Military rush vs tech rush. Which is more powerful? (2024)

There are essentially 2 viable (i.e. non-RP) ways to play the game:

• Military rushes, where your early focus is on alloy production to overwhelm the enemy and start snowballing early. Science comes naturally later on from your vast economy. This video has a good example of this type of strat in action, although it's a bit outdated.
• Tech rushes, which are essentially the opposite. Your early focus is on building up a tech lead, which can then be used to overpower other nations with a smaller but high-quality military. This video shows an opener for this strategy.

There are different flavors of these, of course. A Driven Assimilator will play a bit differently from a normal military-focused empire, and a machine empire with a ringworld start would play differently from an egalitarian materialist. In the end though, these are the two goals to advance players through the game.

From reading guides and discussions, it's clear that a lot of players primarily focus on one or the other. I see a lot of topics covering how to do one of them more effectively (e.g. there are plenty of guides on which civics/origins are best for teching), but I rarely see many discussions that compare the two to each other. For people with broad experience in the game, how do the two stack up against each other?

The reason I'm asking is that I've personally been a fan of military rushes, and have recently tried to branch out to early game teching, but it feels a lot slower and weaker than equivalent military rushes. I'm not sure if that's just because I don't have as much experience with teching, or if they're just weaker as a whole.

Definitely the military rush is stronger. A good military rush is not losing significant amounts of corvettes. If you have your first homeworld on alloys, your 2nd (conquered) homeworld on research, and your 3rd homeworld on research, you're absolutely going to catch up and surpass any research-focused build very quickly. This assumes you are on a well-populated galaxy where AI homeworlds are in easy reach and you are lucky enough to not get surrounded by pops that you are forced to purge rather than assimilate. Also past the 3rd or 4th homeworld conquered you tend to need to get off corvettes/destroyers and into cruisers, otherwise attrition just gets too strong and you're not using alloys efficiently. Making this switch smoothly is the key, getting stuck on building more and more alloys for more and more corvettes is a trap.

If you are teching then 100% the strategy is always to go for cruisers immediately and then go on the warpath. Decently kitted out cruisers suffer basically zero casualties if you are the stronger force. The problem with corvettes and destroyers is that even when you win fights you tend to keep taking losses and losses, ideally you never build a single ship pre-cruiser and just survive based on envoys and possibly bribing AIs to like you. Downside again though is bad starts can kill you. Any genocidal AI will never like you and will absolutely never be stopped by any kind of pathetic starbase. Might as well restart if they are your first contact (a rush build at least can beat a FP and use their pops, though its hard).

So really both strategies are trying to get cruisers ASAP, it's just the method is different.

Military rush is stronger, science rush is more reliable.

If a military rush civ doesn't have the right neighbors, it's game over. Tech rush is "only" dependent on not having the wrong neighbor.

Mil Rushing would have been my go to prior to 3.0. Gaining another empires homeworld within the first 20 years was a massive advantage. You could get even more alloys and space to expand which snowballed. Within 50 years you'd probably be a tech leader anyway, your pop having caught up and filled a research world at least. I played consistently with GA and this is how most games went.

That feels way less viable now. Pops are super important, they do more, but you have less. Industry districts now give you more alloys/cg but the downside is that you're now really going to lag behind in research. If you decide to start building rls then pops will jump from other jobs to this one. To add to that that, you really want the clerks in your homeworld, not so much of industry, but ready to for those two hab planets. Getting to 10 pops on worlds is more important than ever, so just dumping everything into alloys feels way too risky, if you are playing on GA.

In multiplayer this is a bit different. Without all the buffs, this is way more viable and even preferred with some starts. If you know the person has a RW start, then go all in asap. They will tech rush and hard, but it makes their eco very weak and difficult to react to war. Taking a ring world early on is pretty much gg.

In SP on high difficulty, tech focus is much more reliable at least.

As others point out, AIs start with a very large capacity for making corvettes, so military rush is tricky. And only the most belligerent neighbour will attack, so being left alone to tech is viable, even on high difficulty.

I prefer a balanced start, as the new first contact system means it takes a little time to discover your neighbours. Once you know who you are dealing with you can shift into more science or more alloys as needed.

Starfury said:

Military rush is stronger, science rush is more reliable.

If a military rush civ doesn't have the right neighbors, it's game over. Tech rush is "only" dependent on not having the wrong neighbor.

Click to expand...

As someone who's done a lot of military rushes, I'd actually say they're less reliant on galaxy RNG than tech booming. The only time my corvette rush has failed was when I went up against an advanced start fanatical purifier, since there was no way I was going to overcome that amount of fleet power. I can consistently overpower any other type of empire, and the "best" type is just any nation with pops that don't need to be purged. Normal empires like that are quite common, and there's typically at least one someone in the vicinity of where I start. Even if I get terrible RNG like the one time I started next to 3 hiveminds, a corvette rush is still viable. It'll be less rewarding than if I got pops out of the conquests, but war still gives enough rewards from systems and habitable planets that it's possible to build an insurmountable lead quite quickly.

With tech booming, ANY neighboring warlike empire is a potential problem. I've read the best way to survive with low fleet power in an early GA campaign is to fish for 2+ empires to guarantee you. In my current game I'm a machine empire and my 3 neighbors are 2 militarist xenophobes and 1 fanatic spiritualist. I overcame the opinion penality to get the spiritualist to guarantee me, but the 2 xenophobes hate me no matter what and are looking like serious threats now. Had I done a military rush, I could have bashed one or both of the military empires by now, but with tech booming I just sort of have to hope they don't want to kill me, or I can try to find another empire to guarantee me (I'm still not really sure how guarantee fishing works).