Stellaris Overlord Mercenaries Are Broken 

Fun fact: you can also create mercenary enclaves using empty corvettes (as long as they still have FTL drives). They’ll merge the ships with upgraded ones, retrofit the empty ships, and AIs will still rent those fleets, eventually making them just as powerful as if they hadn’t been empty. You save a ton of alloys in the process.

Paradox devs: *correct every bug within a week* "Finally, we did it!" Montu:

Honestly I'd love to see more empire-created Enclaves in the future. Having Trade enclaves or Tech Enclaves could be really interesting.

This megacorperation has developed legal loopholes so strong that they break the laws of physics and create energy from nothing

"Hi, I'm an Influencer! I can get people to buy your product!" "Can you help me turn my electric bill negative by shuffling around mercenaries?" "Uh...no?" "Then get out of my sight, you fraud."

Mercenary Enclaves/Scholariums: "Giving you infinite money and resources was never part of our deal, nor was acting as an unlimited fleet reserve!" Late Game Cheesers: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further."

I made a merc based megacorp and by the 2230's half the galaxy begged me to vassalize them, I love it

Ok, Hear Me Out. Mercs With An Attack Moon As The Flagship.

Actually, if you have a capacity for 6 fully upgraded mercenary enclaves, as a Megacorp, the dividends roll in so fast you won't be able to enjoy even a month without a popup. Basically you've just got +5000 energy credits of income, as well as +6k research. It really is quite strong, for just a about one hundred thousand alloys of upfront cost (that you can slowly pay). Definitely a viable strategy.

bugs are basically the reason why i always wait at least two weeks before giving new paradox dlc's a shot. most of them become good but it is rare in my experience that everything launches as planned for them. especially if you consider how many cheese masters are out there specifically looking for funny ways to break the game that paradox didn't think off

Leave it to Montu to break a perfectly balanced game with no exploits YET AGAIN.

I'm actually more sad to see this video than anything. I've been playing with the enclaves all week long to try everything i can with them to see what you can and can not pull off. I was half expecting to see you pull a video like the psionics one off. Glad you're showing off the bugs and all but darn, was hoping for a spotlight on the mercenary enclaves.

Great video, now time to watch it

"be very careful with this resolution because..." "That's the best part!"

I beat the game on Grand Admiral for the first time playing as a mercenary heavy megacorp with the clone soldier origin. I only had four planets the entire game gaining the vast majority of resources and science through subjects.

Also if your in a war make sure to attack enclaves in your enemies systems. Get a nice alloy reward and you also remove competition for your own enclaves

Fun fact: you can rent a pirate fleet to create a mercenary enclave, without using ANY of your alloys on the ships

The memes, the exploits, it’s just all so perfect

Montu, there is a bug with the progenitor hive that you might wanna cover. The 50% sublight speed debuff not only works for military ships but for science and builder ships as well. So you need to send a progenitor corvette with them to have the same exploration efficiency as others.

So TLDR is the guy changing the banners and colors on the ships is just as confused as the enclave accountant.

My very first empire build in this game was a military megacorp based on Frieza's empire, where the idea was to conquer planets and then sell them to other empires. With Overlord now I'm gonna have to give it another go because when I tried it in the previous update, it wasn't that good... Maybe now

I just found another glitch. When you integrate a vassal who had a rented mercenary fleet, the contract kinda breaks. You can't dismiss that fleet. And it stays with you when the agreement ends. Perfectly balanced.

So... The galactic resolutions reduce naval capacity of everyone while my Void Dweller origin let me build fortress habitats early in. By the end of the game, even with all the resolutions reducing everyone's naval capacity, I still have over 2400 naval capacity. 😸

I had to rewatch the pepe Silvia scene cause of your reference. Thanks for showing us more broken strats for us to troll our friends with.

You should do a teir list of the base empires like the commonwealth of man and jhetma Domion.

Ik this seems out of context but speaking of ships, the Nemesis Ships could have be the regular ships but having their own unique pirate design depending on what type you choose like the Humanoid or the Reptilian ship types (idk just thought I point that out)

I feel like while yes, it is a little messy how you can convert influence to energy credits, 75 influence seems a little... pricey. No with enclaves, the money making is all in upgrading them and (eventually, warning renting them too early can and will crash your economy) getting them rented out. Dividends are paid on a schedulized basis, where the more upgrades they have, having the Lord of War Ascension Perk, and renting them out yourself can make you rent out at a ridiculous profit. I am talking an average of once per enclave every 28 months (Not a long time at all) and profit margins with limits of 10000 energy credits per dividend, means with maximum perks (rewards are randomized), you can get about an average passive income of 1264.284 energy if you commit to the bit, and that is just energy. Food, Minerals, Research, Ships, influence in a minute amount, all of them are very possible rewards for simply having them, upgrading them, and renting them out yourself. Be warned though, one fleet can easily be worth 200 naval capacity in itself, they are unwieldly, and while they have a higher fleet power per energy credit aggregate (energy credits per month from ships + (energy credits to initially rent out the fleet/120) + (alloys from ships * 10) = energy credit aggregate of ships) by almost double, their main drawback is in their slow to rebuild nature. A tier 5 can be easily 250k fleet power, but they don't exactly have a Mega Shipyard to draw from.

A funny thing that happened to me (i dont know if there was a video on it) but i was in the imperial fiefdom origin and i started as scholarium and for some reason, because the fleet debuff i coud downgrade my fleet that I built for 4000 alloys into 270000 alloys, so I wasted a lot of space into resource silos but i got the alloys it was very strange, but lucky 'cause after i've done that my overlord collapsed and i became independent.

PMC, Naval Contractors, Warrior Culture, Lord of War, and profiting from all of them. Are you Nicolas Cage, Spiffing Brit, or even Jonathan Irons by now? Although i wonder that if by having an Imperial nation that supplies mercenary forces would it mean that our power projection and umm "protection programs" would be a very early game way of getting easy vassals that we can toy with. If anyone has done this let me know please.

Honestly, the best thing Overlord added to the game, that's bug free and generally amazing, is this sound track.

Montu and the Spiffing Brit, the people you go to when you need results and don't care about the means by which they get them.

I've rented out a fleet directly to my vassal and they immediately turned it into a mercenary enclave. I didn't get the fleet back at the end of the deal.

I'm still getting paid by mercs I'm currently hiring during the endgame crisis. I can run negative energy and some others and still never run out

While im about to go play this in MP with a mate, because fun funky shit, this is why Paradox needs betas for CCs like yourself to find these kinds of exploits and have them patched out before a DLC launches.... this is beyond busted.

I really like this new mechanic. I played as a megacorp, beeing a bulwark vassal under my overlord, so i could milk those juicy planets with some nice branch offices. I think they also reduced empire size from branch offices, wasn´t it 10? now it´s 2. This playes really well as u get some destroyers right from the beginning, sell those weapons for more destroyers and use that power projection to compensate for the more expensive starbase influence cost, and also if u wanna use this trick from the video. I had almost nobody working in worker jobs as i just bought everything and negotiate a nice contract with my overlord. Feels like a really fun way to play tall, as u really have a lot of tech and fleet early, even with just three planets.

Better Call Admiral Saul 😉 #lawyered

I love the mercs but the worst thing about them is u dont see their timer... U rly never know when the contract expires...

It is obvious that Paradox didn´t playtest most of the key mechanics of this DLC .

Time to create a new Human-portrait megacorp: World Marshal.

I have yet to play with the hotfix but i am curious to see if what i found if youre still able to "rent" raider fleets then turn right around and make them their own enclaves and no longer have to pay that "rent" fee from the raiders. Then go from there.

Wait... I just saw a dolphin carry a sword to a meeting.

i do love myself some exploits

Don't stop with these, make PDX earn their DLC revenue by sharing everything we want to know of!

Owen Wilson Wow gif I'm flabbergasted. I'm Blown away I'm making another cup of tea to find more exploits

Alright Senator Armstrong, chill.

The mercenaries were such a cool idea but its just so unbelievably busted... I don't know exactly what causes it, but sometimes mercenary ships just randomly change ownership to me permanently. And I find that extremely annoying because I don't WANT permanent ships, the whole point of the mercs was to only field navies when I actually needed them without the constant resource drain of a standing fleet. It seems to happen most often after battles, so i'm not sure if some of the ships that emergency FTL out to avoid destruction warp back to my capital as MY ships or if perhaps the mercenary fleet gets completely destroyed and then all the little reinforcements on the way to that fleet suddenly become mine instead of neutral, i'm not sure, but it is annoying as hell. I've also run into situations where the mercs just stop building ships altogether. I'll have a theoretically max sized, fully upgraded fleet, but they just stop producing new ships to send to the merc fleet to add to its size. Another issue I see happen a lot is the admirals seem to warp in and out of existence constantly. The fleet sometimes has an admiral with the mercenary trait, sometimes it has no admiral at all, and sometimes it has an admiral with the original trait I created the enclave with. It's all just so horribly fucking broken, I hate it. If they could get it to work, I think mercs would be a lot of fun, but its just such a shit show mess right now. I also wish, as patron, I could design their ships and fleets. I don't like having a mix of nonsense ships rather than neutron launcher battleships. Theres no excuse for it.

I'm always influence-starved, so it counds more like a desperate measure for quick and dirty resources than an exploit for me. Well, abusing one-system vassal and spamming a gojillion of ministries of truth probably will turn it into an exploit, but if you're generating 50+ influence per month, you probably already have accidentaly the game.

I learned something very interesting in one of my more recent runs! I'm pretty sure you can use the pilgrims from the fallen empire inside mercanary enclaves.

Was forced to play tall due to other big empires, tried building merc enclaves, got two of 'em, got dummy thicc cash and research plus the occasional ships and basically had two 300k power emergency protective fleets at my disposal. It was a blast, literally

Mercenary enclave: We've Been Tricked, We've Been Backstabbed and We've Been Quite Possibly, Bamboozled

I had this idea a week ago and it was exactly as powerful as described. I was just trying to get the achievement

honestly I would rather have 75 influence than 3k energy getting such low numbers of energy is easy enough with some trading, while I pretty much never have enough influence until I become the empire and/or get the late game edicts

I like the spiff reference at the beginning lmao

"it prints money"

You ever listen to someone talk and focus specifically on their breaths? It's quite interesting. You can sort of predict how long the sentence will be based on how sharply the breath is inhaled.

I integrated a subject who had 2 merc fleets and I just got to keep them permanently and I couldn't dismiss them cus their enclave didn't exist anymore

Currently we have the most cursed game of all time (out of maybe 50 played) because I pushed through mercenary contracts in GC despite my friends despising it lmao. The Galaxy loves it though, it's the ensurer of peace!

Goddamn, i have work at 7am, so now at 00.30 am i am inclined to play, oh well, mercenary enclave go brrr

Considering I was getting 2000 energy credits a month from a single AI Prospectorum I had in 2240, I have to say that spending 200 influence for a single time influx of 22k energy is sadly rookie numbers.

Paradox don't really have game testers that try out functions they just play a bit to see if it crashes. Nor do they like to play test either

Trading influence for credit? I don't know man, sounds like a terrible way of spending my influence when there are like 5 vassals waiting on me to specialize them out of protectorate

I see you are quickly becoming friends with Paradox. Just like Aspec.

So this no longer seems to work. It's been patched, right? After i create the mercs i have no option to rent the fleet, it's greyed out, saying it's not available. But why? and WHEN does become available?

I don't know if it says this in the video but there's a bug I've discovered that if you hire raiders like the biggest fleet out of the three options you can make an enclave with that

its like those guys at the grand exchange in runescape who tell you they will double your money, but if they actually delivered

Keep putting these out and soon you’ll be pushing Yorkshire Tea too.

I am wondering if you have special ships and use them to set up an enclave will they built more of them? Eg crisis ships or dragon hatchlings from the Here be Dragons origin.

Energy credits printer go brrrrrrrrrr

Montu, noones explained it right can you do like a youtube short, or a quick video to show exactly how to get ships to patrol to stop piracy in trade empires. I kid you not no matter what other videos have said I try what they say and nothing happens automatically. Or is there something To lookout for that may stop patrols working properly. Cheers mate

War is business and business is boomin my friend

Missed opportunity to say 'Increase my opinion with the like button'

Considering the costs of vassal contracts, spy operations, and they reverted habitats to cost influence, I'd rather find an exploit to turn my credits to influence and not waste my precious influence. An investment in a decent vassal could easily give over 1k credits per month anyway.

Oh yes they fun :D Try it with a MegaCorp with franshising and Naval civic.

mercs are so gd honestly i find that its cheaper for most the game to just rent them out then make my own because they are always so big while everyone else on grand admiral had 20k ships i was on 80 k with the mercs

I've got a problem with mercenaries not reinforcing their contracted fleet. I'm playing on console and this is frustrating me as I can clearly see a 2nd fleet being built. Is there any way of course correcting this? I understand that the benefit of having one is mainly in being their patron but having a decent sized fleet instantaneously during emergency situations is something that I was hoping to get from it.

I love the not to The Spiffing Brit.

Mercenaries... aka infinite pop-up spawn.

What I want to know is how we commandeer fleets, it seems to happen randomly while I'm at war. The game just prompts me that commandeered fleets have arrived and their clearly from my enclaves.

What I can say. I have a shortage of influence in all games. This is impossible that I have influence for something like this. 75 influence this is a huge amount. I have no commercial, I have no research and all other agreements because I need influence. I do my fleet that size, and I can do rivalries because I want 1.5 influence each month additionally. I spam vassals because I need influence. Usually, I have influence income around 6-8 from 20 to 100 years from the beginning of the game, but this is never enough. I need mechanics on how to convert 3000 energy in influence because this is nothing. This 3000 energy can be important only in the early beginning of the game, but actually, I have no influence at this stage of the game and 2 times by 75 influence mean -1 habitat... These 3000 energy are important only in the beginning of the game before 10 years pass. So, if I located in poor location, and I have bad neighbors I have extra influence then to convert energy in alloys, from other points of view I don't see something great in this mechanics. When alloy prices become 20 instead 5 energy per alloy, all this energy is not needed in the end of the game.... But I like when enclaves gives 2k alloys as greatings, or something like that. 2k alloys this is like 40k energy... And dividends are good bonuses too.

What is that intro video? Do you have the full version still?

ohhh...you build mercs yourself. That explains why I couldn't find them despite buying communications with every empire

you just caught a like due to that "leverage your..." way of requsting said like. Good on you m8

Wouldn't it be cheaper to just buy a money printer at this point?

Throwing around that much influence is never an option for me. Most of your suggestions don't make sense to me for this reason. Is it realistic to not care about influence, if so, how?

i have 5 mercenary enclaves from annexing and releasing vassals

a perfectly balanced game with no exploits...

Yo does this still work?

This might seem broken, but if you dig deeper, it's really not worth it. If this is TL;DR for you, the most you get is 328 energy credits per month, which isn't worth a Civic or Ascension Perk slot. Firstly, you're trading Influence for Energy Credits, which isn't a good trade if you're particularly aggressive. If you're playing tall and turtling, though, it can be worth it, since wasted Influence goes nowhere, though even tall empires will be starving themselves for influence if they're building Habitats (which they should, generally) Setting that aside, you have to invest either one ascension perk or one civic to make this work. The first perk any normal empire takes is pretty mediocre, but Executive Vigor's +100 edict fund means many empires can run the Capacity Subsidies edict for +50% generator output for free, which absolutely outweighs this trick. That's a pretty strong claim, so here's the math to back it up. Assume we're spending Influence as quickly as the Power Projection cost gives it back. For any non-Imperial government type, that's +2 per month; Imperials get +3. This trick is pointless to use with more than one Mercenary Enclave, unless you're trying to dump all of your Influence at once for a big payout, so the only opportunity cost here is one Civic or AP; for this example, we're using Lord of War, which any empire can take, even Machine and Hive empires, so it's the fairest comparison I can think of. Setting aside the setup cost, as this WILL pay for itself eventually: At the minimum rate of 3000 energy credit profit per 75 influence, a normal empire breaks even on Influence after 38 months, Imperials after 25. That's 78 energy credits per month, or 120 for Imperials. That's good, but once your gross energy credit production from technicians is at least 240, Capacity Subsidies is better, especially if it costs no Unity through Executive Vigor or Edict Fund technologies. At the maximum rate of 22000 energy credit profit per 200 influence, a normal empire breaks even on Influence after 100 months, Imperials after 67. That's 220 energy credits per month, or 328 for Imperials. Again, that's good, but by the time you can afford a maximally-upgraded mercenary enclave, Capacity Subsidies alone should be worth more than that - and if we compare the credit output of building another Habitat with Commercial or Generator Districts with 3/4 of that Influence cost (if a much higher effective credit input, as it costs a base of 1500 Alloys), it's not even remotely a better deal, as the Habitat and its pops will continue to product value indefinitely, making them a better long-term investment. In short, this is a funny exploit, but much like the now-patched Deficit Abuse trick, it isn't actually worth doing most of the time. In the early and mid-game, Influence is better spent Claiming your neighbor's systems and renegotiating Vassal contracts, especially to turn them into Scholariums; in the late-game, 22000 credits is a drop in the bucket, as your credit income will likely be in the thousands, and you'd usually want to spend your Influence on Galactic Community chicanery, Megastructures, or Habitat spam. By the time you're completely out of those, this exploit is utterly useless. Still, this was a fun video, and it made me think critically about how I spend my Influence at each stage of the game, even if I don't think I'll ever use this trick.

this one hurt my head

[Insert metal gear solid 4's opening monologue here]

So do you and other Stellaris RU-vidrs independently find these or play some and scrub reddit for the rest. Not trying to call someone out, just curious.

i still dont get why make mercenary fleets to begin with, what is the advantage compared to just making your own fleet? less alloys and upkeep?

Is there anyway you have a military enclave build to make money renting your ships?

Me looks at my own pfp: Hmmm Stellaris update comes out on console: HMMMMMM Me remembering i already have several Mercenary Megacorps: *HMMMMMMMMMM* one of them is MSF: *WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO*

Some things are ingenious and stupid at the same time :)

I'd appreciate if someone could figure this out feb 26 2024 still a issue for console the enclaves do not reinforce can someone explain why they don't reinforce after I set it up I've had the ships build and sit above the enclave but stay neutral

In PS4 Is the same?

Stuff like this is neat, and drawing attention to it should get to fixed, but I personally am more interested in cool builds than showing off exploits that’ll get fixed

I would like just a video of the meme at the beginning please and thank you

Are the enclaves worth it if you aren't doing the bug