The Vaulters/Strategy

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

About
Gameplay
Traits
Ships
**Strategy**

### Overview

The Vaulters are a slightly unusual faction; most of their actions behave fairly normally, but there are a couple major special abilities that make them play in a radically different manner than most factions.

These are, respectively, **portals**, and **instant colonization**.

The vaulters have some slight perqs nudging them towards a science victory, and are reasonably good for most victory conditions except "conquest"-by-settling (i.e. owning a certain significant percentage of systems in the galaxy). They will struggle to get a "conquest" victory by settlement (unlike most factions), and must instead follow its namesake and actually *conquer* that large set of systems if they want to pursue that victory type.

### Strengths

##### Science

The Vaulters have some moderate bonuses to science gain. Their default population and collections give bonus science; they've got a few quest rewards that give bonus science, and their heroes also give bonuses to science gain. The upside of this is that science is something you generally don't have to worry about - it will accumulate on its own.

It also means that if you want to double-down on trying to achieve a science victory, you've got some bonuses leaning in that direction.

##### Defense

The Vaulters are arguably one of the best defensive factions, along with others like the Unfallen and Hissho. This is due to a combination of getting slightly-better-than-average generic defensive buildings, potentially getting a bonus one as a quest reward, and having both of their default population types give significant defensive bonuses against ground invasions. Their heroes also have ground-defense oriented skills.

Furthermore, as covered in the section below, they're uniquely able to always rush their fleets to defend against an attack.

##### Mobility + Portals

Vaulters actually have above-average mobility on their ships, on top of their special ability. The special ability, though, is an insane ability, *available from the start of the game*, to build a relatively inexpensive "portal" building on owned systems, and from then on, to be able to transport any military or pop-transport ships from any system to any other. Essentially it's like having all of your systems connected by wormholes.

**Force concentration, therefore, is one of their greatest strengths**. There's a classic military-tactics story: "How can 10 men beat 100 men? By fighting them one at a time, 10-versus-1." At least defensively, Vaulters are always able to bring their entire fleet power to bear on any single system. If the vaulters are attacked, they can always immediately move all of their fleets to the system being attacked, and therefore, (ideally) outnumber their opponents in that fight. In the very late game, vaulters can even temporarily set up the Argosy into a "portal mode", allowing them to perform the same trick offensively.

This act of "force concentration" thankfully has some limits. Amplitude rightly deserves some credit for partly fixing a common problem in 4x games (such as earlier iterations of the Civ series, as well as the current version of Stellaris), which is derisively known as the "doom stack". If you really could have "your entire military, period" duke it out in a single battle, that would be the ideal strategy, and the vaulters would be unstoppable if they got ahead in a game, because no opponent would be able to deploy their forces fast enough to defend against their attacks - in order to have fleets able to catch the vaulters and stop them from attacking, the opponent would need to have not merely a fleet of comparable size - but *multiple* fleets of comparable size, each defending whatever areas of the empire they can reach within a single turn. (History geeks might notice that this sounds awfully similar to how the mongols were able to repeatedly defeat militaries that, on paper, were much larger than their own.)

The limit that Amplitude has put in is that the number of ships that can participate in a battle is limited by your available technologies. It's a fixed count of command points, and thus, you can get a modest advantage by bringing one fleet, fighting an even battle (say, 7 vs. 7) with an opposing fleet, and then bringing a second fleet of 7 ships in to replace the battered remnants of your first fleet, and beat the opponent's similarly battered remnants - but what you can't do (without being very far ahead in technology) is combine those two 7-ship fleets into a 14-ship monster that just annihilates the opposing fleet with almost no losses on your side. That's the key difference - by forcing you to take the fight as a series of battles where you're facing even numbers of ships, the game forces you to have some substantial attrition rather than none.

It is still a very powerful mechanic, and should be a key aspect of your strategy, but it has fortunately been put on a leash.

##### Instant Colonization

At the cost of being globally rate-limited on how quickly they can colonize (they're limited to *strictly* one colonization ship), the Vaulters are able to instantly colonize systems. They can't do this if the enemy has an outpost on the system, but if they beat the opponents to the location, they can skip the entire "grow an outpost into a colony" contest and just immediately have a full colony right away. Like all factions, on the very first turn this will have no manpower defending it, but if you're just able to sneak one unopposed turn in (or defend it during the process with a fleet), you can instantly have a fully defended colony on that system. There are no "population shipments" the enemy can intercept or blockade to slow you down. There's no bombardment the enemy can do to hurt the growing outpost, or steal from its growth, etc etc.

The strategic implication of this, is that you need to snipe the best systems you find in the game. Instead of gradually growing across the map, colonizing a series of adjacent, mutually defensible (but often crappy, 1-3 planet) systems, your goal as the vaulters should be to scout outwards, and find the best systems available. Immediately send the Argosy to them and colonize them before your opponent has a chance. If the enemy (or frenemy) has an outpost on it, you can even toggle your ships to "privateer mode" (which conveniently is immediately available for the vaulters rather than being a lategame tech), and blockade the outpost to death whilst appearing to be a pirate fleet.

Because "all systems are one turn away", rather than having a contiguous mass of systems like most factions, you should ideally have a disconnected series of totally disparate systems scattered around the galaxy, but all of them should be great systems.

##### Civillian Portals

Portals cannot be used for "trade routes", but all other civilian ships - namely those transporting population units - can use portals. This means that unlike all other factions, you can **safely** transport population to a system of yours, no matter where it is - including deep within enemy territory, and will even work on blockaded systems. Often for many factions, it's difficult to bring new systems online, because a mixture of jagged border arrangements, pirate ships, etc make it so that sending a civilian pop shipment is a very risky affair.

The strategic implication of this is the vaulters can always bring new systems online very quickly. Your core systems in a game of ES2 will generally be "full" - they'll usually max out their pop capacity, and sit there producing no new pop units, despite being able to do so quite quickly. The Vaulters, unlike most other factions, can reliably ferry these *anywhere,* so even if a new system has what would be "risky" positioning for other factions, the vaulters can very quickly fill it up with population (which is a resource that can't be bought, and most factions simply have to wait patiently to build up).

With a combination of dust buyouts, and pop shipments (and their unique colonization mechanic), the vaulters can establish a new system immediately, and develop it to a surprising level in just a few turns. Critically - they can develop it to a **defensible** level - a system with multiple defensive improvements, several units of the vaulter's default populations that offer defensive bonuses, and no wait-time for the outpost->colony transition.

**Both aspects of this; the instant colonization, and the buyout, require lots of dust**. The former doesn't always, if you can time it right, but the defensive buyouts and food-building buyouts absolutely do. As a result, it's often in your interest as Vaulters to secure a substantial supply of dust to allow yourself to jump on an excellent-looking system and rapidly colonize it.

##### Approval

The vaulters start in a Federation, and as long as they're under the overcolonization threshold, they also have a unique trait that gives them an approval bonus. Their golden ages give a modest, empire-wide approval bonus for several turns (in addition to the substantial bonuses given on the system you settle on), and furthermore, they start with Sisters of Mercy, a (usually) easily-boosted pop type that gives large amounts of bonus approval, without a requirement of having a specific planet type (like Kalgeros or Horatio).

### Weaknesses

##### Strategic Resources

In order to settle systems at a decent rate, the vaulters need copious amounts of Hyperium and Titanium. (They also need copious amounts of dust.) They're guaranteed to start near a colonizable planet with Titanium and Hyperium, but nearby systems are a different story. and can actually get off to a really rough start if they don't any supply of these nearby. They have a few ways to at least produce a "trickle" of these resources if they really, truly, get "skunked", but these are not reliable ways to mass-produce them, but rather just exist to produce exactly that - a trickle to help solve your early-game problems. An often useful way to solve this problem would be to buy during crashes on the market, but this would require you to be in a good place financially.

The Vaulters also need copious amounts of other strategic resources (or, again, Hyperium and Titanium) if they want to use their unique ability to use strategic resources as a system development upgrade. These can give a nice income, but it can be rough if you end up picking one of these and then also needing the same resource for weapons, buildings, or - at worst - colonization.

##### Wide Colonization

If you're using nothing but the Argosy to increase your count of systems, you'll struggle to keep up with the rate at which other factions can do you. You'll out-compete them for the first couple of systems, and then steadily fall behind, because for most other factions, the rate at which they can expand is gated on the number of current systems they own (with each current system being able to support a growing outpost).

You can accelerate this process by spending (potentially enormous) amounts of Titanium , Hyperium , and Dust , but in order to keep up, this cost will quickly become prohibitive.

You're strongly encouraged to add systems via "side channels" - via all the other mechanics the game provides to do so. Those include trading systems, conquering systems, or assimilating minors.

##### Industry

Unlike several other factions, the Vaulters really don't have any bonuses to industry, and you're really reliant on the quality of the actual planets you're on to provide your industrial output. If you settle cold planets, like Boreal worlds, you may end up with systems that struggle to produce anything.

One key thing to bear in mind is that the Vaulter's "Material Expertise" trait can, if you want, act as an industry buff. It's dangerous to use Titanium  because of how in-demand it is for their colonization mechanic, but it can provide +30  & . What's much more impactful is using , which will provide +3  &  per. Because of the Vaulter's early-game science boosts, it's entirely reasonable to secure that as your level-1 system improvement, where it will provide a very solid buff to what are ideally large, multi-planet systems, and remain available to be doubled-down on for a level-2 improvement as well.

##### Influence

The vaulters have a very tiny direct buff to influence, and have several indirect buffs. Broadly speaking though, their influence gain is in the same situation as their industry - unless you deliberately take care to address it, and/or adjust your playstyle to accommodate it, you're at the mercy of being an "utterly vanilla" faction with no significant influence gain.

You get a tiny amount from golden ages, but this is mostly just to keep you going in the very early game. The indirect buffs that you have are that you are probably the faction best suited to snipe systems with unique planets. The Vaulters also have a fairly strong approval buff, and approval in ES2 strongly gates influence gain, frequently crippling it if your approval drops below 50%.

The key thing to watch out for is that you have no early<->mid game bonuses to it, so during that phase of the game where most minor factions are getting won over, you may struggle to win that contest. One you enter the mid-game, when the "National Museum" improvement becomes available, your influence gain will become quite respectable, but by that point in the game most of the minor factions may already be assimilated.

##### Dust

In order to keep up with the rate at which other factions colonize, the Vaulters need copious amounts of Dust. In order to buyout buildings and rapidly establish a new colony (i.e. to cash in on the meaningful benefit of their unique mechanic), they also need copious amounts of dust. They don't really have any bonuses to generating Dust (besides, potentially, Material Expertise), but through careful planning you can usually get around this.

##### Food

The Vaulters have a modest malus to food production, as a way to offset the food taken by Outposts. This doesn't generally end up being a big deal, but it's something to consider. You notice it most when you're trying to establish and ramp up new systems - and you'll likely need to invest in both of the early food technologies and buildings. A few of their strategic-resource-system-development upgrades will alleviate this, but it's a little bitter to consider that you're using a special ability on that front merely to 'break even' with what other factions get for free.

##### Ships

A key thing with the vaulters is that despite having a theme of militarism to the faction, they don't get any direct offensive bonuses like other factions get (such as the UE's "Punisher Drives", the Craver's 50-pop collection bonus, the UC's Stochastic Formations, or the Hissho's potential +30% damage quest reward). These bonuses are relatively rare amongst ES2 factions, but it's worth keeping in mind the Vaulters don't get one.

Another thing to watch out for is that the Vaulter's T1 attacker is a bit low on firepower. It is at best a 3, 3  ship, whereas other factions like the Riftborn bring 4, 4  ships to bear. There are several factions that get 7 "direct" attack/defense modules on their attacker (and a few rare ones with 8), but the vaulters get only 6. They do have 2 fully uncontested utility slots on their attacker, and can use these to help even up the odds, but in absolute terms, these ships are weak compared to the competition. (It's worth noting that, because of their portals, ships being used as purely defensive fleets could go entirely without engines. It's also worth noting that their unique "Tiryak Drive" quest reward gives them access to evasion values most factions can only get in the lategame, and can help tip the odds in their favor.

Once they're up to Tier 2 ships, such as Coordinators/Hunters, their ships are quite competitive.

As a result, it's important as the vaulters to get your higher tier ships online, and make sure you're fielding a solid "combined arms" force.