The Vodyani/Strategy

The Vodyani worship the Virtual Endless, and scour the galaxy seeking ancient temples while devouring lesser beings.

About
Gameplay
Traits
Ships
**Strategy**

## Basics

* Don't waste your probes exploring curiosities at the beginning of the game. Send them directions your ships aren't going to explore, it's imperative to find as many minor factions as fast as possible and locate a nearby homeworld, it is also useful to put your hero on your first exploration vessel as for your first quest you will need to fight pirates.
* Embrace Ark micromanagement. Whenever you have to move an Ark, try to put just enough engines in utility slots to get it to destination as fast as possible. Scavenged ramscoop is an especially good module, because its bonus to distance moved is multiplicative.
* Always boost your pops with luxuries. Vodyani get one of the highest  bonuses from boosting.
* Try not to lose the  party from the senate. Both the power law, Righteous Fury, and the starting law, Species Stability, are important for Vodyani early game. Pass Species Stability as soon as you can, to smooth out your early essence gain.
* Prioritize the first couple of Arks over growing your population, to claim resources and strategic positions, as well as gaining increased Essence production from Ark modules.
* Science-wise, planet colonization techs deserve special focus due to the unique Vodyani population mechanics (pick the order according to your situation!); later, mothership module upgrades can multiply your empire performance. Do not neglect reaching higher tiers on the economic sector either, because the system development level of an Ark directly determines that Ark's population cap.
* The military tech Unstable Isotope unlocks Meditation modules, which prevent Arks from being attacked in space battles while anchored, forcing enemies to ground invade them rather than shoot them out of the sky. It is very important for your long-term survivabilty. Consider also researching N-Way Fusion or Ubiquitous Surveillance early, as the first tier of military tech unlocks more Ark module slots.
* Arks are useful for more than just being colonies. They are extremely bulky, and with system development upgrades can be very good in combat when supported by a fleet. Their large number of utility module slots allows them to serve as entire invasion fleets, or as mega-leechers draining thousands of essence per turn. They build instantly without using any industry at all, so if you have the essence you can suddenly add a massive amount of invasion capability or additional leeching income no matter how poor your production on that system.
* Build up your leeching capacity and leech from a major faction supported by a combat fleet rather than a minor faction. You don't have to go to war to leech and can cross closed borders due to Righteous Fury, so be the aggressor.

## Defender's Advantage and the Vodyani

The most powerful thing about the Vodyani is all the ways they remove the defender's advantage. The defender's advantage has four components; distance, counter-refitting and healing, the influence cost of war declaration/forced truces on the aggressor, and the difficulty of invading. The distance advantage is self-explanatory; the aggressor has to move much farther and thus their ships may be outdated by the time they arrive. The Vodyani remove the distance advantage by being very, very fast. They get up to +5 bonus movement through their traits, unique techs, and pop bonuses, their heroes have a +6 movement skill, and all their ships have at least 2 support module slots for engines even before the additional slot upgrade.

When you are defending your systems, you can refit your fleets at any time. The dust cost of refitting is based on the difference in industry cost between the two ship loadouts, so if all you're doing is swapping weapon and defense modules for modules within the same tier, it is extremely cheap. The defender can thus wait for the attacker to reveal their ship loadouts, refit all of their ships to counter the aggressor's, and win handily. Bringing along a combat/leeching/invasion Ark with your combat fleet allows you to set up on any unclaimed system and refit your ships to counter the defenders ships in turn. The defender also can repair their ships for a significant dust cost after a battle, while the aggressor cannot; using the same technique of bringing an Ark along and setting it up on a nearby unclaimed system, the Vodyani aggressor can also use dust to heal their ships.

Unless they have a Militarist government, the aggressor has to spend influence to declare war, influence that not all factions will have early on in the game. The aggressor is also subject to high influence costs for refusing a forced truce, which most aggressive factions simply will not have early on. As the Vodyani are a Religious faction, they will usually have the Religious Power Law "Righteous Fury" which means they do not have to declare war to invade or attack ships in another faction's influence zone, and they are not subject to forced truces because forcing a truce requires you to be at war. It is the defender who has to declare war, the defender that has to pay influence to strike at Vodyani systems, or rather, ironically, "defending by declaring war" in order to force the Vodyani into truce when they are pressured enough as a twisted victory. And if they think about being cute and closing their borders, Righteous Fury lets the Vodyani ignore that too. In fact, the defender has just screwed themselves, because closing borders is a reciprocal action and they now cannot cross into Vodyani territory without either declaring war or the Vodyani agreeing to open their borders. On top of that, the Vodyani will have a massive amount of surplus influence to pay the cost of refusing a forced truce due to the way their population mechanics interact with law upkeep. Essentially, they only have to pay law upkeep for their actual population while having a much larger effective working population.

Finally, invading is hard. For multiple reasons, the aggressor has to build a dedicated invasion fleet or you won't get anywhere against fortified systems. This takes time, both to build the fleet, and to successfully invade. The Vodyani don't have to invade to get what they want out of aggression; they can just park leechers over your system and drain it dry to boost their own population growth and expansion, as well as crippling the leeched system for a very long time. If they do want to invade to take the system for themselves, they can spend essence to instantly create an Ark with an absolutely massive amount of manpower modules, effectively building an entire invasion fleet in a single turn. If they bring an Ark along, they can even create this invasion Ark on-site, using the essence they drained from your systems.

In any matchup, the Vodyani should seek to be the aggressors and attack before the enemy is ready. Move with the speed of the Virtuals themselves, and scour the galaxy of the lesser, unprepared races.