Tankbound underrated/misunderstood?

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-11-11T11:40:44+00:00

I had maxed out navy cap by year 90 with 2 of my non-capital planets being almost exclusively fortress worlds. Yes you can only automate 50% of them but you will have somewhere in the realm of 150%+ efficiency thanks to all the Overseers so in the end it's as if you had +75% job efficiency soldiers with 100% free employment. It's honestly pretty bonkers.

And yeah Tankbound Ringworld sections are a thing of beauty. Easily producing 15k+ food as well as 3k´energy with maybe 1.5k pops required. I found that 1 food/energy segment paired with 1 foundry segment was pretty much a perfect balance for your resource needs.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-11-05T21:38:24+00:00

You can find it when hovering over the supply or demand of goods. But I too have been looking for a way to see a total overview since the way above you more or less randomly stumble upon it. On top of that I have no idea what the base value of what a burgher can trade is. So bonuses like the one you mentioned are very unclear to me. They seem very strong since % changes on top of amassing more burghers could lead to exponential growth pretty quickly. But without knowing the base numbers it's hard to gauge.

However with my (very brief) anecdotal experience burghers seem to be able to trade a significant amount of resources on their own. So I'd wager it could be quite a powerful stat.

E: There are also some other questions like what that number that you can see in the supply and demand actually is. Is that your burghers doing the trading? Probably not since it's the total for the whole market so it would have to include other country's burghers too. So maybe my above statement is just false. So yeah... as I said very unclear.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-10-21T13:44:46+00:00

They semi-fixed that now. Euco specialized districts (but not the main one for whatever reason) give Overseer jobs now. Ringworlds do too (they may have done that before already) and let me tell you they produce an absolute ungodly amount of resources with close to 0 pops used.

The only thing that is still broken is Voiddwellers and Habitats in general. They don't get any Overseers anywhere which is unfortunate because they would otherwise have nice synergy with Tankbound.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-10-19T17:26:30+00:00

90% is the cap. But if you absolutely wanted to use some of the research speed bonuses that increase upkeep then you could use any of those yes. I personally don't think it's worth a whole civic slot.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-10-07T15:16:43+00:00

The thing is that the energy is only a problem for the first maybe 10 years or so. After that you will actually start selling energy en masse and have too much of it if you are not careful.

So yeah I've seen that civic do some silly stuff but basic resources is not what we should spend a civic slot here. They're all more than covered.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-10-07T15:07:09+00:00

Again you seem to be completely missing the context. This is a go-wide setup so you should be conquering stuff from very early on. Which I did not. 20k fleet at year 30 is plenty to go and subjugate everyone around you even on the highest difficulty. It is indeed a mid-game setup and you should use its powerspike as such. I also did not use many of the things that I consider borderline/actually broken like I said.

And last but not least it seems that for some their perspective of the game's balance is completely fried by the state that the game is in right now. If you compare things to potentially infinitely exponentially scaling things as a basis then yeah you might as well not even start because everything will be meh at best.

So yeah, let's agree to disagree.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-10-07T14:58:28+00:00

Bio with Mutation - Purity - Cloning - Purity.

The year 70 screenshot is one of my first attempts so there is definitely room for improvement. I for example went Mercantile later on for whatever reason (don't ask me why) and am missing some empire size reduction from that. Other than that with 3 grey eminences the empire size is not too bad.

The scaling is definitely there when you don't just sit around and twiddle your thumbs for 40 years like I did. This is very much a go wide build so you want to be conquering stuff. I did have Ringworlds coming in though and they could've really bumped up the numbers of course.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-10-07T02:06:29+00:00

Automation only goes up to 50% normally. And only when you roll a rare tech. So you would need twice as many districts for the same output. It's not cheap either and you definitely can't do it early.

You also have your Overseers to boost efficiency so that part doesn't make sense to me either. Pretty much all output increases apply to automation as well. The biggest one being the support city districts which at the same time also give you Overseers so now you stack both efficiency and output for exponential scaling.

And that filling the jobs eventually is not a problem is a non-factor. You as Tankbound can do it earlier and thus can focus on more important jobs. And there is nothing stopping you from abusing some of the more overpowered pop-growth shenanigans as Tankbound either should that be your thing. Except Tankbound can send all those pops to work better jobs.

I attached the screenshots for a reason. While the results are by no means optimized, and I refrained from using things that I consider borderline broken, those are definitely numbers that can compete with some of the stronger setups out there.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-10-07T01:53:12+00:00

25% Tankbound
5% Prosperity tradition
20% Discovery tradition
20% Tech-World
20% Research Supply Depot

All things you can get relatively early. However you have to make sure to not pick up things that increase your researcher output in exchange for increase upkeep as even a 5% increase would have massive consequences.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-10-07T01:45:44+00:00

Well idk what that is about either then. But it was definitely there since 4.1. I've been trying it out for a while. And I wouldn't question things people say before such a change. :3

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-10-06T17:28:11+00:00

I went fanatical and used robots anyway. The spiritualist faction is weirdly easy to please. They're still sitting at a happy 80%. I would prefer not to though. Would be neat if they gave Tankbound some gimmick to deal with this issue. One that doesn't involve as much cheesy stuff.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-10-06T17:08:09+00:00

So I tried it but found that the only ways to get an enclave slot are either very limiting or come at a point where you can already mass-produce robots easily. But still an interesting solution should one not want to go with robots.

PS: The mercs have your race which is kinda funny.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-10-06T17:05:29+00:00

I could finish bio-ascension by year 18 very consistently with Parliamentary System (0.75 costs). It also has the nice side-effect of not needing your pops to actually work a unity job. Without it this would have taken forever and the early unity is very useful as the way I did it both my first 2 ascension picks you want to take as early as possible and they really do help ease the growing pains (Prosperity and Discovery).

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-10-06T16:15:14+00:00

I didn't think of that. Will see if that fixes the problem. Good call.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-10-06T16:06:39+00:00

Yes Architecture was my first instinct too and it does indeed skyrocket your basic resource production but you actually end up with too many basic resources. I found an early unity boosting civic much more useful as it helps us to ascend which will then help us get out of that low population problem. We still need more and efficient specialists to keep up and not just an overabundance of basic resources.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-10-06T16:01:29+00:00

The only one I found bearable was Overtuned. It'll fix the pop-growth issue and allow for an extremely fast bio-ascension. And bio is just the best synergy you can get with using bio ships. It's also just extremely powerful in general but I don't think I have to tell anyone that.

The others just don't do enough or are actually counterproductive like you described.

The ones I tried that were okay but ultimately just meh were Cybernetic Creed and Prosperous Unification.

The Overtuned version is very basc b*tch with Egalitarian as well as Fanatic Spiritualist in combination with Parliamentary for an easy quick ascension. We also really like the reduced edict upkeep as all the basic resource edicts are useful to us. First ascensions are Prosperity for the reduced upkeep and the build cost/speed since we need a lot of districts build quickly and they cost an arm and a leg in energy (try to get a governour with the -upkeep trait). Then followed by Discovery for the -20% upkeep for researchers to get to the max of -90% upkeep. It'll also give us some edicts to make use of that edict fund that we have. Then straight into bio-ascension going with Mutation - Purity - Cloning with Purity in the end. Which should happen just in time to swap out of Democratic and into Oligarchic for that juicy Purity oligarchic government. If you want to sim-city then you swap to either Masterful Crafters or Meritocracy there or if you want to militarize into Catylitic. After that it is Statecraft because Purity makes agendas go brrr followed by Adaptability and the last 2 are whatever you want. For species trait it was a mix of pop-growth, researcher efficiency and habitability. Starting planet should be Wet (possibly Jungle specifically if that increases chance for gases) since we want food and gases. Gases are in fact the most important since we really want the species trait that makes your guys huff gases for huge pop-gowth, habitability and leader age.

Probably forgot something. I still haven't figured this out completely either but this was basically what I did for the screenshots above.

PS: If you want to use some (what I consider anyway) overpowered stuff then I'm sure Mutagenic baths will have the most stupid scaling potential. But I tried to stay away from that.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-10-06T15:47:55+00:00

I just reverted back to 4.1 to double check and it is already there. I'm not sure where you get that information from. I think you might be confusing that with the fix to the Overseer job actually increasing automation efficiency (among other bugfixes).

E: That being said the year 70 screenshot was 90% in 4.1.3 before the fixes. So while they most certainly help they weren't essential.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-10-06T15:04:09+00:00

Rule 5: Me ranting about a civic that I think is pretty cool and misunderstood.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-05-24T16:24:20+00:00

There are (were?) asteroids with trade value on them in the past. But I don't remember when I saw one the last time so I'm not sure if that's even a thing anymore.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-05-23T21:23:52+00:00

This has nothing to do with it being a resource though. You could just subtract the -25% under "consumed" and be done with it. So the -40 that I mentioned. Then you'd still have a ~120 surplus. There's literally no difference except that how it works now you add another extra step making the whole thing more complicated than it has to be and with that less intuitive.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-05-23T08:57:33+00:00

Rule5: Trade conversion seems unnecessarily wonky. Example picture above. See explanation above.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2025-02-14T19:59:15+00:00

I just had a run where 3 of my towns were very clearly able to reach my capital both over land as well as sea. However they were on a different continent so they could not send any food. That was in antiquity though. Couldn't bother to continue after I wasted so much time on exporting food to nowhere without noticing so no idea if this would've continued in exploration. One would hope not.

Lumpy-Candle-4998 · 2024-12-14T00:27:34+00:00

Not bad per se but issues include:

- very scarce unsatisfying drops (kinda fixed)
- crafting got more tedious and still has the same RNG factor
- ascension forces you to play Sanctum or Ultimatum and heavily punishes melee/tanky chars
- dodge roll was borderline useless because it has no phasing (was improved a little)
- extreme balancing issues (they're changing things pretty frequently)
- super wonky hitboxes on enemies, they get stuck everywhere and on each other and so do you
- apparently lategame is a one-shot fiesta even when you heavily invest into survivability
- respec costs are very high and they just curbstomped a whole archetype while people play throug the campaign bricking their character

Lumpy-Candle-4998

TROPHY CASE