Megacorporations are by far my favorite type of empire to play in Stellaris – their advantages in economy, their strategic weaknesses when it comes to expansionism – makes you play a more diplomatic, resource focused approach. But with how much Stellaris changes with each new update, it’s worth revisiting the fundamentals even if you’re familiar with the basic strategy. 

This guide assumes that you have some familiarity with the basic mechanics of Stellaris, but does not account for specific DLCs. Rather than mentioning which DLC you need for every single civic, you can double check what’s available in the Empire Creation screen itself. The principles will remain even without the larger game expansions. 

What’s Different about a Megacorp

The primary unique mechanic of a Megacorp is the ability to construct branch offices, which enable you to gather trade and build buildings on planets owned by other empires, so long as you have a commercial pact with them. These branch offices can bring in ludicrous amounts of trade, and the buildings on them often do a great job of supplementing your basic resource production as well. 

Aside from that, the main features of a Megacorp are: 

• Can use the Mercantile diplomatic stance
• +1 Available Envoys
• +10% Trade from Jobs and Contracts
• +50% Empire Size from Planets

The Trade from Jobs and Mercantile diplomatic stance represent good bonuses for boosting your economy. However, the +50% Empire Size from Planets indicates that you should be pretty conservative with how many planets you colonize. Depending on the build, you might not have to build any dedicated planets to generating basic resources, maybe with the exception of a mining world. 

The Build

Ethics

Best: Xenophile
Good: Egalitarian, Spiritualist, Materialist
Okay: Militarist, Authoritarian, Pacifist
Worst: Xenophobe

As far as ethics go, there is one abundantly clear pick, and that is the Xenophile trait – since trade is your primary means of generating resources as a Megacorporation, getting a +10% or +20% boost to that will translate into a massive boost overall. The extra envoys and opinion modifier with other empires will make it more likely for you to secure trade deals, and less likely for a suspicious neutral to become a bitter adversary. 

I’m fond of Egalitarian, Spiritualist, and Materialist for the special civics that they unlock, as well as the minor boosts to specialist output, unity, and research respectively. These align well with the strengths of the Megacorp economy. 

Pacifist is nice for the boost to stability and reduction in empire size, which allows you to expand a bit further before running into empire size penalties, but it unlocks no civics and blocks a couple interesting ones. It also kneecaps your ability to go to war, which is not nearly as important for this empire type, but still worth noting. Militarist and authoritarian unlock some interesting but not especially effective civics, and in my opinion, don’t have bonuses that are that relevant to a Megacorp. 

Xenophobe will hinder you diplomatically, preventing you from securing commercial pacts. The Pop Growth and Influence reductions are not worth it.

Civics

While I will not comprehensively list all the civics that you can play as, I’ll drop a few of my favorites here, and why you might enjoy playing with them. The main items to look at for picking a civic is: how much does it boost your advanced resource production, or how fun is it to play? 

The Staples 
These are good simply because of the bonuses that they provide, but they don’t necessarily change the way that a megacorp plays. 

• Free Traders: +10% Branch Office value, +2 Trade per 100 Traders. 
• Mastercraft, Inc: Replaces Artisan jobs with Artificer jobs (Produce +1 Consumer Goods & Trade per 100 Pops)
• Trading Posts: +4 Station capacity, +2 Trade from starbase buildings

Neat Picks 

Naval Contractors
While there are several civics that play into the Defense Contractor build, this is the quintessential one. If you want your Megacorp to be loaning fleets across the galaxy, this will give you the early ability to build up mercenary enclave capacity, and start loaning them out early. 

• +15% Naval capacity
• +2 Enclave capacity

Worker Cooperative
This is my favorite Megacorp Ethic by a longshot. The main functions of the civic are: 

• Can use the Employee Ownership living standard, must use egalitarian ones. 
• Unlocks the Mutual Aid trade policy. 
• Replaces Executive and Manager jobs with Steward jobs

The main appeal of the Worker Cooperative civic is the Mutual Aid trade policy. For each 1 unit of trade you generate, 0.25 is kept as trade, but the other 75% converts into: 

• 0.27 Energy Credits
• 0.27 Minerals
• 0.27 Food
• 0.10 Unity

With sufficient trade generation, you can heavily supplement or completely bypass the basic resource generation that your empire needs. Very strong, and fun to not have to manage those elements. 

Criminal Heritage
I don’t recommend playing this in multiplayer, everyone will hate you. The main effects that Criminal Heritage grants are: 

• Can establish illegal Branch Offices without Commercial Pacts
• Crime on Branch Office Planets increases trade value.
• −20% Branch Office Cost
• +20% Infiltration Speed
• +1 Codebreaking

Not mentioned on the civic, but this will result in a large spike in crime on the destination planet, which you will need to maintain in order to keep your branch office from being closed down.

Augmentation Bazaars
This civic is the most cyberpunk / neuromancer feeling of the various corporate civics. It lets you add some cybernetic traits to your starting species, and grants some modest bonuses to your population. 

• Can select some cybernetic traits for starting species
• Augmentor Replaces Executive jobs with Augmentation Merchant jobs
• +4 Trade per 100 Augmentor Augmentors
• Can construct Augmentation Bazaar buildings

I hope this gives you a decent charcuterie board of civics to pick from, whether you’re aiming for an optimized or wacky build. 

Origins

While there’s about two dozen origins that a Megacorporation is eligible to start as, the trade-focused, limited planet and limited warfighting abilities of megacorporations push you towards a few specific origins. Rather than list every good origin, I’m going to point out the ones that are especially of interest for Megacorps. 

Prosperous Unification
The game’s default origin remains a worthy pick. While the bonuses to starting districts doesn’t matter so much, the immediate access to the Societal Unification tech, and the starting modifier your planet gets to resource output are worth considering.

Mechanist
Mechanist is a fairly straightforward origin – unlocking robotics technologies early on and allowing you to build more robots quickly. The pop assembly that this provides allows for pretty quick population growth, and robots are good at filling out menial clerk and basic resource jobs so that your primary species can focus on wealth generation. 

Common Ground
If you look at the tier list of any Stellaris Youtuber, this is considered one of the worst origins. With 4.0’s population mechanics, they are wrong. Common Ground starts you in a federation with two other brand new empires, at the expense of your guaranteed habitable planets. But with pop growth no longer directly tied to the number of planets in your empire, this is not as meaningful of a disadvantage.

The main benefits of Common Ground are having immediate access to forming a Trade League type federation, which allows immediate access to the best trade policy in the game – the trade league federation type. Additionally, you also have two more empires to form migration treaties with to dampen the loss of guaranteed habitable worlds. Having immediate targets for branch offices is also a huge boost. 

Void Dwellers
Void Dwellers is an interesting origin because it switches out your starting home planet for Habitats, and makes it so your species cannot colonize planets. The advantage of this is that Habitats are quite good at generating resources, and you can build practically an unlimited number of them. In the case of Megacorporations specifically, their commercial districts are quite economical. The downside is that they are smaller and more expensive to settle than planets. 

There are plenty of other origins that Megacorps are viable for, but these are the ones that I tend to go back to for my playthroughs. 

Traits

There is one primary species trait worth mentioning for Megacorps, and that is the Thrifty policy, which grants +25% resource output. Other than that, it’s worth taking either population growth, upkeep reduction or other advanced resource production traits. 

Trade Policy

While this government policy is rather optional to consider for non-corporate empires, it is essential for Megacorporations to consider, since trade will be your primary way of generating many resources. Aside from the Worker Cooperative trade policy mentioned earlier, there are four different trade policies that one can establish. The default is Wealth Creation: For each 1 Trade generated, 0.5 is converted into energy credits. This is by far the weakest policy, as you will likely be in an energy credit surplus for a large percentage of the game, at least until you start heavy automation. 

If you take the Adaptive Economic Policies tradition under the Mercantile Tradition Tree, you will unlock two other trade policies, which are substantial improvements: 

• Consumer Benefits: 1 Trade >>> 0.5 Trade, 0.25 Consumer Goods. This is a fantastic option for research or military industrial focused factions, as it lets you subsidize your heavy consumer goods upkeep for research, or pivot the majority of your industry to generating alloys respectively. 
• Marketplace of Ideas: 1 Trade >>> 0.5 Trade, 0.15 Unity. For builds that are more focused on a Unity rush, this lets you bypass the value chain of miners extracting minerals, artisans creating consumer goods from those, and bureaucrats or priests finally converting those into unity. 

If you form a federation, you also unlock two additional trade policies depending on the type that you choose:

• Trade League: 1 Trade >>> 0.5 Trade, 0.15 Energy, 0.15 Consumer Goods, 0.075 Unity. The Trade Federation Type tends to be ideal for Megacorps as far as alliances go, anyway.
• By banding together in a holy covenant, we may bask in the collective glory of our divine purpose.

Just to demonstrate why these policies are worth going for, here’s some ballpark math: Say you want unity. An Administrative Office, before any bonuses, employs 200 pops to convert 4 consumer goods into 6 Unity. This needs to be supported by, rounding up, 150 artisans converting minerals into those consumer goods, which requires about 150 miners to mine those. So this setup requires about one building and half of two different kinds of districts, and 500 pops to create 6 unity. 

Now compare that to a Marketplace of Ideas policy Megacorp that builds a Commercial Zone instead. A Commercial Zone, before the many, many bonuses you will apply, converts 2 Consumer Goods in 16 Trade, which Marketplace of Ideas converts into 2.4 unity. That may seem less efficient in terms of population than the Administrative office, but consider two things. First, that other 8 trade can be spent in the Galactic Market to offset the input costs (assuming base cost & market fees, six-ish trade will pay for the consumer goods). So this setup only requires only 2 buildings / districts & 400 pops to replicate the work of 3 buildings / districts & 500 pops before bonuses. 

At +70% trade output, one Commercial Zone employing 200 pops will outproduce a full Administrative Supply Chain. That may sound like a lot, but if you built your empire correctly, you may be close to that at game start:

• 10% from Megacorp Empire Type
• 20% from Fanatic Xenophile
• 25% from the Thrifty trait.

The rest of the gap can be closed with one or two civics, governor / leader traits, and Mercantile traditions. And while Unity from jobs bonuses aren’t uncommon, they are less common than trade bonuses by far.

Playing the Game

Trade, by far, should be the core of your economic engine, which should mean investing early in automatic trades in your internal market, which will allow you to safely build up advanced resource generation without the 

Traditions:
The Mercantile tradition tree is by far the most important pick for any Megacorp empire. I would take this first, even before more common early game picks such as Discovery and Expansion. This should pretty much always be your first pick. Past that, I recommend Discovery or Prosperity as your second choice, depending on how much room you have to explore vs. how much help you need. Once you start running into hostile empires that you can’t neutralize with diplomacy, invest in Fortification. 

Ascension Perks
Universal Transactions is the most important pick for a Megacorporation, with its elimination of commercial pack influence costs, and reduction of branch office costs by 15%. That being said, it does not have to be your first pick, as you might not have positive diplomatic relations with an empire by the time you unlock your first ascension perk. 

Your first pick should probably be Technological Ascendancy or One Vision, depending on whether you’re more Tech or Ascension focused. Your third pick should be whichever unlocks your intended ascension path (Bio, Synthetic, Psionic, etc.). Past that, it’s according to your empire’s long term needs. Eternal Vigilance is great if you have nasty neighbors, Arcology project is good for making the most out of your worlds, especially since you’ll be outsourcing a lot of your basic resource production. 

Technology
Prioritize unity and research output focused technology such as Societal Unification, Quantum Computing. Deprioritize research pertaining to basic resource extraction, for minerals, but especially for energy and food, which are easy to produce through trade or starbase constructions. Colonization technologies are less important to you, as you probably aren’t going to be expanding as heavily as other empires, and you can always expand via branch offices. More broadly, technologies that boost your population, either through growth or pop assembly are your friend. 

Colonization
Since population growth is not so tied to how many planets you have, you can take your time with colonizing planets. I like to set up an industry-focused planet and a trade-focused planet early on, and use my homeworld to produce research and unity first and foremost. 

Diplomacy
Business without customers is difficult! Unless you’re starting with the Common Ground origin, most of the other empires you run into will take some work in order to do business with. You will likely have large stockpiles of resources, as well as a plethora of envoys, so make sure to improve relations and give gifts to any empire you meet that starts out with a Wary / Suspicious status. Once you’re past that in either direction, good or bad, it’s unlikely that giving gifts will change the outcome. 

In the early game, capital worlds are really the only ones worth a branch office investment. I wouldn’t bother putting an office on any planets with less than 1.5K population. Branch office buildings only unlock after the administrative building is upgraded from a Reassembled Ship Shelter into a Planetary Administration, and they hardly have any trade to gather before then anyway. 

Defense

I highly recommend leaning on Starhold static defenses rather than large fleets, unless you’re aiming for a Mercenary build. Starholds heavily outscale ships in the early game, so investing in them will buy you enough time to build up an industrial base that can equip a proper fleet later on. The Fortification Tradition tree helps a lot in this regard, especially the perks that boost health, damage, capacity, and reduce upgrade cost. 

Conclusion

I hope this gives you a good overview about how to play Megacorporations. Being a rich empire in a galaxy of squabbling militarists is a fun fantasy to live through, whether you’re providing the munitions for their wars, backing your favorites, or just trading with all sides. 

Featured Image Credit: Paradox Interactive