That Stellaris' fifteen content packs add up to four or five times the base game's price is merely a sign of the insanity of current game marketing, of which Paradox is guilty in no small measure. However, that under those conditions the base game is still listed at $40 almost six years after release should draw your attention. While yes, of course that sum's deliberately inflated to offset "sale" prices, you have to wonder why so many of us are willing to drop $100+ on a 4X with little to no glamour factor.
While much of Stellaris' success has to do with the complexity of basic gameplay and successfully keeping its mountains of information accessible through the interface, maybe the best way to convey this is via the immense replay value achieved by mixing and matching races, planets, governments, diplomacy and other options... and also I just felt like gushing about my various empires, so here we are.
I should admit that I'm no champion at the game and have no intention to ever become one. It would cut too much into the fun of trying various themes and often sacrificing utility to roleplaying spin. Given I always play in a large, slightly underpopulated, minimally habitable galaxy, assume I lost at least a dozen times with every setup due to overexpansion, absence of colony sites or getting blindsided early game, despite playing only on "captain" (medium, minimal AI bonuses) difficulty. In the screenshot above, though ultimately successful, I had a devil of a time keeping up with my Hegemonic Imperialist ally who I swear started more wars than the rest of the galaxy put together, leaving the heavy fighting to me and just snatching up easy claims every time. Assholes gave me no chance to reach the (admittedly extended due to my love of marathon sessions) end year.
1)
Three to two years ago, my first runs defaulted to my preferred setup of research focus in any strategy game, with the ethics:
Fanatic Materialist / Egalitarian
(The nerds.)
They were alpine mammalians, alternating between genetic modification or cyborg ascension perks with other minor changes from run to run.
Especially since I visualized my mountain wolves as slow breeders, the lack of expansion bonuses made for a slow early game, high dependency on robots (better pray to all-powerful Atheismo that you get the right techs for them quickly) and susceptibility to the robot uprising event. They were, however, extremely productive per population unit and not very finicky. Interestingly, in Alpha Centauri terms it starts out like the University but feels more like the Human Hive after your robot workforce gets off the ground. This was also the most neutral culture I've played along the good / evil axis.
2)
Fanatic Xenophobe / Authoritarian
The cannibals.
Desert arthropoid / avian with syncretic evolution and slaver guilds. I envisioned them as basically xenomorphs ovipositing in captive, brittle but fast-reproducing pretty birdies.
Lightning-fast expansion due to claim discounts and influence bonus; if you like the classic 4X land grab strategy, this is the one for you. The most massive investment in slaves I've ever run, especially since I decided my xenophage race would expand its culinary / reproductive tastes to anything resembling its instinctive victims and proceeded to, on principle, enslave every avian race in the galaxy as livestock, and the rest as workers. Combined with repeated extermination campaigns against non-delicious, non-sexy, non-muscular species, this not only made me the galaxy's most hated empire by a wide margin -
- but required two precinct houses on most planets just to keep the peace.
Still... working to death or simply eating your superfluous workforce gives you both raw power and flexibility, and though it was hard staffing research planets, slave labor bonuses and low support costs made me an industrial powerhouse. Best of all, as a capper:
- I took the Worm-in-Waiting's offer to become unliving abominations (I'd started as repugnant anyway) and turned my trinary starting system into a clockwork of tomb worlds spawning around every collapsed star.
It's good to be bad, baby.
Fanatic Pacifist / Egalitarian
The decadent subversives.
Molluscoid, life-seeded. Terraformed every planet into a gaia world. Nicest squishies you'll ever meet (to balance out my arthropoids' karma) to the point everyone was so gosh-doggonned happy with my amazing standard of living that I needed no police precints! Caveat: in possibly the biggest departure from classic 4X gameplay, fanatic pacifists cannot
declare war, and while in the early game it's possible to diplomatically
taunt enemies to attack you, as soon as you build up your fleet the AI
refused to risk it, and though that's gradually being addressed in recent patches by the galactic U.N. declaring you a threat, my empire's abundance of diplomats and angelic publicity meant I pretty much WAS the Galactic Community, pulling strings nonstop to censure whatever and whomever I wanted. I could do no wrong. Combined with the then-new espionage system, this made for a hilariously, insidiously passive-aggressive playthrough, culminating in the most Balkanized endgame galaxy I've ever seen.
 |
| "border gore" the fanboys call it |
Note the chaos increases the farther you get from me and my allies. For a long time I was at a loss as to how I could expand, until I realized just because I can't go to war doesn't mean everyone else won't, and planets will rebel against their cruel (and war-weakened) masters... and unable to survive in a hostile galaxy will beg to join the best option available. Which was me. I recruited rebel after rebel, one system at a time to the tune of literally dozens pockmarking the galaxy above in gold dots, mopping up after crises, inciting wars via spycraft or "helping" my confederates defensively, waiting for empires to splinter
from diplomatic pressure and just effortlessly picking up the pieces.
It is, apparently, also good to be good. Baby.
4)
Fanatic Militarist / Materialist
Rock the house down.
Lithoid, calamitous birth origin with the "very strong" trait, and rushed Supremacy as my third tradition. Basically Prussia. My credit economy was shit, even with robots and lithoid pops' resource-shedding, and influence (the all-important expansion-limiting resource) was a bigger problem than for my xenophobes. However, industry was decent, and combat bonuses don't just make for powerful fleets but amplified build-up so you're never in much danger even if surprised. Also, the AI cannot account for this and is more easily baited into attacking you despite your ability to instantly crank out several pugnacious little fleets in record time. Where my arthropoids devoured or worked to death their victims, I built my lithoids for outright extermination, and given this made me <almost> as reviled (seriously, not even blowing everything up matches eating everyone's babies) and given this was my first playthrough last year after the Nemesis expansion came out, I opted to Become the Crisis(TM)
Luckily this turned out to mostly involve military bonuses amplifying my main advantage, escalating to blowing up entire star systems (where normally you can only blow up individual planets) and finally collapsing every star in the galaxy at once for an instant game over. For my money it's a bit too straightforward and definitely needs further fleshing out. I especially dislike this path forcing you into a communion with psychic space-ghosts or whatever, given my usual stance on telepathy in science fiction. Still, it fit my rampaging ethos this time around to a decent approximation.
5)
Fanatic Egalitarian / Xenophile
(More like xeno-erotic, amirite?)
The teacher's pets.
I decided I liked alternating and so opted for another "nice" race of short-lived plantoid scions of a fallen empire (initially overpowered but stagnant neutrals) with the free haven and idyllic bloom civics. The faction influence bonus doesn't kick in for twenty years and building up trade value is a centuries-long process. Budding made robots a no-go proposition due to overlapping with biological pop cloning. Slow expansion with assured rapid population / economic growth afterwards.
Sadly, this turned out the most boring of all runs. Not only can nobody attack your fallen empire master and you can't go on the offensive as a vassal (I definitely like turtling but this made it too easy) but also, by some accident my galactic region featured few or no neutrals around me, no L-gates and a marauder empire that only threatened me twice then shut up for two centuries. In a show of poor planning on my part, my vassalage prevented me from building a federation to leverage my egalitarianism, and while I did put my diplomacy to use here and there to squeak out a narrow victory with a last-century rebellion and wave of expansion, overall it was just a snooze.
I did however manage to get many biological races fucking each other, littering the galaxy with half-whatevers. That's gotta count for something.
(edit: I had actually tried these ethics at first, instead of scion, with the origin option placing you immediately in a federation with two other empires, which presents its own challenge of struggling to edge your allies out of early expansion, but giving me buddies from the start just rubs my lycanthropic, hermit-at-the-edge-of-town fur the wrong way; never again)
6)
Fanatic Authoritarian / Militarist
The zombie apocalypse.
Necroid necrophages with once again the slow breeder malus (since necrophages' growth is already gimped) plus the venerable trait and philosopher king civic to bank on immortal leadership offsetting my workforce issues and stability/ethics/anti-crime edicts stabilizing my considerable but not overwhelming slave population. Basically the opposite of my plantoids' rapid growth and subservience, less dependent on slave labor than my bugs and as obedient as my fanatic pacifists for entirely different reasons.
A new addition this past year, necrophagy throws an interesting wrench into your delicate population balance, forcing you to maintain slave pools which you convert into your own species. Expect critical dependency on thrall worlds pumping out more slaves. The fact they can also convert biological enemies in ground combat makes planetary conquest practically their modus operandi (no blowing shit up this time) but combined with my barren galaxy setup (with only one guaranteed colonizable world) this gave me the most difficult early game yet, unable to grow quickly enough to become strong enough to conquer and convert my neighbours once I meet them.
Interestingly, necrophagy doesn't carry nearly the same attitude penalty as sapient-phagy, so my zomblies ended up more politically favored than my bugs or rocks, but it just isn't enough. Maybe I've just been unlucky but there seems to be some unwritten malus to necrophages starting you off next to hostiles. In all attempts I've started near marauders, fanatical purifiers, hegemonic imperialists or all of the above. May be meant to help you, since early on it's easier to let your rivals grow planets which you then conquer and convert than it is to grow your own... but it just conflicts with my turtling tendencies. Not even counting the score of attempts failed in the first decade or two:
1- Death by angry grandpa. Mismanaging my pops set me so far back that I lost in mid-game by being forced to sign ill-advised defensive pacts with some idiots who immediately pissed off a fallen empire.
2- Death by Gray Tempest. I wasn't nearly strong enough by the time competition forced me to open the L-cluster.
3- Death by Great Khan. Successfully blocked off all potential enemies by starbases with the Unyielding tradition, but had encircled marauders without fortifying and lost track of hitting middle game.
4- Keeping my fingers crossed so far. I got lucky early on with enemies suiciding into my defensive station instead of taking the long way around to flank me, quick conquests via the nanite interdictor (exploration jackpot) and a great khan prioritizing an enemy empire, plus managed to lock down the L-cluster. Near-death by Paradox patch's influence/unity system revamp yesterday (yes, yes, I should've checked the patch notes) wiping my edicts and sending my economy into a spiral before I managed to recover thanks to a freshly-minted ringworld.
Two centuries in, for all its early difficulties this setup is proving an overpowered mid-game juggernaut ideal for the biological ascension path to optimize both your main population and fertile thrall breederies. It basically gives you a "single" race fully adaptable to any planet (as your converts inherit their homeworld type) and therefore combined with authoritarianism a highly cohesive, law-abiding, efficient society once you overcome your early growing pains... and every conquest not only adds to but amplifies my advantage.
Mechanics are still advancing six years after release. Every new combo has developed differently, building upon without detracting from core gameplay like other TBS/RTS' "no navy" or "infinite resources" standard alternate game modes. While your ethics most frequently determine your style, the combination of origins, civics, astronomy and a shuffle of scripted events play just as much of a role. I'm thinking maybe a "fuck the galaxy" fanatic xxxenophile(TM) race next. I might even choke down my bile and create a spiritual empire at some point, though I'm more prone to revisit materialists, and I have yet to play around with voidborne, hive mind, machine consciousness, aquatics, clone army, remnants or so, so many other options.
Buy it.
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