your entire empire-wide FIDS output.
	+ Building a Citadel (Behemoth upgrade) on your Nexus to protect it and add additional manpower defense is also a very good idea
		- Citadels do not follow Nexus if you activate a transmigration beacon. They also add a little status ring around the system they are on, visible to the trained eye. Expect opposition. Plan accordingly.

## Early Game

* Fasol Staccato, your starter hero, is an excellent governor. But since searching curiosities will level him much faster, he should be assigned to one of the starter scouts at the beginning of the game. Add two engines to bring his fleet up to 10 movement and one probe module to help with curiosities
	+ Curiosity searches do not apply their movement costs to the hero, only the scout. If your Nexus has 4+ curiosities, you should explore 4 of them, then split your hero off the first scout and merge it with the second before exhausting the rest of the probes. This maximizes the experience your hero will earn, while letting you move at least one scout off of Nexus with Fasol in tow.
	+ Keep two skill points in reserve to invest in additional bandwidth for when your faction quest demands it.
	+ Feel free to reassign Fasol back on Nexus once the reassignment penalty expires, you just want to jump start him by a few levels.

* Your early tech progression will likely start with Xenolinguistics. It unlocks Titanium (the blue strategic), and its unlocked improvement stacks a flat amount of industry per sanctuary. You want industry first and foremost.
	+ Behemoth Blueprints should be grabbed at your earliest convenience afterwards, but don't feel bad about delaying it a few turns if you want a colonization tech for a nearby planet (especially if the planet in question belongs to a very juicy system).
		- Behemoth Analyzers should be picked up one or two techs after this. The Stellar Node Study I module gives you extra science if the Behemoth is orbiting a special node (such as the one Nexus is sitting on).
	+ Off world Agribusiness lets you conduct diplomacy with minor factions and pirates.
		- Depending on their difficulty, pirates will get anticloak well before you muster up the science for higher level cloaking. Pay them off, or they'll harass your scouts.

## Your First Election

* You should have roughly four pops by the first election. Don't send any to Sanctuaries
	+ Only the pops on Nexus get a vote, and election results can get really screwy if you only the first two pops are counted.
* For most of the game, expect either the pacifist or the science party to lead your democracy. Your first election is probably the only time for another party to seize power.
	+ It is possible to get the Ecologist party as the primary party (allowing you to place a sanctuary on any non-gas planet), but this will typically require you explore only Life Form curiosities to overcome the other parties' support.
* In an ideal first election, you should have the Pacifist, Scientist, and either Industry or Ecology parties elected. Support one of the latter two during the election.
	+ Industry's first law gives you +20 food per sanctuary. This will GREATLY accelerate your pop growth early game.
	+ Ecology's first law gives a decent boost to FIDSI production, and is a good follow up.