How to quickly rise your power when you have a very small power at the beginning of The Swarm?

Advantages of slavery:

1) High resource output. Slaves +20% minerals and food become +30% minerals and food in Despotic Empire. Allowing you to expand extremely fast at the beginning when you need minerals the most. At the same time with high yield slaves, you can completely spare developing robot technology and robot rebellion is no longer a concern.

2) Conquest is efficient. Enslaving enemy planets is the most efficient means of conquest. Conquest of local planets face a variety of problems, cleaned to change their own race, and slow and worried about the adaptability of their own populations. Keeping the enemy population, for one thing, has a super low level of happiness, and you also need to worry about Lindenwan. And the enslaved population can not rebel, and do not need to care about the happiness of their lives. In addition to dealing with the enemy, their own internal separatists are also enslaved. Faction rebellion is no longer a concern.

Post the races and empires I use

Empire: use an authoritarian empire to maximize slave output.

Extreme centralization, eliminating slave tolerance a must.

Authoritarianism, add 5% happiness, +5% happiness with race. Initial home planet 80% happiness, +10% bonus to all resources

Race:

Frugality, +15% energy. We are no longer short of minerals, but will find energy in short supply in extreme expansion, and must add energy to avoid shortchanging in expansion.

Swarming, +5% Happiness, combined with Only Mind, 80% Happiness initially.

Settlement, put together a negative, or you can go with Ugly if you don't intend to play diplomacy, we're in the slave stream anyway, don't have to worry about the happiness of other races.

Slave flow has good and bad, the good thing is that the mineral output explosion, the bad thing is that the energy output can not keep up, and scientific research will be slow, so instead of considering the degree of happiness, it is better to consider the speed of scientific research is more real, the degree of happiness can only be added to the main body of the output of the nation, go slave flow rather meaningless.

Going happy is only for the initial extremely fast development, the default AI density, beat off the next two AI (each still only 2, 3 planets to beat), then almost berserk colonial ship colonization around, the number of other nationalities is quite small. It's true that mid-late game is not optimal. Energy must be frugal, and research can be considered materialistic.