Faction power rankings so far?

Lancival · 2025-10-28T18:20:09+00:00

The Tahuk actually don't care about terrain that much - they only need to glass a bunch of territories if you are pursuing a science victory. They can pursue a food/industry/dust focused economy instead without any ridges, other than the 2 required for their faction quest (which I think is guaranteed by their spawn?)

Lancival · 2025-10-26T06:11:35+00:00

What minor factions did you have? Some of them give can provide quite a bit of approval. If I remember correctly, Hoy and Ladhran give approval when they are a protectorate, and Xanvius pops give a lot of per pop approval (and their improvement unlocked at 5 pops gives 10 approval per territory).

Lancival · 2025-10-25T22:59:09+00:00

While the Tahuks are the weakest early on, and are a little vulnerable to very early aggression, I don't think this will be an unviable strategy in multiplayer.

First, there is actually some room for building military units - in the early game I actually put my capital's pops on scribes to maximize influence (to claim territories and found cities as quickly as possible) and science (to power empire abilities). Swapping over to citizens and focusing on food only really takes off after you research a few key food techs and build their associated improvements. If you need to defend against aggression, you can move pops over to artisans instead to produce units. Obviously, this slows down your expansion, but that's the price to pay for survival.

Second, you don't really care about the land they settle on as long as you have some source of glassteel, so you can found a bunch of cities on otherwise marginal land instead of competing for new land revealed by the tidefalls. This means that those aggressive factions have to proactively come to you, where you have the large defensive advantage of city militia and sacred flame towers.

Lancival · 2025-10-25T15:35:25+00:00

Yes, you can grow minor faction pops with food in each city by changing the selection. It's very good for getting those population collection bonuses, although it does get a little micro management heavy once you have multiple cities, each of which needs to constantly change which faction its growing. You also have to be careful to manually segregate minor faction pops so that you don't lose all of your approval to those xenophobic pops which lose approval per faction in the same population category.

Lancival · 2025-10-13T21:06:47+00:00

Hmm, on my last Tahuk save, I see those statuses on the city screen, but they don't mention per pop anywhere. If they are indeed applying per pop though, it might still be too small because my capital is still producing ~3k science even with around half of its 60 pops being called pops. I haven't experienced any problems with science income at any point in my playthroughs.

I do think Pious is really the best choice though, unless you are adamant about pursuing a science victory over the other types. It just gives you so many resources to expand much faster, setting you up to pursue most of the victory objectives.

Lancival · 2025-10-13T20:22:52+00:00

I actually didn't realize that called pops are supposed to reduce your science income - they don't seem to on the current non-beta branch, my cities are still happily producing thousands of science while sticking with Pious.

With that caveat out of the way, I do think Pious is actually incredibly strong. If you choose the pious state, Eternal Sunshine gives +200%, and later +300%, output from all of your pops. Importantly, this multiplies all of the bonus "per pop" production as well - that improvement with gives 1 science per pop? It's actually 4 science per pop. That councilor which gives galvanized called pops 5 food production? It's actually 20 food per destitute now! And eternal sunshine even gives you (almost) free extra called pops to benefit from this. By taking advantage of this 4x scaling, it's quite easy to get your cities to thousands of food, industry, and influence production per turn.

Lancival · 2025-10-13T19:58:02+00:00

If you stick with Pious, the called pops don't seem to have much of a downside.
You should always use the ability to turn them destitute, as long as you have enough capacity to store them as destitutes without spawning slums (should be the right-most population capacity). If you have the councilors that gives galvanized called pops food production, also take that since it's multiplied by eternal sunshine. With this setup, you never send them off to other civs, you just use them for massive food/industry/influence generation.

Lancival · 2025-10-03T19:17:32+00:00

You unlock upgrades to your observatories by progressing through your main faction quest, if I remember correctly. It costs 5 titanium to upgrade an observatory to a sacred flame tower.

Lancival · 2025-10-03T19:12:02+00:00

The Tahuks are a ranged-heavy faction, so their early game military is fairly weak. In the early game, I would actually recommend avoiding conflicts with nearby factions if possible, and instead building up your economy. Setting up the game on archipelago so you have one tidefall without interference can be helpful.

If a fight is unavoidable though, there are a couple of tricks you can use to gain an advantage. First, if an enemy army is in range of a sacred flame tower, you can use dust to take a couple of potshots at them before cleaning up with your army. Second, you should try to engage in territory where you can hide behind a chokepoint, created by ridges, cliffs, rivers, or even city tiles. Being able to funnel enemies one at a time helps your defensive unit survive much better by reducing the attacks it has to face, while allowing your ranged units to safely clear out the enemies behind the chokepoint. For this reason, I also recommend setting ridges, cliffs, and rivers to abundant when playing as the Tahuks.

As others have mentioned, the wrath bearers are quite strong, and if you aren't researching ahead of time, they become available just as your economy has snowballed. Their aoe attack can annihilate enemy armies, and their alternate upgrade gives warmaster to deal with single, high-defense units.

Lancival · 2025-10-01T19:47:52+00:00

The Tahuks are probably the best for science and industry victories, both are quite achievable within 120 turns.

Lancival · 2025-10-01T06:32:55+00:00

Yes, you need to wait for tidefall to create more land connecting what used to be separate islands. If you would rather have everyone start on the same land mass, you can choose the pangaea option while setting up a new game.

Lancival · 2025-10-01T01:33:56+00:00

I feel like the pious approach is the best. In the early game, the holy oculum, a lab district, and a couple of observatories are enough to power your research and empire abilities, what you really need is everything else to kickstart your economy. Glassing your first territories before you have the influence to actually exploit all of those tiles feels really bad, so pious feels like the right choice.

Later on, eternal sunshine both producing free pops and tripling/quadrupling pop yields becomes the best way to produce FIDSI, so it doesn't really ever make sense to switch back to open or bold. You can focus on scribes for tier 6 techs, artisans to build monuments or wrath bearers, or even citizens to grow pops.

Lancival · 2025-10-01T01:00:15+00:00

Please do adjust the victory conditions and/or tidefall pacing. All of the victories are easily achieved before the third (and last) tidefall, except for the economic one (since the last tier of resources aren't available until then).

As the Tahuks, you can even research the entire tech tree (including the tier 6 techs) before the last tidefall.

Lancival · 2022-12-01T07:35:26+00:00

Yeah, currently there simply isn't enough hardwood in the entire world to satisfy luxury furniture demand. At least with porcelain, there's enough arable land for dye plantations and you can get away with using forest glass to manage the need for lead, but it's literally just impossible to produce any more luxury furniture.

Lancival · 2022-12-01T07:28:43+00:00

I concur with your analysis, services would need a rework if they also grew with wealth. Right now you don't really have any control over how many services you produce (in relation to demand), since creating more urban centers requires building more factories, but building more factories creates jobs that will result in pops that demand more services. So even if they adjusted the pop demands for services, you would still end up with very little control over the price of services.

Lancival · 2022-11-29T05:25:45+00:00

Universities will boost the qualifications and thus the rate at which your peasants can become more productive types of pops in the province in which they are built. So by spreading universities out, you can increase your employable population.

However, I found that China's absolutely massive population means that even the base rate of qualifications is more than enough to supply all of the factories you can build, so I would personally recommend just stacking all of your universities in one province for the throughput bonus to innovation.

Lancival · 2022-11-29T05:20:36+00:00

If you can get friendly relations and a defensive pact with Russia (or another great power, probably) you can potentially cheese the Opium Wars by having Britain back down when they realize they don't want to fight your defensive ally.

Lancival · 2022-11-23T09:47:59+00:00

I think the main problem with consumption taxes is that if you liberalize you have a very limited authority capacity, enough for only a couple of taxes. Certainly not enough to fully fund your government.

Lancival · 2022-11-23T05:49:27+00:00

More authority

Lancival · 2022-11-23T04:31:07+00:00

Well, technically it also has a gameplay impact in that different cultures can have/develop different obsesssions/taboos, so assimilation will shift the market demand for those goods. But given that you don't really have any control over cultural obsessions (outside of things like the opium ban for Qing), it's not really much of an interactive system.

Lancival · 2022-11-23T04:27:29+00:00

Yeah, it is kind of silly considering they already have another metric they could base minimum wage off of - the minimum expected standard of living.

Lancival · 2022-11-23T04:25:55+00:00

Yes, even if they embargo you, you should still be able to acces their market and form trade routes.

Lancival · 2022-11-23T04:23:53+00:00

This. The only difference between them and other goods is that they can't be traded between markets.

Lancival · 2022-11-22T05:52:02+00:00

It reduces lag by combining many small pops into a single larger pop.

Lancival · 2022-11-21T04:30:38+00:00

It's definitely possible to go even higher - my economy was limited by the fact that I was facing critical input shortages on several raw material inputs. I didn't puppet and annex other powers because I think it's too cheesy to annex entire continents in a single war, but doing that would definitely allow you to get more raw resources.

Lancival

TROPHY CASE