How to rush to Megastructures? (2024)

In order for the tech for megastructures to appear, you need:
The tech for Battleships, which is unlocked by getting the tech for Cruisers, which needs the tech for Destroyers.
The tech for Citadels, which is unlocked by getting the tech for Star Fortresses, which needs the tech for Starholds.
And the tech for Zero Point Power, which is unlocked by getting all the other reactors.

There's also a tier system - each tech has a tier, which you can roughly guess by how expensive the tech is (higher tier techs are more expensive). To unlock techs from the next tier, you need 6 techs from the previous tier in that field. Mega-Engineering is a tier 5 engineering technology (the highest tier).

So the "path" would be researching any six T1 engineering techs, getting Starholds, Destroyers, and four other T2 techs. This would then allow you to research Star Fortresses, Cruisers, and four other T3 techs. Then you can get Citadels, Battleships, and four other T4 techs, which unlocks Mega-Engineering, which you just need to find - it's much more likely to appear if you have a ruined megastructure in your borders, or lots of Citadels and Starholds.
Also don't forget to research all the reactor techs in the physics tree, though this is a relatively easy requirement once you know it exists.

There's more strategy to ensuring the techs you need appear as options, but that requires you to memorise pretty much the entire tree.
You can look into beelining if you want to know more about that.

Starfury said:

Also, Battleships have a 0.1x modifier before 2250, Citadels have a 0.1x modifier before 2270, so these are quite difficult to get sooner.

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Citadels aren't too bad - if you have three star fortresses you get a 5x multiplier, so it's only 0.5x before 2270.
Unless you're very good at optimising your economy for science, the main roadblock is just getting enough research to reach T4 tech in the first place.

There are a few counter-intuitive things you can do to speed up the process, and one of those is keeping your engineering department "clean". That means you'll want to avoid progressing any technologies that unlock many other techs, and that means it's important to NOT research guns, missiles, or armor. Set your robot workers policy to "illegal" so those techs cannot drop.

However, DO salvage enemy fleets to unlock the basic guns/missiles/armor technologies: this sets those techs to partially researched which means those "cards" get taken out of the "deck" and won't impact your draws.

DO take the supremacy and unyielding tradition trees, as those increase the drop rate of fortress and hull techs.

DO colonize close to a fallen empire to make them count as your "neighbor", since having a neighbor with the fortress/hull techs will increase your odds of getting them dramatically.

Dementor4 said:

DO colonize close to a fallen empire to make them count as your "neighbor", since having a neighbor with the fortress/hull techs will increase your odds of getting them dramatically.

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Does this actually work? That's a neat trick if it does, the modifiers for neighbours having the tech are huge.

DamnedLackOfTropicalFruit said:

Does this actually work? That's a neat trick if it does, the modifiers for neighbours having the tech are huge.

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I've always assumed it did. Why wouldn't it?

Dementor4 said:

I've always assumed it did. Why wouldn't it?

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I sorta figured fallen empires would be treated differently - the game is full of things that are technically "empires" (like space aliens), so special handling for edge cases like this wouldn't be too surprising.

I tried Necron's test and it works though - an outpost next to a fallen empire increases the weight of destroyers and starholds, just like any other empire would if they had the tech.

DamnedLackOfTropicalFruit said:

I sorta figured fallen empires would be treated differently - the game is full of things that are technically "empires" (like space aliens), so special handling for edge cases like this wouldn't be too surprising.

I tried Necron's test and it works though - an outpost next to a fallen empire increases the weight of destroyers and starholds, just like any other empire would if they had the tech.

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Good to know for sure, thanks for checking.

Prometheus_1 said:

Is it possible? Is there a specific path to follow?

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Besides what everyone else has mentioned, the extra research option from technocracy civic is excellent in allowing you to beeline to the techs for mega engineering.
An extra research option is actually extra two research options - techs you get in one roll cannot be repeated in the next one, so if you get 5 options instead of 4, you actually get 10 unique tech options instead of 8 in two rolls.
Just keep in mind that having mega engineering researched is useless if you don't have the alloys and unity to make use of it. So you should prioritize techs that increase resource output specially minerals and alloys.
And you should not be banning robots - having extra pops more than makes up for the tech cost.
If you have the spare influence, stealing techs via espionage is also a good option. If done with the asset, you get the option to destroy the asset for 10% research bonus, and puts the tech as partially researched, so it won't draw in the regular options.
Don't research anomalies early on, unless you know the outcome is something like a relic world. A lot of anomalies reward with research points, which scale with your current research output (can be 1/2/4 years worth). So if you research them later on when you have a lot of research output, you will get a lot of bonus research points.
Lastly, if you want to primarily rush for Galactic Wonders (Dyson Sphere/Matter decompressor) which require fully finishing a megastructure first, having a broken one in your empire makes it a lot quicker and cheaper. It also increases the weight of Megaengineering tech by 20x. The most reliable way to do that is to start either with Shattered Ring or get Cybrex.
You can either restart until you get Cybrex or if you are not on ironman, use the debugtooltip command and hover over the neighboring systems to check if they have precursor_5 which is for Cybrex and restart if they don't.

Violent AI said:

Besides what everyone else has mentioned, the extra research option from technocracy civic is excellent in allowing you to beeline to the techs for mega engineering.
An extra research option is actually extra two research options - techs you get in one roll cannot be repeated in the next one, so if you get 5 options instead of 4, you actually get 10 unique tech options instead of 8 in two rolls.
Just keep in mind that having mega engineering researched is useless if you don't have the alloys and unity to make use of it. So you should prioritize techs that increase resource output specially minerals and alloys.
And you should not be banning robots - having extra pops more than makes up for the tech cost.
If you have the spare influence, stealing techs via espionage is also a good option. If done with the asset, you get the option to destroy the asset for 10% research bonus, and puts the tech as partially researched, so it won't draw in the regular options.
Don't research anomalies early on, unless you know the outcome is something like a relic world. A lot of anomalies reward with research points, which scale with your current research output (can be 1/2/4 years worth). So if you research them later on when you have a lot of research output, you will get a lot of bonus research points.
Lastly, if you want to primarily rush for Galactic Wonders (Dyson Sphere/Matter decompressor) which require fully finishing a megastructure first, having a broken one in your empire makes it a lot quicker and cheaper. It also increases the weight of Megaengineering tech by 20x. The most reliable way to do that is to start either with Shattered Ring or get Cybrex.
You can either restart until you get Cybrex or if you are not on ironman, use the debugtooltip command and hover over the neighboring systems to check if they have precursor_5 which is for Cybrex and restart if they don't.

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Of course if you savescum for cybrex you get mega engineering as a part of that chain, so...

Dementor4 said:

Of course if you savescum for cybrex you get mega engineering as a part of that chain, so...

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Savescumming is different than starting a new game, which is what you'll have to do for cybrex. And OP only asked how to rush megastructures, and the fastest way IS cybrex

Violent AI said:

Savescumming is different than starting a new game

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Eh.

Besides the obvious option of rolling for cybrex to cheese the tech draw, no one have mentioned the Lithoid Hivemind Prospectorium route.

A 75% tech boost is massive and have given me the earliest megastructure draw I've ever pulled off without cybrex.
Staying at level 1 prospectorium is mandatory though, so massive loyalty micro-management is needed.