Stellaris 3.9 Megacorp Empire Guide

This video is about mega corporation empires in Stellaris. This comes from the Megacorp DLC. I cover regular megacorps and criminal megacorps aka criminal heritage empires. These are very powerful builds and I encourage anyone to try them! Enjoy!

[nixtunes]

Played my first Megacorp as a Criminal Syndicate in a PVE game + 1 friend, proceeded to get all my offices shut down and decided the branch offices weren't worth the influence tax.

[Douglas-ntjd]

There's several ways to go for crime. You'll notice each branch office building has a crime value attached to it. That means crime will go up based on that value. However once crime reaches a certain level natural criminals will occur on the planet that are not related to your offices which further increases crime. These two factors combined means you can get crime to well over 300%. Practically speaking this will force the enemy to use 4-5 building slots and 6-10 jobs reducing crime. Which means they are not using the building slots and pops for something useful like research or alloy production.

Criminal syndicates are about crippling your enemies, not putting extra cash in your pocket. You can certainly do both however.

A good way to ensure a malignant growth in your enemies is to bank influence and credits, then attack 6-15 planets rapidly. Best to target planets that are important either strategically or because of resources. Suddenly having to lose 6 alloy production pops in order to deal with crime hurts. Attacking 10 planets inside a month means they may have to spend 60! Pops worth of production trying to scrape you out of their systems. This is when you conquer them. Their ability to fight back relies on production. So if they choose to keep those production jobs then you are leeching resources off of their economy anyway and are able to take a defensive posture and out scale them.


I for one an a huge fan of the research branch office buildings. (Private research labs, illicit research labs) 9 of each research type. It didn't seem like a lot but 20 branch offices is adding 270 research, 100 branch offices is adding 2, 700. Since it is a playstyle where playing tall is the strategy imo, taking 10ish systems then fortifying and building upward so you can spend influence on branch offices works wonders.

Any specific empire can only close one branch office per year. So assailing then with 10+ means they will always have then. Crime offices automatically reopen after 10 years. Which means they will never be able to safely reassign those building slots.

Finally the corporate retreat. This building provides a stacking 10% increased amenities empire wide. This means with enough of them, the natural 10-20 you start with will be more than enough for any number of pops. Meaning you can get rid of those holo-theatres and put those pops to productive work. You can reassign those clerks to new planets or habitats to be full fledged traders or merchants.

Conversely, keep that holo-theatre and have obscene excess amenities to provide very high happiness and stability to your empire. Stability converts directly into resource production. +30% at 100 stability.

Now here's an absurdity. Early game go for the high crime buildings and resources offices. Once you reach the mid-late game convert every single office building into pirate havens. Assuming 100 offices which is modest by the mid-late game you'll be getting 4, 000 naval capacity. Pick up naval contractors civic for another 15% create a mercenary enclave and purchase their logistics support for another 15% now you have 5, 200 naval capacity without you spending a single building slot, pop, or space station module.

Tldr: when playing a criminal, use your branch offices like a cancer for your enemy not a boon for yourself. Vassalize them, don't accuire their territory.

[gerryscholz]

That was awesome. Thanks! New subscriber

[paperbagginem]

Great guide and explanation! Would love to see some walkthroughs utilizing these guides.

[PerfectAlibi]

The megacorp version of the Angler civic is nice, as you could just build agricultural districts for all of your food, consumer goods and trade value needs ^^

[GravitasZero]

Each time I play megacorp almost all empires around me are ones I cannot make branch offices on (one or two megacorps also competing with me, a machine empire, etc…)…
I have found that to be a major turn off from a corpo run
That and the utter RNG of the galactic market also turns me off from corpo. Can have the best trade revenue on the selected planet, be the richest in the galaxy and have spent all you can spend on “increasing” your chances… and still sometimes another random empire gets it.
I remember once cheating and switching to the empires that won, removing their nomination one by one and each and every time it was still not my empire that got it lmao

[ElZentu]

Excellent video! Thank you very much but I have the following question: What are the best species traits for this build?

[DrewPicklesTheDark]

Mega-church really surprised me with how good it was.

[tendertriper]

i would say there is a third megacrop aswell the PMC megacrop :)

[krisWitUhK]

Tell me if this is stupid guys, but if i was running this i would put food and mineral producing buildings on the other empires and leave my planets for more important things like alloys, consumer goods, etc would that play well or what

[danielgloyd]

I have over 1k hours, and have never played a megacorp yet. I have been thinking about trying a run with a criminal syndicate. Going psionic with the wisperer covenant. Trying out a max stealth Battleship kinda build for fun.

Do you know anything about the letters of marque civic? Seems like it would fit thematically for a stealthy criminal syndicate to also be or hire pirates.

[JNorthernSG]

First time I played megacorp I was being the Rothschild family and it’s the only time in a stellaris game I’ve been the top power in every field of the game the entire run

[helpusername]

It might seem like you're wasting the trade value on your ruler jobs, but megacorps can already get a lot of energy from branch offices. Going trade focus on top of branch offices can result in you making too much energy. So going mercantile is not always beneficial.

It depends on the spawns to be fair. Megacorp is the most spawn dependent empire type, given that it trades the strong civics of the normal empires and the base bonuses from gestalt for the potential to have 'free' resources from branch offices. If you can't find an empire with high TV then you should definitely go trade

[GovnoHerZalupa]

I'm not very good at playing stellaris, so I'm interested in a question. Tell me, please, which start is best suited for a classic corporation, ringworld or relic world? I can't figure out what is better revealed in the late game of the current meta. On the one hand, the ringworld gives a huge boost at the beginning and at the end of the game when at least one compartment is being repaired, but on the other hand, ecumenopolis is theoretically also a good option