Stellaris

I usually play strategy games to relax.

I just had an incredibly stressful game.
Authoritarian/Spiritualist/Pacifist snake people. Got the neural symbiont event very early.
Off to a good start.
First neighbor civ I encountered was a Devouring Swarm.
Cool. I'm pacifist, they're genocidal.
Perfect ! Guilt (and influence) free land-grab. They even had the same climate preference as my species (tundra), and since they're a hive-mind species they're automatically purged.
They die off and leave the infrastructure for my colonists.
How sad !

Not that cool: marauder empire not really close, but my divine empress had the trait that reduces mineral and influence cost for outposts. Naturally, I expanded like crazy. During my first war with the hungry bird people, I get attacked by another empire. Eventually I fight them off in a frantic two front (three or four front if you count pirates) clusterfornication but lose a vital choke point system with a heavily fortified starbase.
During that war another empire attacks me.
Before the war those utter dicks (they're fungoid, probably don't even have dicks, I apologize for my terracentrism) grabbed a system I really wanted because it had a size 25 tundra planet.
They colonized the planet. A damned tropical preference species colonized the tundra planet I want.
Of course I conquer the planet and purge the idiots.
For their own good !
Don't want them to catch a cold !
And of course there's a marauder raid.
And because my forces are stretched so thin, common pirates are running wild.
Just when I try to consolidate my power the devouring swarm decides to take revenge. They're pretty weak because I ate 80% of their territory and a war against them would normally just be pest control, but I'm still distracted by pirates and my fleets are literally half a galaxy away when they attack.

After about a hundred years of war a Great Khan unifies one of the three marauder empires. Naturally, it's the one right next to me.
Naturally, I'm so stubborn that I spend a couple of in-game years fighting a hopeless war against the Horde before I eventually submit and my empire becomes a satrapy.
My first instinct is to plot revenge, but then I decide to just wait for the Khans inevitable demise because I realize that I'm at peace. For the first time in over a century my empire is at peace.
And once the Khan dies I vassalize the succesor Khanates.
Who's laughing now ?

 

Today I learned that you can win a game by accident if you conquer a Fallen Empire during the War in Heaven and all of their vassals instantly beome your vassals.

 

New trailer for the console edition.

I wonder how they are going to manage this: giving a console port of a grand strategy game is a ambition in itself.

 

I knew it !



I didn't know it's going to be megacorporations, but I knew they were working on an economy focused expansion.

 

Took them two and a half years, but FINALLY we get galactic slave markets. I can't wait to buy sample populations from all sentient species known to my people, to create the biggest banquet the galaxy has ever seen. We will feast tonight, boiiis!

 

I just bought the base game and some dlc during the sale. I'm enjoying my first game. I don't know if I'll finish my first game before 2.2 goes live. My game is basically a sandbox game, no AI opponents. Basically I'm just learning to expand and fight pirates. If I continue I think I'll hit the midgame and endgame events (forgot to set those sliders). I don't know if I want to devote too much time on it. It is a small galaxy, and I have half the planets I need for a win. I have the whole galaxy explored, So I could just build the necessary starbases and colony ships. I know I'll have to learn a bunch of stuff again in a few days. So I could just play something else this weekend.

I am also debating if I should get the expansion. I don't know if all the game guides will be written with the assumption that the player has this expansion. Or just stumble thru the 2.2 patch changes like everyone else.

 

They released the patch notes and it says the tutorial will be updated. There probably won't be too much stumbling.
I think I'll first play a few 2.2 games before I get Megacorp. There's already enough new stuff in the free patch.

Edit:
Dammit, now I can't decide whether or not to buy Megacorp before my first 2.2 game. I really want the city planets and new megastructures.

 

Started a new game after waiting for the big planet patch for a while. The new tutorial doesn't do anything much to explain any of the new features, the quests are the same as before, and if I hadn't watched a tutorial video on the changes I'd have been stumped by unemployment and how jobs work. It also took me a while to understand how to get trade routes running.

I'm hazy on how to control empire sprawl - which seems to get out of hand then drop down again every so often for no apparent reason, and the only way I've found so far to increase my administrative cap beyond the baseline is one of the Expansion traditions. I'm scared to create starbases now I've hit the limit, so my empire is a series of fragments around the most interesting-looking systems and the ones with strategic resources I have no ability to use but am assured will come in handy. The AI empires I've met all have coherent-looking empires.

Overall I'm enjoying it a lot but have already hit the sticking point that stopped me playing years ago - exploration of everywhere accessible has been completed and the empires to both sides have closed their borders and declared rivalry (one of them is militarily Pathetic compared with me, but I'm still waiting on Destroyer hulls and to work out how to invade planets before attacking. I have animals to hunt inside their borders, as an added bonus).

I'm not sure I quite qualify as having reached the midgame, but opportunities for sandboxing seem to have dried up and I haven't run across interesting event chains - now I either turtle and tech up in an area with a bunch of barely habitable planets (I have four colonies, but once I hit the right tech I can uplift the tundra-dwelling pre-sapients who can make better use of the remaining uncolonised tundra planet within my borders), or go on a rampage - and I'm also at my (rather low) fleet cap despite a couple of anchorages.

Also, no idea what changed with what patch as I haven't played for around 2 years but anomalies seem to have changed - the difficulty now seems only the affect how long they take to research, the risk of failure seems to have been removed (unless I've just got very lucky). I was needlessly skirting around precursor anomalies I could have researched far sooner.

 

Yeah, the tutorial isn't much help. Better to watch some let's plays and have the game expleined by experienced players.

The bolded part is your problem.
Disconnected empires with many isolated system and outgoing lanes used to increase piracy risk. Now they reduce empire coherence. When coherence is under 100% it increases your empire sprawl and you hit the cap sooner with fewer systems. You can see your empire coherence in the government screen and if you mouse over it it shows you all the contributing factors.
It's generally a good idea to keep your borders as coherent as possible and only leave very poor systems within your borders unclaimed. Build some starbases to connect your territoty and your sprawl should actually go down.
Going over the administrative cap isn't a big deal of you don't overdo it, and you can increase the cap with some society techs, pacifist ethos, the Imperial Pejorative perk and Efficient Bureaucracy civic.

The failure risk has been removed with 2.0 almost a year ago. Scientist level now only speeds up anomaly research.

 

Well, I rolled a species that suffers a 50% extra penalty for going over the cap - though indeed it doesn't seem to be doing too much harm.

Unless I'm confusing Stellaris with Distant Worlds, there used to be passive cultural spread that increased each system's borders over time, so systems that were close but not adjacent would naturally connect. This doesn't now seem to be the case, and I appear to need a starbase in almost every system.

That's unfortunate - it makes the levels rather meaningless. My science ships are rarely short of time, and with no failure risk it seems they can't be destroyed unless you get careless (I built 4 - recently I got the event that clones one of them so now I have 5). Even an event that spawned mining drones gave me time to get away.

EDIT: I tried connecting my empire but still ended up well in excess of my admin capacity, and my economy collapsed for no clear reason - I ran out of food and periodically of minerals and eventually ran short of things to sell on the market to get sufficient replacements. Now I can't gather influence, a resource I'd been neglecting since it grew more or less naturally until it stopped for unclear reasons.

At this point I'm facing a 26,000-power marauding horde and, if I stretch, I might get a navy about a third of the size. I suspect that by this point I'm supposed to have a stable economy that can produce ships at an adequate rate, and no one in my vicinity aside from the Fallen Empires is able to put up a fight - they're all Pathetic militarily compared with me. Now that the horde is moving towards my main territory after excising my outlying spots, I doubt the session will last much longer.

 

I had no idea that was a thing - maybe my plan, in that case.

My game so far, aside from the coming marauder invasion and my economic mismanagement, has been pretty much the way I remember from a couple of years ago. Do a lot of exploring, beat up whichever of the overly-passive AIs I feel like, ally with one of the others (which has since been thoroughly dismembered by the Khanate), and deal with an empire of upstart ship rats that I left too much empty space to while occasionally getting involved in the internal politics of gas giant aliens (who have been a bit of a disappointment - I felt sure I was saving an evil race of monsters who would go on to liven things up by rampaging across the galaxy, but so far the joke is just that they keep asking for things and then spamming revolutionary rhetoric).

EDIT: Well, that was a story that didn't happen. The Khanate never attacked me again and only took one vassal, although I spent my last session upgrading my fleets, and only getting into a minor war with the surviving Rontarans (my war of subjugation ended up splitting the faction into my subjects and independents) to try and connect some of my trade networks. The Khan is now dead - if a new one arises I'll be prepared.

 

I bought Stellaris awhile back but got a bit scared off by the learning curve. I finally got into it this weekend and things finally clicked. I could not stop playing it. I love the game so much now!! I am still on my first game (to learn the game mechanics, not trying to win yet). I think I figured out most of the important stuff now. Playing as the United Earth. Expanded out, colonized some planets and built starbases to claim as much territory as I could. My empire is not very big compared to my neighbors. I have two hostile neighbors. I went to war with one and it started off ok but then he counter attacked and beat me badly so I surrendered (I ceded 2 systems). Later, I attacked the other hostile empire and won the war (got 2 systems from them). The war was back and forth but my fleets were stronger. Eventually, the other empire sued for peace and gave me two systems I had claims to. (I love the claims mechanics for getting systems in war) I did build too many ships to win the war and was way over my limit and I completely tanked all my resources. I even had 1 planet near revolt. So as soon as I made peace, I disbanded some of my ships and got my resources back up. I made friends with the empire on the other side of the hostile empire I defeated in war. I formed a federation with them and 1 other empire. I have made contact with most of the empires in the galaxy and there are now two power blocs. I really love the geopolitics of the game as empires grow, shrink, form federations, become vassals etc... I found a primitive species in my borders. I built an observation post and I was able to bring them up to the level of a spacefaring species as a vassal and then completely integrate them into my empire. Pretty cool!

I just have the base game but I plan to buy the expansion packs soon.

 

I've had quite a bit of fun with Stellaris and Cities:Skylines, the base versions. I'd love to explore their addons. But to do so would require me to spend about 300 dollars (150 for each). That's just ridiculous.

 

I would absolutely recommend picking up Utopia and Distant Stars before your next Stellaris play-through. Catch 'em when they are on sale and you can get the pair for less than $10.

The rest of the DLC, you could be a little more discriminating; pick it up if it looks particularly interesting to you, give it a pass otherwise.

 

I really want the Utopia DLC. Apocalypse looks good. I feel like I can wait on the Megacorps DLC.

 

Literally you can buy every DLC for Stellaris for $106. And if you wait it's easy to get them on sale for half that.

 

Most Stellaris content 50-75% off right now.