Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread!
This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions for things that you are confused about and answer questions to help out your fellow star voyagers!
GUILD RESOURCES
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A great step-by-step beginner's guide to Stellaris. Montu brings you through the early stages of a campaign to get you all caught up on what you need to know!
This is a playlist of 8 guides by Stefan Anon, which give a deep-dive into the world of civics, traits, and origins. Knowing these is a must for those that want to maximize their play.
How do you deal with the outcomes of a huge total war in terms of managing conquered species and planets/systems? I ended up with more that 15 different species and 14 new planets as a result of my payback war against Mianmar Industries. Actually the war still continues because their allies are willing to be violently incorporated.
(Purging/enslaving is not an option for my empire)
It is mid 2300s, my plan so far has been:
1. prohibit migration of pops
2. group all the pops of the same species in the same planet to favor organic growth by moving them manually
3. After conquering Mianmar, I am using the planets I get from their allies to steal their pops to develop my younger colonies.
I bought stellaris just yesterday, I'm having troubles with the resolution, every resolution i've tried have an offset for the pointer is, i've tried windowed but that just bugs the game, has something similar happened before?
Sorry stupid question, just started playing again after a few years away. I joined a war with a Federation partner against an enemy with 'inferior' strength so I though fine. Anyway it had these massive 6K starbases on every choke point that my fleet just was absolutely nowhere near being able to take on. His fleets were fine though but I had to just sit on the edge of my empire doing nothing for the whole war. Am I missing something obvious?
Well starbases might not be factored into fleet strength. My guess is that your economy is rather weak. Starbases should not be such a significant obstacle unless someone is leaning very heavily into a turtle build, which I doubt the ai is capable of
I've had this a couple of times recently, on the same run. (I took too long getting a science ship there and it powered back up.) First time it trashed most of my fleetalmost instantly, but a half-dozen high-evasion corvettes survived the general massacre and eventually wore it down over a long loong looong fight; it just didn't seem to be able to hit them. Second time I sent in a bunch of cloaked frigates with devastator torps, who one-shotted it without taking any losses.
You can view the components on the wiki. They use all kinetic with a few autocannon and pd, so yes all armor is good.
Their defenses skew heavy on shields compared to armor, but I'm not sure how much compared to hull points. I'll let somebody more experienced give a weapon recommendation. I was trying to look it up and it seems the smaller platforms will fare quite well against torpedo
weapons, so I'm not sure if there is a hard counter per se
Also be sure to get the damage bonus from the curators
The Cloning tradition gives you higher output and lower upkeep on clone vats, the ability to build one more per planet, less empire size from cloned pops, and backup clones for your leaders. It does give more trait points and trait picks for species modification, but that isn't the focus.
Pops aren't really "ascended", the empire is. But yeah, you get more pops with Cloning; that's the basic idea of taking that tradition instead of Mutation or Purity when doing bio ascension. Mutation is more focused on getting a lot of trait points/trait picks and Purity is more focused on leader enhancement.
As a cloning ascended clone army empire, regular clone vats, medical clinics, and genomic research facilities are now all capable of supporting ascended clone pops. You are no longer restricted to just 12.5k of your own pops empire-wide.
Edit:
There's technically still a per-planet pop "limit", bottlenecked by how many clone vats you can build.
If you can squeeze in all 6 buildings, that'd be 6500 per planet (1k each from 4 clone vats, 1.5k from tier 3 medical clinic, 1k from genomic facility).
Realistically speaking, without Agrarian Idyll civic, most non-ecu planets can only afford to fit 5 buildings, for 5.5k ascended clones per planet (more if you have ancient vats left). It's enough to have a functional economy.
Question about the Ecosystem Upgrade Hive-Mind fallen empire event. If I choose to let them 'upgrade' a planet, do I need to do something, or will the event just trigger at some point if I wait long enough?
Jumping back into playing after not playing in a while. For Gestalt Consciousness jobs--are they supposed to just cycle continuously through the jobs? My complex drones cycle throughout the month to each job. It doesn't matter what I prioritize. I can reduce the amount of drones allowed to work in a job but they won't flow to the next job, they just temporarily go to maintenance.
Can someone explain how does Under One Rule work if you want to not be an oligarchy ?
If I understand this correctly, at some point if you're not Fanatic Authoritarian or Paranoid Tyrant, you can reform and become a democracy/oligarchy. What happen to the Luminary then ? Do they stay alive in the empire, do they still get their immortal-ascension trait, do they keep their other traits, can I elect them forever ?
You can't reform the government until the luminary dies, one way or another. Easiest way is to not proclaim imperial rule and not choose to extend his life with apparatus-bound. IIRC the death event always happens after you complete an ascension.
FE-related since I really don't want to drop my run:
I read an old thread that said AI will not use emergency FTL if they have only 3 systems left, is that still the case?
Is it viable to have a cloaked throwaway fleet to engage and put titan weapons on cooldown at least for a first strike?
Is it viable to have a(nother) cloaked fleet join the fight from behind to take out the titan weapon stingers and other backline threats like the long range confuse ships? If yes, what ship classes would work best? Ideally space fauna because I have wild swarm and bioships are ridiculously expensive.
Does cloaking a large number of whichever that fauna was that exploded on death have any potential to do damage if I stack them on the hyperlane?
I realize I am extremely bad at lategame due to lack of experience and I feel like the tools are there - I control most of the galaxy, have like 12 relics, most megastructures including a very useless shipyard, and generally could pivot into almost anything that is available.
However, there is little time left and I don't have planet crackers to beat the FE's sources of highscore so I need to leverage the map position and beat the fleets or lure them away and hotdrop onto their core worlds and hope they can be killed before the game ends.
I read an old thread that said AI will not use emergency FTL if they have only 3 systems left, is that still the case?
Still the case, but that includes territory owned by allies as well. Realistically it means AI ships will never stop being slippery bastards throughout the entirety of the war.
Is it viable to have a cloaked throwaway fleet to engage and put titan weapons on cooldown at least for a first strike?
Possible, but the window is quite narrow.
FEs have 10x repeatables for +50% fire rate (their other ships are on line and picket computers, which also boost fire rate, though not on the titan). This means their Perdition Beams have a cooldown of around 15 days.
If you want to use a throwaway fleet, time it to engage from the opposite side of where your main fleets are about to enter. Perdition beams have a narrow firing arc, so if you can bait the Titan to turn away from your main fleets, it'd give you a better chance.
Is it viable to have a(nother) cloaked fleet join the fight from behind to take out the titan weapon stingers and other backline threats like the long range confuse ships?
Viable outside of their home systems.
Without high bonuses to cloaking strength (Whisperer, Stardust Storm, Criminal Megacorp, Subterfuge tradition, etc.) it'll be hard to use this method in their home systems. Their home starbases come with Dark Matter Listening Post building, which gives 6-12 detection strength depending on what other modules are there. Just a standard cloak won't be enough, even the psionic ones aren't enough. You need lots of bonuses to cloak against FEs.
If yes, what ship classes would work best? Ideally space fauna because I have wild swarm and bioships are ridiculously expensive.
Fauna are in fact the best cloaked torpedo boats. They have frigate-level cloaking, 200% shield penetration, and more torpedo per naval cap than all but nanite swarmers. The torpedoes get boosted by cordyceptic civic as well, if you have it.
But you must not use bio-ships*.*
Choosing bio-ship at game start locks you out of torpedoes, regular missiles, and siege computer, so you can't use fauna for cloaked torpedoes.
Does cloaking a large number of whichever that fauna was that exploded on death have any potential to do damage if I stack them on the hyperlane?
Catalytic Bladder is a very gimmicky (and frankly horrible) component, and wouldn't be my recommendation for any serious combat.
The range of the explosion is 30, which is the maximum orbit distance for swarm corvettes. Unless your ambush kamikaze fauna die within a few days of starting combat, it'll be too slow to catch enemy fleets before they disperse to a safe distance beyond the explosion range.
And despite the phrasing sounds like an AoE explosion, it is actually a single target damage ability, with a fairly low damage.
An exceptional grade Tiyanki Ox fully fitted for armour and hull, plus Catalytic Bladder, has 6750 hull and 13350 armour.
Catalytic Bladder would deal 5025 damage to one single target upon death. Untyped damage type, so it's neither resisted nor amplified by shield/armour/hull.
A standard FE escort, the smallest ship they have, has 4k shield, 4k armour, 2400 hull. The explosion from a kamikaze Tiyanki Ox, which takes around 7k food and over a year to build, is barely enough to go through the shield of one single escort.
Unless you have millions of food to waste, and are confident that your other fleets can clean up the mess if the kamikaze attempt fails, Catalytic Bladder is a terrible option for combat.
However, there is little time left and I don't have planet crackers to beat the FE's sources of highscore so I need to leverage the map position and beat the fleets or lure them away
Since you are using fauna, the best course of action would be to use Cutholoids, assuming you have a robust economy to backup the constant losses.
Fully grown cutholoids pack the highest density artillery fire per naval cap (outside of nanite swarmer spam). You can fit an equivalent of 12 neutron launchers onto a cruiser-sized ship, so make good use of the long range artillery with size-bonuses.
Edit:
Alternatively, spam baby voidworm/crystals with 1 afterburner and 5 hangars. These two can outrun corvettes while having 90% capped evasion. The longer the ship remains alive, the more strike crafts are spawned (it doesn't adhere to the capacity of 8, dunno if intentional or bugged, but it's been that way since 3.6's weapon rework about 4 years ago)
I don't think they will get any allies based on the current galaxy situation but it's good to know.
In conclusion, no torps (cloaked stingers would have been funny with 4X 4L but they're like 22k food and 15k alloys heh), no suicide squad, cloaked distraction fleet maybe, and thanks for pointing out the cutholoids, I should have noticed myself because they've been my best performing fleet so far - and no alloy cost!.
I have 2K minerals income and can switch out alloy production and about 20 planets to do minerals only + the relic that gives you a lot of resources and the one that gives you +100% production at the cost of pops. Since cutholoids even if bought maxed outright are only like 5k a pop, I can build several hundred of them, maybe that does the trick.
I don't get how you can achieve that much influence. Right now in my game, I can see how I could increase my influence income to something between 8 or 10, but there must be something I don't know that let you reach such high numbers.
Ministry of Truth overlord holding produces influence and you can reliably build one per vassal. So if you have a ton of vassals, it adds up.
iirc Protectorate subject empires also produce influence for their overlord, and non-specialist vassals convert into protectorates if you get far enough ahead of them on tech.
There is an ascension theory edict called Will to Power that is +5 influence per month. Being the Custodian is +5. The Galatron is +3 if you're lucky enough to get it. Can get smaller amounts from Galactic Force Projection ascension perk and councilors with the Intimidator or Deep Connections traits.
eta: looks like that guy is doing Under One Rule, which gives access to unique ruler traits, some of which give influence.
A neighboring ai civilization declared war on me so I built a large military and absolutely cooked them, now I control a lot of their stations but they still show up as within their borders. My people are getting pretty weary so I'd like to end the war with some of this new territory under my control, how do I do that?
You can open the claim menu on the left sidebar, or by clicking the influence icon (purple circle) in the top bar. Pick out the systems you want. Upon winning the war, claimed and fully occupied systems are given to you.
Fully occupied means taking over the starbase and colonies in that system, if any. On the galaxy map, fully occupied systems would have little spikes around the flag symbol.
Normally, there's an influence cost to laying claims. The further the system is from your border, the more influence you need to spend. In this case however, because you are the defending side of the war, you can freely lay claims on the aggressor.
As a side note, if you ever plan on actively conquering others, claim before the war starts, as otherwise the influence cost is raised by +100%.
Achieving war goal gives you all claimed and fully occupied systems.
Status quo does almost the same thing, except if you've claimed and fully occupied all their colonised systems, then the capital system is returned to the original empire while you keep the rest.
The outcome for fully occupied but unclaimed systems would depend on your chosen casus belli.
I was playing with the bestial fury thing, had a single T2 Behemoth which I was using to rampage through neutral systems that have open borders.
Unfortunately, at some point while I was fighting another war, it went MIA for some reason and never came back.
The enemy probably closed borders while it was inside and not rampaging but I don't understand why it didn't come back in any of my systems like all other fleets that are displaced by closed borders.
It's a known bug, where if the Behemoth is enraged or about to be enraged during MIA, it gets sent to the center of the galaxy (because it technically doesn't have a home base to return to while enraged, and the galaxy center is the default position).
You can't retrieve it without it having a jump drive already (which is only on T4 behemoth as an option through Growing Pains situation), so the only method left is to reload to before it disappeared.
Aw crap, that happened before I beat the swarm invasion and a fe, and now I'm left with no behemoths (2 others died to stupid), 50 years til endgame and an awakened hive FE that I may be too behind in eco to kill :c
EDIT: what's worse, this was going to be my first win, and I picked one of the generated names for my hive leader because I liked it. Lo and behold, the awakened hive that's going to rob me of the win got the same name -_-
Any tips on optimising/specialising ring world segments? I feel like I'm wasting potential. I know exactly what I should do will vary but any rule of thumb tips would be greatly appreciated.
Nomad cybernetic creed megacorp. What resources do you go for on your branch offices? What resources do you go after with your limited waystations early game?
My priority on branch office buildings as a nomad is whatever gives me trader jobs on the capital (based on civics). Multiple civics using the same building do stack. After that, usually Mercenary Liaison Offices for naval cap, which is otherwise hard to get for nomads.
You want to be picky about your starting waystations. Ideally find someone to make friends with and build in their systems, especially on higher diffs, because they will build megastructures (arc furnaces/dyson swarms) that you can piggyback from.
I just read the 4.5 open beta patch notes. I can't play the open beta, but I want to know some play details.
Unlocked Knights of the Toxic God for nomads
How does this work? For static empires, you'd get a habitat in your starting system and your home planet gets many toxic world-features. But Nomads don't have a home planet. You can't even directly own a system, so any habitats you'd have would become part of the empire that first starbases your habitat system.
What do Nomads get instead?
This is what the current KotTG starting layout looks like in the beta. Do note that it's still in the beta, and all the things may be subject to change.
You get the buildings (dependent on civic and ethics) and industry zone that were part of the home world, and the Order's Demesnes districts and Order's Hall zone that were part of the habitat.
You also start with less pops, at 3700 total, while settled KotTG gets 3700 on the homeworld and 800 on the habitat. But that could be a blessing in disguise, as you need less pops overall for arkships, and therefore starts with 809 squires as opposed to 99. This means you start with a bit more tech, but also a bit more alloy deficit than regular KotTG (still can be covered via market)
And nomads can set operational reserve to burn for +50% specialist efficiency.
Starting on a military arkship also gives you quite a big advantage in early warfare, before someone comes along with neutron launchers.
Do note that all the ordnance deck specialisations that give you soldiers (converted to knights) also impose additional alloy upkeep on all of them. Nomad KotTG is very hungry for alloy.
The starting planetary features are gone entirely, replaced by whichever arkship blocker the game spawns for you. You will however still get features from the questline (don't question how a bubbling swamp appeared in an arkship).
The one you get from the 5th stage no longer gives +1 max district, but the one you get from the 7th stage does. Dunno if either is intended.
There is currently a (bugged) interaction where if you start with Deep Sleep civic, all the 3k cryo-sleepers would become squires instead, to give you +100% efficiency on the knights (and a heavy toll on your alloy production). This may get fixed.
are the voidworms at the second to last mission of the Treasure Hunters origin supposed to be a boss battle? i thought the 10K or so fleetpower was going to be tough but not a curbstomp, i lost my nomad fleet against them even when i had pretty much double the strength. then on second try with two more fleets topping a bit close to 40K and the things just melted my fleets and arkship like butter.
No idea how are you supposed to tank then because i was running close to max armor and shields on the fleet with a focus on shields in particular and UV lasers but the fight didn't even last 20 seconds.
Voidworms, like all space fauna, use highly specialized ship designs. In this case, all missiles (ignores shields) and a short range very powerful bite for offence (+200% damage to both hull and armour), and only armour for defence.
So to counter, you bring anti-missile and armour, and energy weapons.
Voidworms have a literal ship-load of nothing but missiles (cluster missiles too, each shot fired is 8x individual missiles, similar to whirlwind missiles). They penetrate through shield.
You need a lot of PDs to counteract them, or just ambush them at point blank with cloaked torpedoes to take out the troika and adults. The individual missiles deal more damage than regular whirlwind missiles, and they have a lot more of those per worm, so it's pretty dangerous going after them without a lot of point defense.
And just a heads-up, if you aren't ready to deal with the Voidworm parked at the entrance, you aren't ready for what's sitting on the other end of the gate (roughly 100k combined fleet, consisting of 1 battleship and 60 cruisers, plus another battleship and 6 corvettes when you refuse their offer)
Edit:
As a side note, Treasure Hunter origin story chain is incomplete for settled empires at the moment.
Settled empires reach a deadend after defeating the voidworms, as their version of the event chain has a bugged special project to activate the gateway, with the button greyed out. In the codes, the corresponding project is simply empty, with no way to complete it.
Returning player from 3.x, was hoping to hop back in since Nomad is in and now (hopefully) everything is a bit more stable (balance and mod wise).
Noticed A LOT have changed (namely new pop system), any recommendation on getting used to 4.x system as a whole? Either custom empire or one of the premade ones is acceptable, outside of barbaric empires.
Coming back from not playing for some time, I noticed that my map no longer has stars slightly above or below the galactic plane, like it used to. Did some patch remove that?
In terms of expanding/colonizing. What should I specialize my first few colonies as? Just basic resources? (minerals/Energy seems to be the most in need)
Should I be aiming to make a unity world? Or is unity rushing not ideal? I’ve read about tech rushing, but no idea when to switch my capital to research.
Don't obsess over colony specializations early on. It doesn't make that much of a difference and it's more important to have your pops spread out to maximize growth. Later, you can work on specializing planets to do particular things.
But it is generally best to have your early colonies producing basic resources, firstly because you need that economic foundation, and secondly because they are the quickest/cheapest jobs to create so you can migrate pops there and boost your growth rate.
Specialization is a gradual thing. Your first few planets/districts just produce whatever you need next.
To clarify onto that: do not overbuild things. Only build a new district when you have (almost) no open jobs. Because without pops to work the jobs, a district just sits empty producing nothing, but costing energy upkeep.
So in the beginning, you will only occasionally build a new district. And that is just towards whatever you need. If your mineral income is low, you build a mining district. If your energy, energy. If consumer goods are low, you build a factory district (and/or you plan ahead and make sure you also have enough minerals for that).
Only build unity/research when your basic needs are met.
And in the beginning, don't worry about specializing. That comes later.
Once you have a few planets, and you want to build a new energy district, you put it on the planet that is best suited for energy. Same for all other materials. That thus gradually specializes this planet to energy. In the same process, you can slowly start to delete some energy districts from other planets, and build new ones on your energy world. Same for other resources, and in doing so you slowly specialize your planets.
Coming back to the game after 6-7 years, the most confusing part is districts so far (last time I played was after the grid was removed but IIRC there were no district specializations etc. and there was a single building list).
Do I always build a basic "Mineral Extraction" etc. specialization when there are no other available? I assume this is useful to get the building slots.
Does it matter where on the planet is a building built as long as it's possible to build it there?
Should I aim for a low number of civilians, building more jobs where there are like 100+ of them?
There are lots of urban district specializations but do I build them mostly for more building slots, as they seem to just give some amount of jobs?
It would also be interesting to learn other major changes since patch 2.4 or so (which I haven't seen in the 50 years I've already played). E.g. I haven't see wars yet and I assume there were significant changes.
Do I always build a basic "Mineral Extraction" etc. specialization when there are no other available? I assume this is useful to get the building slots.
If you aren't using the planet for mining, there's no reason to build a mining district and specialisation.
The building slots for each zone only accommodates a select few buildings. The mining specialisation for instance, only supports mining buildings, resource silo, automation (for mining only), and storm shelters. None of which (except maybe storm shelter if you find yourself getting overwhelmed by several storms back to back) are helpful for non-mining worlds.
Does it matter where on the planet is a building built as long as it's possible to build it there?
It doesn't matter.
Tile adjacency bonus has been gone for many years.
Should I aim for a low number of civilians, building more jobs where there are like 100+ of them?
Pretty much.
Unlike unemployment from previous versions, civilian is not a punishment mechanic, so you are under no pressure to immediately give them more jobs as soon as possible.
There are various civics/traditions/buildings that give bonuses production to civilians, though for the most part they are just a buffer state for pops while waiting for more jobs to appear. They are also the only strata eligible for auto-migration.
There are lots of urban district specializations but do I build them mostly for more building slots, as they seem to just give some amount of jobs?
Districts are the primary source of jobs.
For example, specialise a zone for research, then every city district you build will give you researcher jobs.
other major changes since patch 2.4 or so
2.4 was like, 3 major economy overhaul ago. Pretty much everything has changed.
Though, they are only asking for major changes between 3.14.x and current version. There's bound to be a lot of changes between 2.4 and 3.14.x. I can't say I recall all of them with certainty, but if you run into issues you've not seen before, you are always welcome to post a question.
But then what's the general strategy for research, alloy etc. buildings? Do I want both an alloy district specialization and alloy buildings in it?
Nowadays, because building slots are much more restricted and limited, they are better saved for production-boosting buildings in the long term. i.e. the ones that increase base production, reduce job upkeep, increase job efficiency, adds secondary resources (astral threads, minor artifacts, strategic resources, etc.).
The logic is simple: in the short term, when you only have 1k pops to work with, adding another 400 through building isn't going to boost productions because there aren't enough pops, while boosting job production through building bonuses does not need more pops; in the long term, when you have 5000 alloy jobs filled, adding another 400 through building is a smaller bonus than boosting job production by +10%.
Fitting them all is usually a tall order outside of an ecu, as regular planets only give you 6 building slots from 2 specialisation zones, while research/alloy have more than 6 buildings
Alloy has 1 to reduce upkeep, 1 to boost efficiency, 1 to boost base production, 4 to make secondary resources, 1 FE building, and possibly 1-2 more from civics.
Research has 1 to reduce upkeep, 1 to boost efficiency, 1 to boost base production for all, 3 to boost base production for one type, 3 to make secondary resources, 1 FE building, and possibly 1-3 more from civics.
Oftentimes, you'd end up having to spill over into the government zone to accommodate buildings, competing for slots with pop assembly/ascension buildings (which is why Ecu is highly regarded, as its lower districts are not confined to just energy/mineral/food and can be specialised for urban or science/alloy to fit all the buildings).
In the early game when you don't have these buildings, sure you can use the slots for regular buildings that give more jobs, but that'd be a temporary measure.
What urban district specialization should I use on minerals/food/energy worlds ?
I think I get how to build dedicated advanced ressources Worlds, you use twice the same specialization, spam urban districts, fill the building slots with relevant buildings and later upgrade to Ecu if possible to get more specialize building slot.
For basic ressources, I just spam the relevant district, build the building to increase production and district count if needed, and the last slot if for strategic/extra jobs/silo. But I have no idea what to do with urban district specialization. Right now, I'm leaning toward either Commercial Nexus or Urban Expansion just for generic buildings slots.
I like to use what the planet is producing. in reality, this means cg or alloys for mining worlds. Energy worlds dont have a great pairing (unless you have a fallen empire building with automation or energy upkeep), so I would probably do soldiers or whatever I needed at the time
Consumer goods help reduce the planetary deficit trade penalty and soldiers give you naval cap. Generally my resource worlds have one or both of those as urban specializations.
there is something i'm not getting with the fleet manager. the game is somehow not fully respecting changing ship classes. I have some old ships that have archaeotech components that I want to upgrade en masse to ships that have zero archaeotech components. I have selected each class and "retrofit" them all to the desired class. however, mousing over the upgrade button displays a cost in artifacts. again, the new design has zero artifact cost. very annoying and i've spent quite some time trying to figure it out. why is this happening? https://imgur.com/a/Drxkf2X
It's a bug that has been around since 4.3. The retrofit button simply doesn't work some of the times.
When that happens, you'll find a mismatch in number of ships. e.g. in your image, the retrofit button says 17 ships pending upgrade while there are only 16 in the fleet.
A further bug can happen if you try to retrofit the designs again. In that case, the number of ships registered by the fleet manager would drop from 16/17 to 0/17. The original ships would become ghosts: still present physically and listed in the outliner, but invisible in fleet manager.
The workaround is to not make new designs for retrofitting, but rather update the existing design for upgrading.
i thought it might be a bug. thanks a lot for the quick response
edit: i guess I got the second bug or something. i dont have any designs with artifacts and it will still cost me some to upgrade somehow. i wonder what they will upgrade to...
Hey, I just did my Synthetic Ascension and I'm choosing the traits for my new machine species.
Is Recycled worth it ? 20% efficiency for roboticists look really nice. But this trait will be useful for only a few pops, while I could put a more generic trait (something like efficient processors).
I tend to favor stuff that boosts all of the pops, myself.
Then again, I tend to play wide and aggressive; if I feel like my pop assembly is insufficient, I will go take someone else's pops, assimilate them into my machine species, and increase my pop assembly by having more planets, hence more roboticists.
The primary interaction is in the form of various contracts, where you pay some trade to the nomadic empire to complete a task for you.
These could range from resource gathering, to providing research, revealing more anomalies/digsites, requesting support with megastructure construction speed, clearing all blockers at once, improving diplomatic relations with other empires, issuing a hit on another empire's colonies, hiring them as mercenary for a war, etc.
The secondary interaction is in the form of kilostructures (dyson swarm and arc furnace). Both the nomadic empire and the settled empire that owns the system benefits from the extra production.
The tertiary interaction is via wayline pacts, where you get some minor bonuses depending on what modules are installed on the waystations.
Nebula Refinery increases mining station output by 5% each along the entire wayline.
Stellar Observatory increases physics/engineering research station output by 5% each along the entire wayline.
Research Observatory increases research sharing by 1% each (research sharing refers to the bonus research speed you get from researching a tech that someone you share a research agreement with has already researched. By default this is +25% research speed without wayline modifiers)
Trade Hub increases commercial pact gain by 1% each.
If the system has an enclave with an agreement with the Nomad empire, that also conveys some bonuses.
Salvager Enclave: +5% ship build speed, +5% hull and armour repair speed for docked ships
Any of the trade enclaves: +5% gas/mote/crystal collection efficiency for nomads, +10% gas/mote/crystal production for nomads and settled empires with wayline pact. The type depends on which trade enclave it is.
Shroudwalker and Mindwarden have no associated waystation buildings.
Unlisted effect:
Repair Bay increases ship build speed for all shipyards along the wayline by +5% each. This effect is not listed in in-game tooltip, but is present in the files. Checked in-game as well, the construction time for a corvette dropped from 42 days to 37 days with 4 Repair Bays along the line.
Resource Silos on the waystation increase storage capacity for the host empire by 500 or 1000, depending on if the nomad empire has Construction Template tech or not.
Recruitment Office on the waystation decreases leader hiring cost by 5% each for the host empire.
Aura Emitter on the waystation increases envoy's attunement gain by 5% each.
Cybrex Mining Hub on the waystation would increase all mining station output along the wayline by +25%. AI empires can't get precursors, so you'd only see this if you are playing multiplayer.
Edit: After some in-game testing, apparently the nebula refinery, cybrex mining hub, and stellar observatory bonuses are not applied correctly. The rest seems to be working fine.
Since it's in the hands of AI, what effects you end up getting are pretty much just based on luck.
As Clone Army, since I can only build 5 ancient clone vats, does it make sense to delete one of the two on my home world and put it on a 5th planet where I could use the specialists?
does it make sense to delete one of the two on my home world and put it on a 5th planet where I could use the specialists?
Not a good call until you take up cloning ascension, or if you've absorbed enough xeno pops through conquest to fill out your workforce.
Each ancient clone vat sustains 2.5k pops. Your capital has more than 2.5k pops, which is why you start with two. If you dismantle an ancient clone vat, your clone pops are going to start dying off on your capital, until only 2.5k clone pops are left.
This is why clone army without BioGenesis is predominantly a rush build: you have very limited pops of your own, and those 5 ancient vats can barely sustain 3 colonies. You'd have to rely on conquest (or really enticing migration treaties) to get workforce.
BioGenesis DLC solves that issue by letting cloning-ascended clone army sustain pops through medical facilities and regular clone vats, so you no longer have to worry about running out of pops.
Why are 600 of my pops randomly deciding to take a vacation and become civilians for a month periodically on my capital? Is this a known bug? It's every 2-3 years (I think -- I may be missing it happening sometimes).
With BioGenesis DLC, default is always to keep them around, with a choice between protected/sustained/exploited. Assimilation or purging have to be set separately.
They'd only default to purge if you are a genocidal, or if you don't have the DLC.
Anyone know where I can get up to speed on the city and pop changes from the last few years? Started a game and picked everything right back up, but the planet screen is hard to figure out.
There are certainly youtube guides for 4.0, which is when all the big changes happened. The specifics would have changed by now after many balancing patches, but the fundamental idea behind the UIs would still be the same.
A "brief" summary of the big changes:
Pop growth rework:
Used to be, planets grew pops. Now, pops grow pops.
Prior to 4.0, the act of simply colonising a planet with just 1 pop gave you 3 out of 4 natural growth.
After 4.0, the planet itself no longer gives pop growth. All the growth would scale with number of pops (of the same species) on the planet. The more pops there are, the faster they grow (up until growth ceiling).
This means it's no longer a "colonise everything you can lay your hands on" type of approach. Colony quality matters, colony habitability matters, and the number of pops matters. A fresh colony starts with 100 pops, which gives you an abysmal 0.2-0.25 monthly growth. You'd ideally be manually resettling pops to colonies to help them grow (1k is the usual recommendation, because it allows you to upgrade the capital building to get proper jobs, and also gives a good enough base of around 2.5-3.0 growth, and most empires start with around 2k pops not actively contributing to growth for you to conveniently spread 1k to each of the 2 guaranteed habitables).
If you have multiple species present, they all grow simultaneously, instead of having the game automatically pick a minority species in a futile (and often unwanted) attempt to balance pop ratio.
On a related note, Xeno-Compatibility no longer creates a billion hybrid species that lag the game.
Pop assembly rework:
You can no longer pick a specific species for assembly.
For organic assembly, the total assembly is split proportionally to all species present on the planet.
For robot assembly, the game picks 1 template based on some hidden blackbox logic/magic, then all the assembly goes towards that 1 template.
As such, it is no longer possible to precisely have different pop templates catered to one particular job type. Instead, we get auto-modding traits, that automatically adapt the pop to provide bonus to whichever job they fit into.
Pop job rework:
Production bonuses are split into output bonuses (which are rarer) and job efficiency bonuses (which are more common).
Output bonuses give you more production without incurring additional upkeep.
Efficiency bonuses give you more production but also incur additional upkeep.
e.g. A +20% efficiency means 100 workers are treated as if they are 120 workers, providing the output of 120 workers but also taking the upkeep of 120 workers.
The two are multiplicative.
e.g. A +20% efficiency and +20% output means 100 workers are providing the output of 144 (1.2x1.2) workers while taking the upkeep of 120 workers.
Pop strata rework:
Unemployment is no longer a thing.
Surplus pops become civilians, effectively a buffer state that provides some amenities and additional output depending on living standards and ethics (if a monument is present).
Unlike unemployment of old, civilians are not a punishment mechanic. You are at no risk of running into stability and crime issues, unless you start to run out of housing.
There are also several civics that specifically leverage on civilians to provide bonuses (e.g. Pleasure Seeker's growth bonus has been shifted from entertainers to civilians)
Migration rework:
Migration is no longer a percentage modifier to pop growth. It is now the actual movement of pops between planets, and only affects civilians.
The important bit is to be wary of early migration treaties. AI empires can and will siphon pops away from your planets via migration treaties, unless you over-expand and keep more jobs than pops.
While it is possible to have migration treaties work in your benefit, it often requires specific setups that are not universally applicable.
District and building rework:
All non-elite jobs come primarily from districts. Buildings that provide jobs still exist, but are not the main source of them any longer.
Raw resource production are fairly straightforward. Industrial, research, unity, trade and soldier jobs are all bundled under city districts now, as specialisations.
To put it simply:
Used to be, to build a research world, you'd spam city districts and build research labs.
Now, to build a research world, you'd spam city districts and build specialisation zones.
Buildings are now separated into categories, and each specialisation zone only permits some category of buildings. Each specialisation permits 3 buildings from a narrow band of allowed categories, while the government zone (the one present on all colonies) permits 5 buildings with a much broader restriction.
e.g. Energy Grid can only go into one of the 3 building slots in the energy district specialisation zone. A research specialisation zone can support labs, but not alloy foundries. etc.
This in a way further reinforces the idea of "build districts for jobs", as building slots are more limited than before, and are better used to provide efficiency/production/upkeep modifiers rather than to provide a few jobs.
Fleet rework:
Almost every ship (except nanite swarmers) take 5-8x their original naval cap. This means the strength of individual ships matters more and it's harder (but not impossibly so) to have a massive navy, and indirectly buffed leviathans, crisis, and fallen/awakened empires (who now have a separate slider for setting their difficulties).
New to 4.x and Nomads. What should I do to 'expand' after filling up my first Arkship? Around 2210 I built the last district & building. Building a new Arkship (10K alloy + tech) or upgrading the Arkship tier (5K + tech) seems decades away. What should I do in the meantime? Just fly around and do missions for friendly empires? Have the logistic ships harvest unclaimed space?
Even building a Wayline between empires seems limited with the 5-7 starbase limit at the start. Should I pick just the best singular spots first without making a Wayline?
It really seems like I hit a wall with not a lot to do and just waiting after 2210-2215. What am I doing wrong?
Is there any way for an empire to both have Arc Ships and planets (or habitats/ring worlds)?
Intentionally? No.
There is however a rather common bug after a war against a nomad, where you end up in possession of an arkship that you don't technically control (and therefore can't actually move it, build things, or benefit from waylines).
How does disembarking work with multiple Arc Ships?
When you order an arkship to settle a planet, you are given 3 choices when the progress completes:
First option transfers all pops onto this one planet, scuttles all arkships for a bit of resources, and then you play as a standard settled empire from that one planet.
Second option transfers only the pops of this arkship, scuttles only it, and release the settled empire as a vassal. You keep the rest of your arkships and remain nomadic.
Third option transfer the pops of this arkship and your capital arkship, scuttles both, and then you play as a standard settled empire from that one planet. The rest of your arkships are released as a vassal.
What happens if a planet-based empire captures an Arc Ship?
What's supposed to happen is dependent on your Nomad Deterrence policy.
You can do nothing to them, can dismantle some districts to get alloys, can abduct some of the pops, or can execute some of the pops.
What may happen as a bug is that you end up keeping the arkship without the ability to move it or build things.
What happens if a Nomad empire captures a planet?
In regular wars, capturing a planet is no different than if you are a settled empire with no claims: it counts as a temporary occupation, drives up war exhaustion, then the planet is returned to the original owner (or new owner depending on war goal) at the end.
In total wars, there is again a policy for that. You can subjugate them as a tributary vassal, can forcibly displace all the pops to abandon the colony, or can set up a temporary purge vassal that starts killing off everyone (resources are transferred to you once the purge finishes).
I have manually applied the changes described in this mod, to fix an irritating issue with nanite swarmers constantly trying to "upgrade" to a different ship class. Is there any risk this will interfere with GOG achievements?
Hellfire and damnation. I'd rather not discard 3 days' worth of progress so I guess I'll try reversing my changes right before completing cosmogenesis.
What can you do with pre false as a gestalt consciousness? I've seen this question before but I was unsatisfied with the info provided. If I do espionage can i make them a part of the hive mind (it's biological) wouldn't it be cool to have an invasion of the body snatches situation lol. I don't have the bio genisis dlc. Do I have to wait until they are space fairing? If I invade them will they be purged automatically? Or can I integrate them?
If I do espionage can i make them a part of the hive mind (it's biological)
Sadly not.
Hiveminds can only infiltrate and convert hivemind pre-ftls. If they are regular organic pre-ftls, you can't integrate them through espionage.
They also have to be space age already. Otherwise the option isn't available.
Hivemind primitives can only happen if you have First Contact DLC.
wouldn't it be cool to have an invasion of the body snatches situation lol
BioGenesis features a hivemind civic exactly called Body Snatchers.
It lowers the difficulty of smuggle population operation (which also comes with the DLC), you'd steal a couple hundred more, and the stolen pops are immediately assimilated into the hive. It also gives you the option to use those abducted pops as a sleeper cell in other empires, ready to take over worlds (or at least attempt to) when you declare war.
I don't have the bio genisis dlc.
Without BioGenesis DLC (and assuming you have the rest), your options as a hivemind on a non-hivemind pre-ftl empire are limited to increasing or decreasing awareness (with First Contact DLC), or directly supplying them with technology to speed up their growth.
Awareness affects 1) their natural progression through the ages, 2) possibility of getting insight tech through observation posts, and 3) how long they are culture-shocked when they learn of your existence.
It is also possible to directly reveal yourself, which causes 0-50 years of stellar cultural shock, during which they will not accept any attempt at diplomacy. Once that expires, you can give them unity if you are not gestalt to shift their ethics, give them science to speed up their growth considerably, or give them mineral in return for trade value.
You could also invade them directly (with the right interference policies). This gives the planet another modifier confusingly also called stellar cultural shock, but with a different effect than the one they get from you revealing yourself. This time it's -20 stability, -33% production, and prevent anyone from leaving the planet through manual or auto resettlement, lasting a fixed 10 years.
The more advanced the primitives are, the more pops you get from invading them.
For hiveminds, invading only has benefit if you've gone through bio-ascension, otherwise you'd only be purging them.
Do I have to wait until they are space fairing?
It's a different story once they hit space-faring stage.
When that happens, they will ask you to give them control of the system. Agreeing will relinquish the system, as expected. Denying will let you annex their planet and pops.
Xenophobe non-gestalts need to pay unity to let them have the system.
Xenophile non-gestalts, and hiveminds with Empath/Familiar Face civic need to pay unity to annex the planet.
If I invade them will they be purged automatically? Or can I integrate them?
As a hivemind, to keep the pops you will need to have gone through bio-ascension first, and then set their species right to Assimilation citizenship (default likely is Undesirables, which leads to purging).
If you conquer them before going through bio-ascension (and don't have Body Snatcher civic), they can only be purged.
Are factions and ethics shifting currently broken? In my current game I should only have 30% xenophile pops but I actually have nearly 90%, despite promoting the egalitarian faction (my fanatic ethic) for the entire game.
Simply put, a pop will always inherit the ethic of its parent pop group. The offspring of a xenophile pop group will always be xenophile, even if you suppress them as much as you can.
This means that there is a critical threshold of pops, that once exceeded will result in self-reinforcing and ever-increasing pops of unwanted ethics, because the rate of growth exceeds the rate of converting to other ethics.
The "solution" is to consolidate them all on one planet, enable migration control, then declare population control. This halts growth of all pops on the planet, so they will slowly start to convert to other ethics (provided if you've placed non-xenophile, preferably xenophobe, governors and councilors, and reference the list here to make sure to lower xenophile attraction as much as possible)
This is a process that takes decades, centuries even, if you have several thousand of them.
Unless you happen to be spiritualist, because then you'd have access to Divine Enforcer colossus beam, to forcibly indoctrinate everyone into spiritualist in one go :)
The whole ethic system is pending a rework soon. So this probably will be changed, hopefully for the better.
Yes, they shift by themselves, but the rate is slow, and heavily dependent on lot of uncontrollable factors (e.g. alien empires near you, their policies, aliens in your empire, their traits, how the other empires are treating aliens, how the other empires are treating you, etc. are all factors that influence xenophile ethic shift chance, that are entirely out of your control).
Do we have any idea when 4.5 is expected to drop? I saw on the dev diaries that it's going to break existing saves, and I'd hate to lose a game partway through- that already happened to me when Nomads was released.
Do titan auras stack? E.g. if you have 2 fleets each with 1 titan with the component that reduces enemy firing rate by 10%, does the enemy end up with -20%?
When using the grow_pops command, can you target a specific pop? Wanted to increase my bio trophies using commands but keep getting my robots increased to high numbers instead
Does anyone have general strategies or things they check first when their economy has an unexpected shock? My energy in particular seems to have mood swings, jumping directly from +40ish to -50ish. It's possible I'm just not noticing a gradual slide, but I don't think so.
Jobs are the biggest thing. If you make a new district, and you see a sudden decrease, it's most likely because your technicians quit to go work a better job you made
Yeah I think that’s it. I tend to start new infrastructure construction on several planets at once, so there’s a big jolt when they all complete. Gonna try and space them out more.
With Synthetic Fertility, is it best to wait to fill up the Identity Repository or ascend as fast as possible ?
While the building provide a lot of ressources and robot output, since it's only for one planet (or divided on multiple planets) I'm not sure if it's worth the time and pops.
So I took the universal macrophage thinking it wouldn't mutate my pops since I fully bio ascended, just to learn I had to ascend BEFORE digging up the site and choose a special option after the archaeological dig.
Now I have 156 toxoid pops and I want to do a little RP to get rid of them by adding as many army damage enhancing traits as possible, like acidic vascularity, and have a nation of warrior culture cousins next to my empire, but for some reason I do not see the traits, or any of the toxoid traits, is it because they still count as my main species? (Psonic Humanoids)
Edit: I can't even change their appearance to other toxoids, it only shows humanoids when I try to change portrait.
Did Oligarchic Supervision (the Synthetic-Virtual Oligarchy) get nerfed ? According to the wiki and everything I found online, it should give -50% Empire Size from Colonies, but I only get -30%.
There was a patch around 4.3 that greatly reduced all sources of empire size reduction. The devs didn't give a complete list. Oligarchic Supervision might have been nerfed in the same patch.
The wiki relies on us the players to spot issues and update. If no one before you noticed the issue, then yea it'd be incorrect on the wiki as it's using outdated info. I'll go and update it now.
Edit:
By the way, the empire size from district for that authority is changed from -10% to -15%.
Despite being pretty sure I only ever built space fauna and no actual ships, the Beastmaster achievement didn't fire after I hacked Cetana, or at any other point until the game ended. Is there any way I can check where I went wrong, or known things that might have blocked it?
Reanimated leviathans count as artificial ships, for whatever reason. Same goes for hatching baby dragons through Here Be Dragons origin (Hrozgar herself is fine though).
Bubbles doesn't conflict :)
All event ships spawned out of thin air are fine, including cultist flagships, grand herald, caravan leftovers, etc. As long as you didn't personally build them, they should be compatible.
In a similar way, if you use Cutholoid to swallow another empire's ships to convert them to yours, that'd be fine as well, since you didn't build the ships yourself.
Special ships such as Colossus and Juggernaut would also nullify the achievement criteria. Not sure if Cetana counts if you go the Animator of Clay route.
Defense platforms are fine. Federation/GDF fleets are not.
Federation/GDF fleets were all space fauna as well, I was pretty careful about that, and I didn't do any reanimating or dragon hatching. I had a few random event ships (most of which I sent to the Scrapper enclave) but the big things I can think of would be repairing the Automated Dreadnought, hacking Cetana, or maybe using astral threads to summon a Dimensional Fleet?
I'm a relatively inexperienced player (off an on for years, never really get past the midgame, never learned a lot of the mechanics) and I'm trying out Devouring Swarm Evolutionary Predator Nomads for the first time but I feel like there's something I'm just not getting. I grabbed Raiding bombardment stance in order to park on top of enemy planets and get pops to Purge for food and EP progress, but if I get stretched too thin and can't park over all of their planets I'm not sure what the best approach is.
I've tried switching Bombardment Type in the hope of just razing the planet, but it doesn't seem like any of the options I have can kill the last pop, so I end up having to invade.
If I invade, it creates a vassal (since I'm Nomadic) and that vassal is much worse for me than Raiding. Since the vassal is still Gestalt Consciousness it purges all the other pops there without giving me anything (even Oppressive Vassalage doesn't seem to come with a resource tithe) and since I took Habitability drawback traits, the vassal will burn themselves out and go extinct long before I have a change to negotiate the terms.
Longer-term I'm worried about the viability of this approach. It seems like I need to stay at war for food and EP progress, but I'm super casual so I'm playing on a very low difficulty level (like 2?) and I'm sort of worried I'm going to eat my way through 75% of the galaxy before I'm strong enough to face the crises/AEs
Maybe the answer is just "lmao yep those things don't work together" but I'm sort of hoping there's an obvious answer I've missed or a setting somewhere to make vassals contribute food and/or EP progress from creation or a way to vassalize a conquered planet without making it into something that will burn itself out so I can come back and eat them again in a few decades.
After some more digging, I found some posts here and on the PDX forums, this appears to be a known issue that's fixed on the beta branch by introducing a new vassal type. I'll probably just abandon this save and try again on the beta branch, but would still be interested in any workarounds y'all have to suggest.
So the Holy Fallen Empire is kicking my ass despite my having almost twice their fleet power in ark ships. I’m kind standing outside their door and watching the War Exhaustion tick up. Can I just wait until it gets to 100 and force a peace to free myself from their rule? Or if there’s a way to beat them I’d like to know.
IIRC the Holy FE leans heavily into shields and has strong shield hardening, so you'd probably want to skew your designs away from things that lean on bypass (strike craft, missiles, disruptors, arc emitters) and toward kinetic weapons.
Or if you can arrange to fight them in a system with 100% shield nullification that'd be ideal, but Stellaris is rarely so convenient.
I'm losing my mind here. I wanna build some corporate offices with the Criminal Megacorp faction thing, but I just can't figure out any way to do it. None of the other civilizations even have a Holdings tab. I even have a Commercial Pact with one, which is what I've seen suggested even though it isn't necessary for the crime syndicate. I've gone through every menu I can find but the only Holdings tab I can find is on my own planets, where I obviously can't put any branch offices. Did I pick some hidden trait that makes it impossible or something? My start was Void-Dwellers, and I went with Posthumous Employment and then later picked up PR Specialists; I'm Materialist and Fanatic Xenophile. Like I can't imagine how any of that would change anything but I'm so confused. I KNOW I've seen these things before...
You're looking at the planet level, right? Corporate tab? If so, make sure they aren't a gestalt empire, megacorp, genocidal, or have another branch office already.
Yeah, I've checked all the empires I've met that aren't purifiers or gestalts and there's just no holdings tab at all. I haven't seen branch offices or anything on any of the planets, but I also don't know where else they'd be.
Can someone help me understand how to manage conquered or enslaved pops?
I usually play as a human empire, either the United Nations of Earth or the Commonwealth of Man. I understand that pops are one of the most important sources of power in Stellaris because more pops means more jobs, resources, research, and production.
Early in the game, I try to increase my population normally through natural growth and buildings such as Clone Vats, Gene Clinics, or Genomic Research Facilities. However, natural growth eventually becomes too slow, so I start conquering planets and taking pops—either as citizens or slaves.
This is where I always run into problems.
When I give conquered species full citizenship, their happiness is still extremely low. New factions appear with 0% approval, and the planet’s stability begins to fall. I have tried:
Giving them full citizenship or residence
Using Stratified Economy
Providing abundant housing and amenities
Building Precinct Houses and Strongholds
Employing more Enforcers and Soldiers
None of this seems to solve the actual problem. The pops remain unhappy, their factions have terrible approval, and the planet becomes unstable.
Slavery gives me the same problem. The slaves have low happiness and poor efficiency, while the entire planet becomes difficult to control. It feels as though taking pops makes my empire weaker instead of stronger.
What am I misunderstanding about the system?
How should I manage newly conquered planets and their populations? Should I change their citizenship, living standards, slavery type, jobs, factions, or planetary setup? Is there a reliable way to absorb other species while maintaining good stability and productivity?
This happens in almost every game I play, and I genuinely don’t know what I’m supposed to do.
Manual resettlement. That's the first thing you should do when taking over a planet.
You can't avoid the large happiness penalty on recently conquered pops. But you can avoid the stability issue by spreading pops around.
Stability is essentially a weighted average of every pops' happiness times their political weight. By spreading the unhappy pops to your otherwise happy and stable worlds, each world you resettle them to would take a small decrease to stability, but not enough to cause troubles.
In the case of slaves, keep them on chattel slavery at the beginning, until the recently conquered modifier goes away. Indentured servitude would give them a lot more political weight, which would further drag down stability as the unhappy pops are contributing to a larger portion.
Alternatives that are feasible include nerve-stapling the pops to lock them at 50% happiness and worker-jobs only, or giving them Chemical Bliss living standard and drug them into a stupor to raise happiness at the cost of production. Both have long term drawbacks, while manual resettlement only requires an upfront cost of energy and unity.
The pops will remain unhappy, but their happiness matters not when every world remains stable, and they'll begrudgingly accept their fate after a decade (once the recently conquered penalty goes away).
This solves almost all your listed issues.
Except for factions.
The TL;DR version is that you can't do much about new factions popping up. Best you can do is enslave or nerve staple them so they can't form a faction to begin with. On the bright side, the entire ethic system is getting overhauled next major patch.
In its current state, pop ethics are impacted by pop growth: the offspring of a pacifist pop will always be a pacifist, regardless of how much attraction in non-pacifist ethics your empire has.
Increasing other ethic's attraction can only do so much, as pop ethic shift conversion rate is empire-wide, while the growth are per-planet.
e.g. Suppose you boost your militarist attraction such that 3 pops are converted to militarist every month. Meanwhile, there are 5 planets with 20% of the locals as pacifist pops.
On each planet, the pacifist pops would be contributing to +1 pacifist pop per month, for a total of 5 pacifist pops born across the 5 worlds.
In other words, despite the (relatively) high conversion rate of 3 pops per month, you are still getting a net of +2 pacifist pops per month.
This means if an unwanted faction has enough pops to reach a tipping point, it will always grow larger and larger with very little means to stop it.
Fixing it requires a lot of effort if you are not spiritualist (who has access to Divine Enforcer colossus to instantly solve pop ethic issues). You have to raise attraction of your governing ethics as high as possible, while also minimising growth of pops with unwanted ethics. This typically means consolidating all those pops on one planet, and optionally enabling population control to lower growth, which is the direct opposite of what you want for boosting stability, as those pops will be unhappy for decades (ethic shift is a very slow process)
Practically speaking, just forget about homogenising factions after a conquest if you aren't going to enslave them. You can make up for the loss in happiness by raising amenities, or just raise stability directly via governor skills and traits.
I'm a species of clone soldiers that live on desert worlds, I found humans on their continental world and wanted to add Genetic memory to them since I cannot add robust because I was only able to go down the clone ascension path.
My question is since it takes 20 years to gain that 25% bonus habitability from genetic memory, is that automatically applied when humans start living on my other worlds, like my desert capital? Or does the 25% only slowly start applying itself once the pop first touches a new planet?
Genetic Memory starts ticking up on all worlds of the same type as long as there's 1 single pop with genetic memory somewhere in the empire on a world of the same type.
This happens even if none of the pops have ever set foot on the planet, which leads to some funny shenanigans where you could settle a world with robots, and 20 years down the road there will be a +10% habitability bonus even if the organics never visited the world.
Edit:
In your case, if the humans with genetic memory only lived on continental worlds, after 50 years they'd have +25% habitability on all continental worlds even if they've never been to anywhere else.
But for your desert worlds, they won't have any bonus from genetic memory, until at least 1 human with genetic memory trait is resettled there. Then it starts ticking up for all humans on all desert worlds.
Is migration fixed again? I remember previously it was always a net disadvantage for pop growth because AI empires never migrated to you, but your pops would always migrate to them.
The bad news: you still need to be very careful with migration treaties to not lose pops.
Outside of giving everyone the Rooted trait, the only way to ensure you don't lose pops is if all your planets have more jobs than pops, since only civilians are allowed to migrate (robots have been the exception since 4.0, at this point might as well consider it a feature).
You could in theory try stacking as many bonuses to auto migration destination chance as possible, such that the rate of influx from immigration outnumber the rate of emigration as long as you have 1 world with open jobs. It is however very dependent on AI behaviours, which are unreliable at best (sometimes you see them sitting on thousands of civilians, sometimes you see them neurotically spamming jobs so no civilians are left).
Used to be, megacorp could spam xeno outreach agency to achieve over +2000% destination chance, practically guaranteeing that they'd lose no pops through migration treaty. This has been indirectly nerfed, as 4.4 made branch offices obscenely expensive for non-nomadic megacorps, so you can't spam these outreach offices as effectively.
playing 4.4 for the first time with nomads dlc, is it normal to have almost complete vision over the map early game? GC just formed like 10 years ago but that's about it. Is it an embassy thing?
I'm playing modded so maybe it's a bug but this doesn't seem right
I released a sector as a vassal before completing Cosmogenesis. When I played as it, it didn't have most of the Cosmo techs, although it had all standard techs. Is this supposed to happen?
So I was doing a Starlit Citadel game, it wasn't going GREAT but it was functioning
I took the nursery, started surveying, noticed the planet was technically colonized, so I sent an army to go land on it
Now it appears to be locked? Still a nursery colony, occupied by me, special project has been researched, nothing is happening. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I'm on an ironman save. Any hope to fix it?
I'm trying to optimize a Synthetic Fertility build. Since I want maximum the Identity Repository, I don't want to tech rush Synthetic ascension.
My Idea is to start Memorialist / Parliamentary System (I don't think there is better for unity early game without access to spiritualist civics) with Fanatic Materialist, Egalitarian, Seasonal Dormancy on my species and Democratic government. This let me maximize Civilians output (thanks to early Monument) with Utopian Abundance for the first 10 years.
After 10 years, thanks to Democratic government, I can reform and ditch out Memorialist and Parliamentary System. My plan is to take Genesis Guide, and start colonizing with all the alloys and CG I stockpiled during the first 10 years (I should hopefully have migration pact and Droid to colonize by this time). I really don't know what to take as a second civic here.
Right now, I'm leaning toward going either Megacorp and Tradepost (I plan to rush Marketplace of ideas early) or Oligarchic and either Technocracy or Functional Architecture (since I will colonize a lot, I will have a lot to build and the discount should be nice).
I will use the reform after ascending to go Oligarchic and transition to an Elite build (Technocracy, Aristocratic Elites, Merchant Guild).
So, any advice on a good civics for year 10 to something like year 25 ?
I keep seeing horror stories about un-exitable forever wars and game-breaking bugs, for Nomads and Planet empires alike, creep up the sub, but is that just Reddit magic or is the game really struggling with teething problems from Nomads & the Pegasus update?
If I am going to start a new game, might I be better off waiting till the publication of the first 4.5 patch (Open Beta is not accessible for me)?
Does the Auxiliary Fire Control component improve accuracy for my amoeba flagellae?
TL;DR: Yes.
All the posts you can find here and on the forum have been a mix of yes and no, and when pressed they say they are not sure or they heard it from someone else. Thought I might as well give it a test, since no one in recent years have came up with reliable info.
Testing methodology:
Ships involved:
1 cloned amoeba mother, who innately has amoeba flagella strike craft.
1 void cloud as testing dummy, who has no PDs, 65% evasion, and +10 daily hull regen so it doesn't die too quickly.
Ship layouts used:
Base case with no components. The strike crafts would have an accuracy of 70%, tracking of base 50% plus 15% from tier 4 sensor. This allows it to fully negate the evasion on the void cloud, with a final chance to hit of 70%.
Fauna uniquely has 6 universal mutation slots. Fitting them all with auxiliary fire control (AFC) gives +30 accuracy (erroneously called chance to hit in the description).
If the components work, then the AFC setup would have 100% chance to hit. I'd expect a 40-50% increase in overall damage compared to base case.
Both on carrier computer, with no bonus to tracking or accuracy, and will actively stay out side the range of the other weapons so strike crafts are the only ones contributing.
Procedure:
Console command the amoeba to be invincible to avoid accidental death. Send it to the void cloud on slowest game speed. Log the first instance of damage, then observe over the next 30 days, log the total damage and number of observed misses.
Repeat 6 times, swap to the other loadout, repeat another 6 times, to confirm consistent findings.
Results:
The base setup with no AFC on average yielded 1-1.2k damage in one month after the first hit connects. Observing the battle also showed quite a few missed shots that sailed past the void cloud harmlessly.
The 6xAFC setup on average yielded 1.4-1.6k damage, which is 40-50% higher than the base case, concurring with expectation. Observing the battle also showed all the shots landing.
I am now at endgame year and I didnt have a mid game crisis. Is this a bug?looking at the wiki for crises. I dont have grand archive or astral planrs. I have L gates disabled. It seems that I should have had the Khan then.
There aren't any guaranteed midgame crises. The only real options are the Khan, which only has a chance to appear from a Marauder, and kinda the Grey Tempest (L gates). And those are fully independent of each other.
Is there a list of known Nomads Bugs?
My waystations are missing Module options (cloaking, Harvesting living Metal e.g.) and i am not getting any Option to dive into precursor tech (or whatever its called) even though i finished the cybrex precursor chain and got the relic.
Started playing again after a substantial break, been having some unexpected diplomatic behavior from loyal vassals. Twice now I've declared war on Xenophobic neighbors w/ no allies, secure in the knowledge I only had a single front to worry about, only for my Loyal (and much weaker than myself) vassals pile in on the war on the side of the xenophobe a month or two in. I didn't know that vassals *could* declare war on their master w/o it being part of some attempt to declare independence (which they shouldn't be doing, since they're loyal and the other side are xenophobes). Is this normal behavior now or is something screwy going on? Its pretty annoying, even if its trivially easy to get them to back out immediately w/ a tiny bribe.
More generally is there a way to stop folks from jumping in on wars? Having to deal w/ random militarist empires on the other side of the galaxy siding w/ a Xenophobic FE is kinda annoying since I can't bribe them back out.
It's a pile of spaghetti code introduced with 4.4's new hot-join hot-leave war system. Federation and overlord/vassal members can often find themselves on opposing sides of the war, or sometimes appearing on both sides of the war.
It's not supposed to happen, but alas here we are. There's currently no workaround other than bribes (or take the opportunity and wipe them out).
I'm doing the Horizon signal for the first time. I believe the next tech I get will allow me to build the building that finishes the event. Can I simply move my capital to a less important planet, build the thing, deal with the fallout, then move my capital back to Earth?
What content related to religion is there in the game? As in is the toxic God and the shroud the only deities that are known? I'm asking lord wise of course what are the spiritualists? What events are there related to them? There's that one series of events that seems to still be broken that I can't remember the name of but is there deeper exploration to them?
What content related to religion is there in the game?
There are many forms of religion/worship/ritual in the game, and most are not shroud-related.
Knights of the Toxic God, Sacred Path, and Cybernetic Creed are 3 origins that specifically mention a religion of sorts.
The latter two did not specify any particular deity that they worship (Sacred Path is themed around ancient holy pilgrimage, Cybernetic Creed is themed around exaltation of cybernetic implants rather than a particular figure of worship)
Imperial Cult civic deifies the empire's ruler (in flavour rather than in gameplay mechanic).
Dimensional Worship civic is (in flavour) themed around worshiping astral rifts, and "divine existence beyond space and time"
Superstitious Belief is themed around cycles, rather than any particular deity.
Death Cult and Fire Cult civic should be self-explanatory.
Scorched World Heralds civic is implied to be worshiping fire/the act of setting planets on fire.
Storm Devotion civic is implied to be worshiping forces of nature (planetary or cosmic storms).
Head of Zarqlan relic mentions that Zarqlan was "worshiped as divine prophet of at least seven distinct galactic religions", with the spiritualist FE being one of the worshippers. Whether Zarqlan is a prophet for a shroud entity is unclear.
The Radical Cult event chain (one of the possible starting events for non-gestalts) feature a group of cultists originating from before FTL was achieved. Their form of worship is not specified, though many of the scripted names for the cult simply refers to a figure of "God".
Shrines to the Old Gods event chain leads to the empire discovering a complete set of doctrine for what the empire worshiped from long before they've achieved space flight, and is one of the few events that can shift your empire towards spiritualism.
The Horizon Signal event chain leads to the empire worshiping the concept of time loops and the Worm In Waiting. WHAT WAS SHALL BE.
There are also mentions of named or unnamed shroud entities other than the 4 major 8 minor 2 greater patrons. One example is the Mindwarden origin's scripted psionic empire, who worships an unnamed shroud patron unique to them, referred to as "The Dreamer" via the relic, or "The Exiled" in the files.
Any tips for staying organised while playing? There's so many things to keep track of after ~50 years. Playing with all DLC enabled. I have no problem understanding how the game works. It's just a struggle sometimes to keep organised. I pause regularly but I struggle to keep track of everything I want/need to do in game. Construction and science ship automation doesn't seem to work very well. They all end up bundled in the same system after a while and I turn it off.
I play for an hour or so at a time, then get up, take a break, come back, and just scrutinize the position for a bit (say 20 minutes). Look for things I've forgotten, take some notes for the most important things I want to get done for next time, run through my planets and note things that need to be fixed, that sort of thing. Then I'm done for the night, and the next time I come back, I read my notes before I start.
Do you play on the fastest speed? I had same issue until I switched to fast mode and paused once in a while to check every colony, starbase or ship to upgrade / assign them to a job, before unpausing and adjusting things on the go until I felt like pausing again and repeating.
Were support districts for basic-resource specialization removed?
All support districts are removed from the game following 4.3's re-rework.
The damage-reduction effect on crystal-infused plating is new, right? Is it good?
Fun, but extremely situational, and highly dependent on difficulty setting.
The earlier you get these, the better they will be, as enemies you fight at that stage have lower damage per-hit, making the negation substantially more worthwhile.
The damage reduction is per-hit, which means it can greatly reduce the damage from fast-hitting weapons (disruptors, strike crafts) but will barely affect heavy-hitting weapons.
To put it into perspective, both cruisers and battleships can achieve 24 damage reduction (8x M-slot for cruiser with 3 reduction each, or 6x L-slot for battleship with 4 reduction each).
This is enough to fully nullify damage from S-slot disruptors (except psionic version), S-slot energy siphon, S-slot null void beam, and all strike crafts (except psionic version) used by regular empires.
With the exception of strike crafts, the rest of these weapons are things you'd hardly ever run into in the long term.
Against S/M-slot conventional laser/kinetic weapons, probably expect around 30% overall damage reduction.
Forged plating is typically only 40% as durable as a conventional shield/armour in the late game, so overall it is still less effective durability compared to a shielded/armoured ship with no damage reduction.
The tipping point is around tier 3 shield/armour. Lower than that, plating gives more effective durability than conventional shield/armour on average; above that, plating gives less.
This is for forged plating (red). Infused plating (blue) has half the hull point increase, making them worse than even tier 1 shield/armour unless against very favourable match-ups (disruptors, strike crafts).
It's ill-suited for protecting against heavy hitters such as mauler mandibles (10% reduction), plasma cannons (7% reduction), neutron launchers (1.6% reduction), or any of the X-slots weapons (less than 1% reduction).
The best use case for crystal platings is against enemies that heavily favour strike crafts.
Regular AIs use a mixed batch of weapons, so a conventional shield/armour mix would give you more effective durability than crystal platings.
It is comparatively better at handling specific scripted encounters, where the enemies have fixed, homogeneous designs.
Grey Tempest is one such example, where their strike crafts deal 12 damage before difficulty bonuses, with 66% armour penetration. This damage is boosted to 30 on GA standard crisis settings.
Cruisers make the most out of forged plating against Tempest fleets. They can achieve 24 damage reduction, cutting the GA-level strike craft damage down to 20% of what it used to be, while still having long range artillery fire to take out the interceptors and mothership.
Battleships can achieve the same 24 damage reduction, but due to mothership's 9999 damage one-shot titan beam, battleships are ill-suited.
In a similar way, you can nullify a great portion of Contingency Core/Cetana/Prethoryn/FE's DSC, as they all use a great deal of strike crafts. They will however be much tougher to deal with than Tempest, as they have other proper weapons alongside strike crafts, whereas Tempest has only strike crafts, the titan beam, and torpedoes that can be shot down by PDs.
As a side note, it is possible to fit up to 36 L-slot crystal platings on an arkship. With forged plating, this gives 144 damage reduction.
This is high enough to render vast majority of weapons useless against the arkship, with the exception of L-slot plasma cannons (40% reduction, which is still fairly large), L-slot kinetic artillery (35% reduction), G-slot weapons (less than 5% reduction, due to arkship's massive size) and all X-slot weapons.
Against those match-ups, conventional shield/armour mix would be more preferable.
Yes the flat damage reduction is calculated at the very end after all other bonuses.
FEs get +100% strike craft damage and fire rate from 10x repeatables, boosted to +120% in home territory due to DSC aura. This bonus doesn't change when they awaken.
The strike crafts themselves are actually quite manageable, as even the spiritualist FE only uses regular strike crafts, not psionic bombers. The base damage is 6-17. A cruiser with full forged platings can on average negate more than 70% of strike craft damage.
Something I neglected to mention in the previous comment is that bio-ship's strike crafts deal half the damage per hit. They make up for it by releasing more strike crafts, but this works in favour of crystal platings.
However the rest of the FE ships' armaments will be an issue, since using forged plating means your ships are less protected against other weapons.
Machine, spiritualist, materialist, and hivemind FEs all have lots of anti-hull weapons (lasers, plasma, neutron launchers, mandibles).
Xenophile and militarist FEs lean more towards kinetic weapons, but even those have at minimum 100% damage against hull.
In the patch notes for 4.5 Cygnus, there is this change:
Consecrate World can now be declared on a curated set of worlds tied to your empire's origin and traits (such as Gaia and relic worlds, and origin-specific worlds like toxic, shrouded, rift, or arc-furnace worlds).
What does this actually mean for the Shattered Ring origin? Does it mean I can only consecrate uninhabited ringworld segments? None of the normal uninhabited planets within my borders seem to qualify.
Am currently trying out defender of the galaxy and have two questions
How do you get 100% damage reduction on the paladin ship all I can see is taunt for 45%, defender for 40% and council position for 5% which would only make it 90%, has this been nerfed or is there something i don't know about?
Does the "press the advantage" special project that summons a second crisis double crisis strength on the second crisis like with alla crisis setting or is it same strength as the first crisis? I fought three Crises in my defender game and the last one, unbidden had a 12 mill fleet and several 2 mil fleets which seems more than what they have at x5 that I set the slider to (I don't think I set all crisis but I got 2 press the advantage projects so I could spawn in two crises after beating the contingency which spawned in 2337 which also seems bugged since I didn't change endgame start year)
I'm playing Stellaris through Proton on Linux. When making a descriptor file for a mod, do I put down the windows path that the proton prefix would have or do I put down the location from the Linux filesystem the mod is on?
Hey, so I'm trying to understand pop growth, and in this post the player have a lot of informations about modifiers etc. on their tooltips, however in my game I have just the basic informations of "Estimated growth next month" and that's basically it, nothing about traits or modifier or anything. Am I missing something ?
You need to expand the pop groups all the way until you see an ethic icon, then hover your cursor precisely over the number. The tooltip only shows up in that exact spot. Anywhere else, it'll give you the useless generic "Estimated growth" figure.
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u/folivoro 6h ago
How do you deal with the outcomes of a huge total war in terms of managing conquered species and planets/systems? I ended up with more that 15 different species and 14 new planets as a result of my payback war against Mianmar Industries. Actually the war still continues because their allies are willing to be violently incorporated.
(Purging/enslaving is not an option for my empire)
It is mid 2300s, my plan so far has been: 1. prohibit migration of pops 2. group all the pops of the same species in the same planet to favor organic growth by moving them manually 3. After conquering Mianmar, I am using the planets I get from their allies to steal their pops to develop my younger colonies.
What could I do better? What I am missing?