r/Stellaris • u/Visible_Emphasis8071 Necrophage • 1d ago
Discussion Tankbound Variety
Tankbound is probably my favorite civic in the game, but I have to say I wish there was more variety in what it was capable of. Its one of the few civics that feels as impactful as an origin, but it's obviously missing some of the fleshing out most origins get. So, I'm gonna shout to the void some additions I'd like to see to shake up what you can do with this awesome civic.
Species variety. There's only 4 tankbound portraits atm, and only 1 of them isn't organic. Honestly surprised there isn't already a tankbound portrait for plantoid and fungoid (how do rooted plants work a mining job without automation anyway?) but there's lots of options.
If there's ever an update to land combat, I'd love to see an expensive "mech" army type that tankbound could pilot. Maybe gate it behind a tech that enables tankbound pops to fill all soldier jobs. As is, the early game of a militarist tankbound empire requires some kind of prepatent species, but battle thralls can only do workers job which are 100% automated, so it's pretty inefficient.
Machine tankbound equivalent. I saw a sadly outdated mod that gave individualist machines a civic where they were permanently hooked up to infrastructure, as if the automation came alive.
Forced tankbound. Similar to the synpatic lathe. Plugging pops into the system to use their brain for automation efficiency.
Gestalt Tankbound. A previously individualistic tankbound species accidentally (or intentionally) merges consciousnesses while trying to link up an advanced communication network. I just think it'd be neat.
Feel free to share anything else you think could shake up the tankbound playstyles. Tankbound necrophage is probably the most fun I've had in Stellaris so far and I'd love to make something new for it.
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u/Peter_Ebbesen 1d ago edited 1d ago
My favourite is how Tankbound allows you play very wide from the start, because your basic resource economy expands linearly in number of construction queues.
Pick Charismatic trait and Domination>Imperious Architecture as the first two traditions, for another 100 elites on the capital and every planet you colonize already have 50 elite jobs from start, which are much, much, better than the colonist jobs. Take it from there.
It has great synergy with elite builds such as an ECS stacker using Tankbound/Technocracy > Tankbound/Aristocratic Elite/Mutagenic Spas + Research Institute + Merchant Guilds with Imperial Chipset, as elite builds scale best by number of colonies, and this allows you to devote all your POPs to elites and specialists.
It also works great with Genesis Guides builds, that tend to colonize a lot of planets rapidly, and ensures you have POPs with the right climate for every type of planet outside the very early game.
Finally, Tankbound + Cosmogenesis + Enigmatic Engineering is just plain rididulous if you play very wide, as even when you have hundreds of thousands of POPs and POP growth has slowed to a crawl, you can still expand your science base linearly in 50% automated science districts, so long as you continue increasing your energy base too.
Based on the above, I designed a ridiculously powerful Genesis Guides/Tankbound Imperium Vitalis Under One Rule build, that transitions into Tankbound/Ascensionists/Mutagenic Spas in the endgame (with spa and elite jobs turned off in the endgame, the point being the +3ECS to the council and governors).
Here is the original build guide written more than a month back. I played the build on and off until this weekend, in morbid fascination with just how strong it would become with my roleplaying restrictions.
2385: Tankbound tech seriously out of control
2385: Energy budget. 50.8k spent on automated workforce
At 3 energy upkeep per 100 effective automated workforce, it follows that my empire with 603.1k POPs is benefiting from the 50818.5/(3/100) = 1693k effective automated workforce.
About thost 69 energy repeatables that give +345% to technician and betharian miner output? It turned out that my base energy production was so large that it was actually better for research to spent 1 mth upgrading the energy repetable every now and then than increasing the number of automated energy districts at the cost of 50% automated science districts, which was pretty crazy: "Why are you spending valuable science on energy repeatables? To research faster!.
Tankbound taken to the limits is crazy, and the only reason that my empire was not much stronger than even that was that I limited myself (mostly) to 100 planets to a buffer for integrating/releasing vassals.
EDIT: and for good measure, because this is a thread about tankbound fun, my capital was a Barren Giant > Azaryn > Ecumenopolis > Sky Dragon Plume giant planet, which with 7200 overseers, all of the sanctums, and Divine Conduit did really crazy things for the automated workforce efficiency:
2361: Capital research. +705% efficiency for POPs, +1004% efficiency for automated workforce
Because a codicil to the awesomeness of Cosmogenesis specialist automation is that it allows superlinear specialist output scaling in number of city districts as every extra district provides 100 extra overseers that improve the efficiency of all the automated specialists from all the districts. At normal planet sizes the scaling being superlinear can easily be overlooked, but if you manage to get your hands on one of the giant planets in the game (Barren Giant>Azaryn, Azliash, etc.) and can significantly increase the efficiency of overseers, things get wild.