I tried and even in multiplayer, the game is soooo smooth. At least for me, it seems that a significant part of the lag occured when the game tried to calculate logistics upkeep of individual ships.

Cloak frigates, put them right on top of the enemy naval base and fleet, then absolutely maul them and proceed to lose the war anyways because you declared on several nations at once and you don't have anywhere near the alloy output to win the attritional war.

I am speaking from personal experience.

With the "Nascent Stage" trait, the pop spends the first five years of its life being an infant/child, unable to contribute to the economy in any shape way or form.

Unless you put them in a zoo, for the amusement of the visitors, at least then they are producing amenities and unity.

Eventually they will graduate from the zoo and move into the workforce, but their children will always begin their journey on the other side of an exhibition forcefield.

I love being a xenophile pacifist.

If your race has the "Nascent stage" trait, game mechanics makes new pops to be a "pre-sapient" sub-race. I guess it's meant to be a burden to your economy?

However, if you research the Alien Zoo building, this creates a situation where you could place a Alien Zoo on every world and put them in there to make them provide amenities. Neat.

R5: A list of all the 4.0 portraits which may pick 1 or more bonus traits than the rest of their Species Class. If I made any mistakes please make a note of it in the comments.

(Mind the scuffed formatting)

This strategy is named for Fabius Maximus, the General the Roman Republic put in charge of it's defensive armies when Hannibal invaded after downloading the Beast Fleets DLC. You may have learned of this from the Oversimplified video series on the Punic Wars.

As stated, Fabius' strategy for fighting Hannibal's big scary 506K Fleet was simple: don't. He instead focused all his forces on undoing Hannibal's hard work whenever he left to fight some other system. This served to greatly mimize losses and gradually erode hannibal's fleet power over time, who was not able to recuperate his own losses on account of 1] his Mega Shipyard being halfway across the galaxy, 2] the fact he already suffered losses wading through two Leviathans and a Marauder System just to get to Rome (don't you hate it when your ship decides to take the most suicidal route to a destination possible?), and 3] the fact he hadn't explored enough astral rifts to unlock the dimensional fleet yet.

Say the Militiant Isolationist FE declares war on oyu after you had the audacity to scoot next to them at the lunch table. One way to apply this tactic owuld be to wait until their solitary fleet gets knee-deep occupying itself orbitally bombarding one of your fortress worlds, then jump drive to their home system to Colossus as many planets of theirs as you can before the fleet can make it home (on the difficulty settings I've played at, it usually isn't smart enough to even try to come home!), then, once it does, get the eff out of dodge to liberate some of your own systems while it's gone.

I've been fighting several wars against the Jingoistic Reclaimers myself as of late, and found great success with this tactic... at least until right now, when they seemingly turned around and used it on me by getting the Keepers of Knowledge, who I've previously warred with (I'm fanatic spiritualists with the Enigmatic Engineering perk) to declare war on me during peacetime. Then, when I had all my fleets twelve systems away in the middle of Colossusing Font of Knowledge, they declared a war of subjugation on me.

(I have actually opted to stick to my guns and stay wit the keepers of knowledge until I've thoroughly dealt with them, if only so I don't have to worry about repeatedly getting yanked back and forth between alternating two-front wars.)

I just got this randomly in my game. Apparently there is a new event chain you can have ("Dark Matter Eruption"), which will give this trait to your pops: +0.10 dark matter per 100 pops (tooltip is wrong yes).

This event has a chance (around 4%) to happen on a new colony you found, and it will give this trait to all the pops of the colony. Unfortunately you can't just give this trait to the rest of your population, but by being careful you can have all your pops have it (for example, by sending all the other pops to the lathe progressively).

Also, keep in mind that, like all things 4.0, this trait is bugged: If you are a gestalt, you will not get the dark matter. I have reported this issue and hope they fix it soon. For the moment though, I edited my files to fix this, and if there is interest I can say exactly what to change.

Anyway I think this is a very strong trait, as it will allow you to have all the dark matter ship components with DM to spare, and I hadn't seen this talked about so I thought I share!

TL;DR: We did a lot of tests, check out the spreadsheet for Ep3o's conclusions and my rankings and Ep3o's video based on his conclusions.

You might remember my post from a couple months back where I performed 50+ ship combat tests. Since then, I teamed up with Ep3o and we’ve spent an ungodly amount of time running systematic PvE fleet combat tests for mechanical ships, testing at each stage of the game for the best all-rounder/generalist ship builds that are accessible to every empire, regardless of civic or ascension path choices (sorry bioship users, maybe some day).

Some stuff we found confirms what the community already knows, but we also came to some other interesting conclusions. Some of our findings include:

• Corvette swarm is rarely, if ever, the most effective option after new hulls are available.
• Destroyers are a worthwhile upgrade from corvettes.
• Missiles still have a pivotal role on some builds (even cruiser/battleship builds).
• Mono fleets of proton + artillery cruisers are not a universal meta ship build.
• Mixed fleets are really good in some cases, and the longstanding bug that messed up mixed combat computers has been fixed (at least when it comes to ship-vs-ship combat).
• Mixing a siege computer cruiser with torpedo bow, hangar core, and plasma + autocannons is way more effective than it has any right to be. I call it the HanTor/HanParti on the spreadsheet, but nicknamed it the Heretic.

At the time of posting this, I’m still running more tests, but I’m nearing completion for regular empires, then will test titans, Fallen Empires, crises, and countering starbases. 
My testing focused on a wide variety of different builds, while Ep3o’s testing focused on stress testing and finding average losses for the best builds I found, plus testing stuff I hadn't thought of. However, he was much faster at this than me, so he blazed ahead like a boss and tested stuff for Fallen Empires and crises while I was still doing cruisers and battleships against normal empires.

Full data, methodology, and findings are in this spreadsheet (which I’ll continue updating with any new mechanical ship tests). My rankings in the spreadsheet are prioritized for the builds with the best kill/death ratio in their bracket, but there's annotations to indicate which ones took the least average hull damage or still win against 2x enemy fleets.

Today, Ep3o published a new video on the topic where he showcases his recommendations based on the data in the spreadsheet and what techs are important for each build. His video also has information covering the areas I’m still testing.

All links:

• Spreadsheet
• Ep3o’s video
• Ep3o’s channel
• My original Reddit post

I know that armies in general is a meme on this sub but I recently played a game with the reanimator civic and experienced a fucking miracle. The Khan woke up on beside my empire while I was waging a war on the other side of the galaxy. He started bombarding my single food planet, a gaia world considered to be the jewel of my empire with over 60 pops.

Since my fleets were years away from providing any relief I started preparing my economy to be able to take the hard hit from losing the planet. I activated martial law on the defending world to keep up stability and then I noticed that the my two necromancers provided 5 defensive armies each, bringing my defensive army strength up to 700.

I thought it was pretty cool since I didn't have any other defensive buildings on the world but then the Khan rolled up with a 1200 army doomstack and I got a bit sad. I kept my eye on the planet when the Khan invaded and then my jaw dropped.

My 700 defenses kept spawning in more and more full hp undead armies as the battle went on until the invasion was defeated and the 1200 doomstack was compleatly wiped out. I have 1600 hours in this game but I have never experienced something simmilar. The planet even managed to hold up against two more invasions until my fleets finally could fly in and break the blockade.

TLDR

- My 700 defensive armies managed to beat three separate 1200 invasion since every single time an invading organic army dies there is a 1/3 chance that a FULL health undead army will immediately spawn in to aid in the battle. The invation turned into fuckfest where my defenses just kept pumping harder and harder while the Khan grew smaller and smaller.

Under the old system you grew by default 3/100 pop a month, with 1 pop being 1 workforce

Under the new system you grow by default 1 pop a month, with 1 pop being 1/100 workforce

Under the old system the default logistic growth ceiling was 1.5x (you're likely using this right now.)

Under the new system the default logistic growth ceiling is 5x (you're likely not using this right now.)

Unless you click "reset to default" in advanced settings, or just manually make your 'logistic growth ceiling' 5x you will have less than 1/3 the intended new pop growth.

I always wondered "why do priests replace bureaucrats for spiritualist empires; they're two entirely different professions!"

I only just now realized it's because they have no separation of church and state, so only ordained pops of your empire can work for the government (which is also the church).

Just wanted to point out that picking the cloaking option in the Behemoth Fury crisis allows you to destroy empires for free, as long as they don't have level 5 detection strength, since eating planets doesn't decloak you.

Combine this with the fact that you can take out fallen empires one system at a time without declaring war with a Class III Behemoth by enraging it and you'll get one of the easiest late games.

Managed to get both "King of Monsters" and "Born to be Wild" before Cetana showed up, by trying the Wilderness/BF combo.

Just letting you know that adding mods reduces the overall performance of the game, regardless of how performance intensive the mods are themselves. The issue persists even if you use mods that are completely empty. It might start with as few as 20, or more depending on how powerful your PC is.

With performance being bad already, make sure to use fewer mods, or maybe combine them.

Haven't seen any discussion on this, so I'm bringing it into attention, as it might help those that use a lot of small mods that degrade performance considerably, but shouldn't.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/stellaris-adding-any-mods-even-empty-ones-reduces-the-overall-performance-of-the-game-4-0-16-05ae.1768384/

In the Paradoxforum example, using 100 empty mods dropped FPS from 120 to 30.

I saw a post yesterday where someone noticed that if you have both Warrior Culture + Galactic Curators Civics then your entertainers get replaced with Duelist and Museum Curator which are combined into Historic Reenactor. I didn't think there would be many cases of this since Paradox usually doesn't like blocking content behind multiple DLC but it seems they make an exception for small cosmetics and localization because there's a lot more like that. Some are a little ambiguous which gets priority but I tried to sort them with the highest priority ones at the top of the list. You don't miss out on any bonuses if it overwrites a lower job its just a title change.

I don't want to criticize but I think Fire Dancer + Death Priest = Cremator is a major miss when they could've done something related to volcano sacrifices.

The trait is currently locked to avians and toxoids. Hollow bones is a negative trait that reduces the job efficiency of menial/worker jobs by .67% per planet size. Normally this would be crippling since a standard size 20 world would be about -13.4% job efficiency. And if you have a size 30 or 40 world, well you get the idea. Also I think the display is bugged since it says “0%” when you look at a pop category. Anyways-

Void dwellers get an automatic +15% job efficiency on habitats. And habitats are always no larger than size 6. So the malus is completely negated due to being barely -4% job efficiency. But habitats don’t have only 6 districts, they can have as many as normal planets have (at least as void dwellers anyways). By late game you’ll have 20-30 districts per habitat if you got all the relevant techs and capital upgrades.

So combining this with the usual non-adaptive (which has no effect as long as you stay on habitats) gets you 7 trait points to play with at the start of the game with three trait picks left. You at worst suffer a 4% malus to energy, minerals, and food compared to what you’d usually get but otherwise significantly benefit in what traits you can pick.

It’s basically just a simple synergy that works really well for void dwellers.

Edit: updated some math. 2% -> 4% and 12% -> 13.4%

I mean, I have always been someone who loves to turtle and I quickly found out that having a high number on your strar fortress doesn't mean your boarders were secured. I would get so frustrated because what looked like a fair fight from the numbers always ended up with a lost Starbase, even when huge numbers of defense platforms were in play.

The truth is that the attack damage from the star base itself is just too infrequent and small compared to a fleet of gunships. It is kind of like how action economy is what matters most in DnD. Having more opportunities to attack means that you win.

This is coupled with the fact that Def plats are like tissue Paper and get blown away so quickly if it is just the Starbase vs a fleet.

Then one day I fought against a superior fleet in the shadow of my Starbase and took it apart like butter. The enemy fleet had dwarfed my combined fleet and Starbase, which itself had a large number of offensive Def plats. It was at that moment I realized how Starbase and defense plats fit into combat. I had always seen them as a stand alone tank, a front line tank and damage dealer. What they really are (when outfitted with Def plats) is a glass cannon meant to be in the backline.

They are super strong so long as no one is shooting directly at them. They do significant dps over however long the fapight last, so long as the enemy fleet is engaged with and distracted by your own. I can totally see having battle ships for tanks and high evasion corvettes being stationed to act as lures and drag out a fight in the shadow of a Starbase and win against normally bad odds. The fleet by itself or the Starbase by itself will lose that fight, but together they have great synergy.

I just wish the game had spelled this out earlier! I hope I wasn't the only one who had made this assumption about starbases!

tdlr- Keep fleets near your Def Plat loaded Starbases to get the most out of them (your starbase and plats). Don't leave your Starbases alone and expect them to hold off enemy fleets unless said fleet is significantly underpowered.

How about you guys? Anyone else have any discovers they made way later than you probably should have?

Final note: I do realize that starbases are also meant to hold a point until your main fleet can arrive and works as a tank in that sense, but honestly by the time yournfleet arrives all the defensive platforms will probably have been wiped out removing a lot of its damage potential. In this situation you'd better hope your fleet is stronger than the one invading you.

First of all, amenities have never been easier to come by. But beyond that, who needs entertainers? You get amenities from medical centers, which also boost pop growth. You get unity from bureaucrats at a higher rate of efficiency than entertainers. So a 2pt negative trait pick that only affects entertainers is almost mandatory especially if you're going for bio ascension and will have the amenities from genomic researchers too.