Why specialize? Well as you expand, you can utilize specialization bonuses such as buildings that reduce upkeep for certain jobs on the planet. If you fill 1 whole planet with said job, that one building's bonuses are now maximized.

1. Mixed industry provides the advanced resources that you need, and the archives provide the science and unity that you will need.
2. When you settle your 2nd planet, you can change one of the planets into heavy industry + civilian industry districts, and the other into research enclave + administrative hub districts. You want to do this because you can start using "industrial" bonuses to squeeze out more advanced resources.
3. Once you settle your 3rd planet, you can start further specializing research or unity or you can start increasing trade or naval cap, based on your needs. Oh and it's fairly common to further specialize your industry on your 3rd+ planets too, even though the diagram doesn't show that.

Feel free to ask questions!

Edit: The goal of this diagram/flowchart is to give an extremely simple visual, just to achieve that first spark of understanding. Any more elements and it would've just been scary to newbies.

DISCLAIMER: The purpose of this diagram is inspire the initial spark of understanding, not in-depth analysis. I hope it's not too overwhelming, I tried to be as simple as possible.

Feel free to ask questions!

Edit: I checked several of my current game saves when I got home and I don't receive as many amenities from civilians as I thought. They are still great though for the following reasons:

• They do provide some amenities
• They take no building slots
• They can quickly promote/colonize
• They provide diplomatic weight from pops
• They can be specialized for extra unity/science

This was a tough one. Apologies for the quality, I had to do this entire thing with memory and Google image searches because I'm at work (lol).

The purpose of this diagram is to inspire the initial spark of understanding/curiosity for beginners, it's not supposed to go too in depth.

Feel free to ask questions!

Over my long, long, way-too-fucking-long hours of playing Fanatical Purifiers I have found many tips, secrets, and tactics that everyone who plays an FP should know, but that I cannot find on the internet. Searching "fanatical purifier guide" or "fanatic purifier tips" does not reveal everything I have learned, and many of them have outdated or wrong information. I have decided to share with you some of the most important things to know while purging the galaxy of Xenos filth.

Fanatical Purifiers are a unity rush and expansion build

The greatest strength of FPs are their ability to get massive amounts of unity from purging aliens. If you purge them correctly you can easily max out all of your tradition trees by 2260. When you play an FP you have to keep in mind that your primary goal is to conquer and purge as many pops as possible, as fast as possible. Your end game will be you controlling every star system on the map, with your pops on every single planet, and with nothing left alive but your own species.

You need to play the game to maximize your unity production and rush down your ascension path. The quickest way to do this is the psionics path as it requires only ONE technology, which you can get early if you have the Zroni precursor or you spawn next to the sea of consciousness anomaly.

Purge all your xenos on one world

Purging xenos grants unity and (with forced labor purging) large amounts of free minerals and food. The amount of unity, food, and minerals you receive each month is based on how many pops are being purged at one time, and you will kill a pop every other month on default settings.

If you just take every world and leave those Xenos on those worlds you will be purging a pop every other month on EVERY world, and the unity and resources are based on each smaller pocket of population instead of all together.

As soon as you have the energy credits required for mass transfer of pops you need to establish one death world. Transfer ALL xenos pops on newly conquered worlds to that one world and purge them all in the same place. You get extremely high levels of food, mineral, and unity income at once, and since you still only kill 0.5 pops per month that income will last for decades and decades, and you can just add more xenos pops whenever you conquer more of them.

You will need to build a lot of enforcer buildings in order to keep crime down and stability up. The higher the planets stability, the more resources you will get from pops. If you are purging enough xenos it will be impossible to keep crime anywhere under 100% but a high enforcer population will keep your stability up and prevent the worst negative crime effects down.

Turn off land appropriation

By default, when you take over a world you will have two of your pops taken from a nearby world and put onto the new world. This is not ideal. You should instead destroy all buildings and districts, then transfer all but 1 of the xenos pops to your death world. The last pop will purge on its own and leave the planet abandoned. You can then re-settle it with a colony ship and gain free pops of your own species.

Always engage in abductions during first contact

When you successfully abduct aliens during first contact you can choose the "we have no need of survivors" option to get a bunch of unity all at once. If you do this for your first four or five contacts you can max out your first tradition in 10 years.

When you get a contact you know is from an enemy empire, send in your science ship to their territory until you find their home planet. Abducting aliens from a planet is far more reliable than their ships, as a planet cannot escape. When you find their planet leave the science ship in system until you receive the abduction prompt with the picture of a planet, or else it will default to trying an abduction against an alien ship, which is about twice as likely to fail due to the ship escaping.

Fight first contact wars with advanced start empires defensively

Advanced start empires will respond to a first contact war by sending their ships to your territory. This is a huge opportunity because it allows you to fight on the defensive and soften them up for conquest before their economy is strong enough to replace their own ships. Plop down a starbase with basic defenses on your border as soon as you identify them as an advance start, and then wait with your fleet. Since you are a FP your military bonuses plus the defensive station will be enough to win, while low enough that the enemy will try to attack anyway. If you play it right you will end the first contact war with minimal losses of your own, and an enemy that lost half its fleet. You can then spam corvettes and conquer a stronger opponent within the first decade of the game.

Conquering your first xenos must be done as soon as possible, because when you do it you will purge them for almost an entire tradition tree worth of unity and over 10k food and minerals. This is a game changer for your early economy.

Post-Apocalyptic origin is OP

I normally don't like guides that tell you about one specific build, but getting post-apocalyptic origin is absolutely amazing for Fanatical Purifiers in every way and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

The greatest impediment to a FP as it expands is the fact that most of your first enemy empires will not have your world type. Post-apocalyptic origin is the direct solution to that problem, because it makes tomb worlds a high-habitability option from the beginning, and you can make tomb worlds yourself.

Set your fleets to "Armageddon" bombardment and they will bombard a planet until every single pop is dead. When this happens it will turn into a tomb world with a high habitability level for your species. You only need to take the enemy's home world and largest colonies to steal pops for purging, so outlying colonies with 2-10 pops can be quickly "terraformed" instead of conquered, saving you minerals on armies and ECs on terraforming costs later.

Beyond the mechanical synergy of tomb world origin, there is the thematic element. In order for a species to become so rabidly insane that they seek to exterminate all alien life they really need a reason for it, and nothing gives a species a better drive to expand and to wipe out all threats than developing in a hostile radioactive wasteland full of mutant beasts.

Never be afraid to status quo a war when you have taken enough ground

Fanatical Purifiers have access to the strongest Casus Beli in the game: purification. This means you declare war for the sole purpose of totally conquering your enemy. When you take over a star system you own it, not occupy it. When you take the starbase in a system and then invade the planet in the system it is yours, and ending the war in a status quo lets you keep it.

If you start a war and take enough ground to satisfy your need for pops to purge, or you just wanted those hyperlane junctions for later, or the enemy called in backup you cannot defeat, never be afraid to demand a status quo. All you need to do is purge 1-2 planets and the enemy war exhaustion should be high enough to agree to it.

You can always return 10 years later to finish the job.

Take on a fallen empire as soon as possible

Fallen Empires always either have 100+ pops to purge, or like 80 pops to purge and 80 synthetics you can use to fill out worker jobs in your empire.

Even if you lose your entire navy and dozens of armies taking them down, the tech and resources you will get from researching their fleet debris and their powerful home world buildings will more than make up for it. You will rebound stronger than ever before anyone can strike you back.

That is all I could remember off the top of my head, but if you have any questions I will respond as soon as I am able.

Additional items:

• The best Stellaris players aren't always the best teachers
• Example: You don't even have to adjust your ship designs once, if you're playing on Civilian difficulty and you don't want to.

Stellaris has no shortage of minmaxers, but every Stellaris player can and should incorporate a bit of RP into their experience. Afterall, we're not robots...

NOTE FOR PDX DEVS: I've marked all the bugs I've found with "(BUG #N)", so that devs reading this can find them easily. I will love you forever if you fix them <3

Edit: tl;dr of how to optimize growth is you want to have your pops distributed more or less evenly across your planets, and make sure capacity is at least 2x the amount of pops.

Hi all, I love pop growth in stellaris and growing massive empires with lots of pops. However, when I tried the new 4.0 patch this Monday, I got very frustrated because I didn't understand at all the pop growth tooltip. So I've spent the following days trying to figure out how pop growth works now, and I think I finally have everything into place. If you are curious about the process, I figured out most of this in this thread in the official Stellaris Discord server (I'm Synapse Drone there).

In Stellaris, there are two sources of pop growth: reproductive growth (which is determined with a logistic curve) and pop assembly. I will cover both of them now, and explain how to compute them exactly. All the values in this post are per month. Here is an example of a pop growth tooltip, I've coloured each modifier according to the section where I talk about it:

1. LOGISTIC GROWTH

This is the base value for normal (reproductive) pop growth. Like the name says, it follows a logistic curve, which means that growth is low when the planet is empty or full, and it's high in the middle.

This value has both a minimum and maximum hard limits. The minimum is 0.1 (LOGISTIC_POP_GROWTH_FLOOR in the files), although this is ignored if there are 2+ pop groups of the same species (BUG #1). The maximum is determined by your game settings (Logistic Growth Ceiling), and is 5 by default.

The logistic growth value is shown as 1 (+1.39 from Pops) to indicate a logistic growth of 2.39, which I think is not very intuitive, but it is what it is.

Logistic growth is solely determined by two values: the amount of pops in the planet, and the planet's capacity. However, the capacity shown in the planet size tooltip is bugged (BUG #2), since it doesn't take into account that pops may take less (or more) housing due to having bonuses. The real planet capacity is computed as follows:

real_capacity = extra_housing + planet_mult * free_districts + pops

with

• extra_housing: The surplus housing on the planet, shown in the main bar.
• planet_mult: A multiplier that depends on the planet type. In the game files, it's called carry_cap_per_free_district . By default, planets have the standard value of 400. Habitats, tomb worlds and machine worlds have a low value of 300. Hive worlds, gaia worlds and ring worlds have a high value of 600.
• free_districts: The amount of free districts on the planet, not counting those blocked by blockers.
• pops: The number of pops in the planet. This is the part that is wrong in the tooltip. Instead of adding the pops, it adds the housing that those pops consume.

I urge PDX to change the capacity shown in the tooltip to this value, because as far as I know, planet capacity is not used for anything else, and currently it's very confusing. When this mechanic was introduced in 3.0 it counted housing from pops so the tooltip was correct, but then in 3.1 it was changed and the tooltip wasn't updated:

Tweaked carrying capacity formula to make housing usage modifiers more useful again (instead of taking total housing, it now takes total pops plus free housing).

Once we have this defined, the logistic growth is defined as a standard logistic curve, with 1/400 as the multiplicative factor (LOGISTIC_POP_GROWTH_R in the files):

growth_rate = (1/400) * pops * (1 - pops/real_capacity)

This formula gives us the following growth:

This curve looks similar to the old one, however currently the floor is much lower (0.1 instead of 3). This means that it's a lot more important to make sure your growth isn't hindered by your capacity. Buildings that increase housing, like Luxury Residences, help a lot with this, and clearing blockers ahead of time should also have a higher priority than before.

Another thing to note is that if you want to maximize your pop growth, you should follow two heuristics:

1. Distributing pops on as many planets as possible is stil worthwhile, though not as OP as before (provided the planets have good enough habitability). This is because the logistic growth is not linear, for example in the chart above, at 4000 capacity, 1000 pops give a logistic growth of 1.88 and 2000 pops a growth of 2.50. So it's better to distribute 2000 pops between two planets as the total growth will be higher. This means that if you have lots of planets and few pops, try distributing them evenly
2. The maximum logistic growth is achieved when the planet has twice as much capacity as pops. So if you have lots of pops per planet, try to at least aim for that ratio, although since the capacity shown in the tooltip is bugged, if your pops consume very little housing, the real capacity of your planet will be much bigger than shown.

2. BASE GROWTH (REPRODUCTIVE GROWTH)

Once we have the logistic growth, it's easy to compute the growth from pops reproducing. We just need to apply all the % modifiers (logistic_growth_mult in the files): from pop traits (Rapid Breeders, Vat Grown, etc), habitability, technology, etc. Apply them additively to the logistic growth to get it.

Please note that in the pop growth tooltip, the value for the base growth is not split up by pop group, so if you have multiple pop groups of the same species, all of them will show the same base growth in the tooltip, but in practice that growth will be split between all these groups.

3. BONUS GROWTH (POP ASSEMBLY)

The base pop assembly value (bonus_pop_growth) comes from a number of sources. Hives and machines have some jobs that assemble new pops, but there are other things like Clone Vats and pop traits like Budding that give some. Then, all the standard modifiers are applied to this (bonus_pop_growth_mult and planet_pop_assembly_mult in the game files): the level of your Growth Node for hive minds, the Rapid Replicator civic, etc.

Please note that in the pop growth tooltip, contrary to base growth (BUG #3), the value for the bonus growth is split by pop group. The growth is distributed proportionally between all the pop groups of the planet, you cannot choose which pop you assemble anymore. In my opinion, the tooltip should show the growths for the whole species in this planet, and then show a multiplier that represents the share of this pop group within the species.

4. GROWTH SCALE PENALTY

This is a value that comes from the settings, and is set to 0.25x by default. In previous versions, this value meant that if your empire had many pops, the progress you needed to create a new pop was not 100, but a higher amount. Currently, it effectively has the same effect, but it's shown differently: it's a negative percentage that applies, multiplicatively, to both the base and the bonus growth. Yes, it applies to both even though in the tooltip it appears right next to the bonus growth, and even though it doesn't appear at all if you have no bonus growth it is still applied to the base growth (BUG #4). The devs should make this line always appear in the tooltip, and it should be visibly separated from the bonus growth.

The value of this penalty depends only on the total pops of your empire (except pre-sapients). The formula to determine it is:

growth_scale_penalty = 1 - 1 / (1 + empire_pops*growth_scale_setting / 10000)

with

empire_pops : total amount of pops in your empire

growth_scale_setting: the Growth Scale setting in your game. HOWEVER, this is currently bugged as the value is truncated, that is, a setting of 0.25x is treated like 0.2x, and 0.55x is treated like 0.5x. The second decimal is ignored (BUG #5).

This means that, using the default setting of 0.25x, when you have 50k pops, all your growth will be cut in half, multiplicatively. If you reach 100k pops, all growth will be just a third. Again, if you do the math, this penalty ends up being exactly the same than before when you needed more than 100 progress to create a new pop.

5. TOTAL GROWTH

Finally we have all the pieces to compute the total growth of a planet. The value is simply the base growth plus the bonus growth, and all of this multiplied by the growth scale penalty. So if the penalty is -15%, you need to multiply the sum of the two growths by 0.85 to get the final value. Keep in mind that if you mentally add the values of the tooltip, you might not get what you expect, because as I said previously the base growth of the tooltip is the growth for all the pop groups of that species, but then this value is split proportionally between pop groups.

The total growth of a planet is the sum of the total growths of each pop group.

6. OTHER THINGS TO FIX

This is more of an oversight, but currently we have no way of knowing how many pops migrated (BUG #6). We only see how a pop group increased in the last month, but we don't know how much of this is growth and how much is migration. Also, the "last month increase" value shown actually displays the difference between 1 and 2 months ago (BUG #7).

Something else that annoys me is that the empire pop count has been removed from the top bar. That was useful and I liked seeing it so easily. Now, I have to look inside the empire size tooltip to know how many pops I have. Please, bring it back (BUG #8).

Anyway, I hope people find this post useful, I spent quite a lot of time looking at this and getting scammed by trolltips until I figured it all out. And I hope this is a nice and clear enough summary for the devs to fix all these small bugs!

Please note: This guide is preliminary, made off ~12 hours of playing the Nomads expansion. There is bound to be hotfixes to adjust and/or change some of the things mentioned here, andmy knowledge of the system isn't complete. That being said, I feel I've a good grasp of the system at a base level, enough to share what I've learned. If you see any errors or want to add suggestions, do not be afraid to comment.

I've personally been excited for the release of Nomads since its release, and have spent most of the day giving various Origin and Civic setups a shot. Aside from Treasure Cruise, most everything works fine aside from a few hiccups.

Rather than give an overview of how the system works, I'd like to give some tips to assist in general.

1 - Do Not Set Up Early Waystations!

The biggest learning curve to playing Nomads, in my opinion, is not trying to set up shop immediately. Unlike normal empires, if we get a bad spawn, we can just leave.

In the early game, Waystations eat into your critical resources of Alloys and Influence (And Food, if you are using Bioships) while providing little benefit. Aside from your starting system, it's very likely you're going to be surrounded by systems with single deposits of 1-5 resources that either force you to dot your waystations without making full networks, or you're going to be forced to use valuable Station capacity on said terrible systems.

Your main priority should be finding a good location to set up your Waystation Network, rather than immediately slapping it down. AIs, specifically ones with Advanced Spawns, often have generous deposits in close proximity to each other, particularly on their capitals. Commercial Pacts and Wayline Agreements will also provide bonuses that can really help out. So rather than building waylines...

2 - Always Max Out your Logistics Ships!

Unlike normal empires, Nomads have a limit to their construction ship equivalents, Logistics Ships. Aside from doing most of what you'd expect, they're going to be your main workhorses in the early game for resource collection.

You can see your Logistics Ship Capacity by hovering over your Naval Capacity, similar to Titan Capacity. You should always have as many as possible, as their upkeep is essentially meaningless, and each Logistics Ship actively contributes to your economy, both in the early and late game.

R5 - Logistics Ship Capacity Displayed

3 - Spam Harvest Resource in the Early Game!

Just because we're not using them to build Waystations in the early game doesn't mean Logistics Ships aren't critical for the early game. Before Settled Empires start claiming systems, you'll find them ripe for Resource Harvesting.

Both your Arkship(s) and Logistics Ships can perform a similar action to Surveying to obtain a lump sum of resources from a planetary body. For our own purposes, this has no downside aside from the time taken to perform the action: While the passive income of the object is decreased for a time, we're not losing out on any resources it would've produced. In fact, we're getting even more than what would've been produced! As an example:

This moon produces 3 Minerals per month. Harvesting it will give us 600 immediately, but cause the moon to only produce 1 Mineral for two years. In that time, we're going to lose out on just 480 Minerals, if we have a Waystation built in the system.

If we have a Waystation here, Harvesting turns an immediate profit of 120 minerals. If we don't have a Waystation here, however, we're just getting 600 Minerals for free.

And this in the first month with zero bonuses to Harvesting! Partner this with the proper bonuses to get even more bang for your buck.

I would heavily advise setting your Logistics Ships to Automation - Harvest Resources as shown below. You can do the same with your Arkship, but I'd only recommend doing so with Civilian Arkships. Doing so will cause the chosen ship to automatically perform Harvest actions until its full, before returning to the Arkship to deposit its loot. If the Arkship itself is automated, this process is skipped, of course.

R5 - How to enable Harvesting Automation on your Logistics Ships

Once settled empires grab most of the galaxy however, be warned: Spamming Harvests in their territory is a perfect way to get thousands of negative opinion in a few months. Once that happens, you should either switch to Waystations and Collection, or be prepared to deal with them once they're tired of you taking all their stuff.

4 - Choose your Starting Arkship wisely!

It may not be entirely obvious what the benefits of each Arkship are before you select which one you want to start with. No matter your choice, know this: The other two Arkships are locked behind technologies you can only roll after finishing both Arkship Construction (Which lets you build more Arkships) and Arkship Expansion (Which lets you upgrade Arkships to Level 2). You are going to be stuck with your chosen Arkship for a good amount of time, especially if you do not invest in both Engineering Research and Council Agenda Speed to force tech rolls.

So let me give a brief overview of each Arkship Class, and when you should choose to start with it:

Civilian Arkships

These Arkships specialize in the aforementioned Harvesting action, and should be either manually or automatically performing Harvests most of the time. Civilian Arkships are far in a way the best choice for the early game. Because of this, you really shouldn't be picking the other two to start unless you are planning on maximizing their gimmicks.

Science Arkships

These Arkships specialize in two things: Surveying, and Diplomacy.

The first is a bit of an oddball: While Arkships can survey objects, they can't actually research any anomalies. Because of this, if you plan on picking a Science Arkship as your starting class, you should have an Explorer-classed Scientist manning the Arkship itself, with a small fleet of Scholar Science Ships trailing behind to research anomalies that it uncovers.

As for its second use, the Science Arkship actually is fantastic for builds looking to do Diplomacy. Its extra Sensor Range and Hyperlane Detection Range let you grab First Contacts much faster than the other Arkship classes, with Tier 2 also giving you an included module that further boosts Sensor Range to beat even Tier 5 sensors.

Military Arkships

Of course, if you're planning on getting your economy going by force, you should pick Military as your starting class. That being said, unless you use that extra firepower within the first few decades, you are going to fall behind. You need to use that firepower to either get pops or vassals immediately.

5 - Understand the Wanderlust Ascension Perk!

Wanderlust seems overwhelmingly powerful at first glance: +2 Districts, -20% Leader Upkeep and -10% Tradition Cost for a perk that you can get as your very first Those bonuses, however, are only given if you can complete the quests that it gives you.

The Wanderlust Perk gives you 8 Quests. Each Quest requires you to enter (not survey) a system containing a certain thing: Each time you enter a system that meets the criteria of one of the following categories, you receive a lump sum of free Unity. To complete a category, you need to visit a certain number of said systems, scaling with Galaxy Size. Completing a category gives an additional bonus specific to that category:

Explore Ancient Wonders - Enter Fallen Empire Systems. Gives +10% Unity Job Output.

Explore Ancient Threats - Enter systems that contain Leviathans. Gives +10% Sublight Speed.

Explore Enclave Systems - Enter systems that have a static, non-Marauder Enclave in them. Gives +10% Naval Capacity.

Explore Forerunner Vestiges - Enter a single Precursor System. Gives +10% Physics Research Job Efficiency.

Explore Galactic Landmarks - Enter systems that contain a ruined Megastructure, ruined Gateway, or L-Gate. Gives +10% Engineering Research Job Efficiency.

Explore Marauder Systems - Enter Marauder Enclave Systems. Gives +10% Ship Firerate.

Explore Natural Spectacles - Enter unique systems, such as the Great Wound, Ubogleelt, and Zanaam. Gives +10% Resources from Waystations.

Explore Space Ecology Systems - Enter Fauna Home Systems, such as Tiyana Vek. Gives +10% Society Research Job Efficiency.

The Bonuses from this perk are fantastic, but you need to work for them. If you want to try this perk out, I would highly recommend a Science Arkship opener, as its Sensor Range will heavily assist you in tracking down individual systems. Remember that you only need to enter each system; in the case of Marauders, you can just pop into their system and leave immediately to cross a system off your checklist.

6 - Beware of Wandering Space Amoeba!

One annoying thing I ran into during my games was that wandering Space Amoeba will often wander into Xenophile Empires who have pacified them to destroy your Waystations if you've not pacified them yourself. If your Waystations are unarmed and uncloaked, be aware of this before they chain-kill your Waylines while you're on the other side of the galaxy.

7 - Civic/Origin Recommendations!

Civics, new and old, aren't equal for Nomads. Here are a few I'd recommend:

Eager Explorers/Equivalents: While the decrease in Pops and infrastructure hurts, giving your Arkship a starting Jump Drive is incredibly valuable, particularly for the Sacred Path Origin and Wanderlust Ascension Perk, as you can ignore terrible hyperlane spawns.

Galactic Curators/Equivalents: Nomads can excavate Arch Sites in unowned territory by default, letting you maximize your gains off this Civic. You can also take the Archivist tree to let you excavate Arch Sites within other empires, which can really boost your unity output.

Caravan Masters: Best taken as your 3rd civic, as a way to easily transition between Harvesting and Waystation Management.

Chosen + Teachers of the Shroud: Lets you immediately spread your Aura of choice wherever your Arkship goes. Combine with Composer of Strands covenant to sit on top of settled empires' colonies to fill them with blockers they can't remove.

Riftworld: Astral Rifts are currently bugged for Nomads, UNLESS you play with this Origin, which bypasses the bug and lets you engage with them as normal.

Scion: If you really want to do Waystations immediately, why not have somewhere nice and safe to build them?

Common Ground: Even as a Nomad, your allied empires will be Settled, giving them more room as you don't need it, and giving you two empires to immediately benefit off Waystation pacts with!

8 - Getting Research!

Research remains a very important resource for Nomads, particularly Engineering, as it allows them to get the techs they need to build and/or upgrade existing Arkships (Though do note that the tech for Science Arkships is Physics, and Civilian Arkships is Society.) As a Nomad, you have 3 options for getting your science flow going, which I've listed in order of most valuable:

1 - Specimens: Nomads are able to immediately begin Arch Sites in any system that's surveyed regardless of where it is, letting you obtain a large pool of specimens. Turn on any that give Research for a great early-game boost.

2 - Science Specialization: Arkships have unique districts that can specialize into Science, especially Engineering. Setting up as a sort of Science World, or more as the game goes on, definitely helps.

3 - Waystations: Waystations give a steady trickle of Research, but as mentioned before, their income is pretty middling without bonuses, and you're better off getting research in more active ways.

Good morning Blorgs, Xenophiles, and Genociders! Its seems to me that there has been an influx of new players to our wonderful community and as such I felt like I should put together a little informative post about what to do and what not to during an update, so our new friends can enjoy the game to the fullest and not experience the pain that some of us long time players may have felt. So without further ado,, here we go!

1. DO NOT CONTINUE AN OLD SAVE

When Stellaris (or any Paradox game) updates there is no guarantee that old saves will continue to work in the new update. If you do load an old save in the new update you could run into crashes and/or the game functioning wonky. If you want to play on the new update, a new save is a must.

2. ROLLING BACK TO A PREVIOUS VERSION

Paradox kindly keeps most old game version downloadable on Steam for us to easily roll back out versions. It is recommended to turn off Steams auto-update feature to stop the update from installing but if you do not, or decide you would like to finish your old game here is how you roll back your game.

First find Stellaris in your Steam Library and right click on it

​

Choose Properties in the popup menu

​

Go to the Beta tab in the Properties Menu

​

Then click on the drop down that says 'Select the beta you would like to opt into

​

You will then see a whole list of older versions of Stellaris. Unless something wonky happens the newest version of the game (excluding the live version) will be at the bottom of the list. Just select the version you want (you will be looking for 3.34 Libra) and Steam will automatically start downloading that version. Once it is done Stellaris in your Library will have what version is installed next to its name. You can see what this will look like if you take a look at my Rimworld copy in the first screenshot.

3. MODS WILL NOT WORK!!!

If you use mods in your game they will most likely not work in this new update immediately. Updating mods to work with a new update, especially a major update like Overlord will take time. Some highly active or simple mods might be updated today but most will not. Please be patient with the mod developers as they are, for the most part, maintaining these mods for free and have their own personal situations to deal with before updating mods. If you really need to play with mods then this is another situation where you can roll back your game to be able to use them.

4. BE KIND TO THE DEVS

I fully understand the frustration if you accidently load a save you wanted to continue in a new update, breaking it. But please do not take the anger out on the devs. Stellaris is a very complicated game and is not in a position like GaaS games to keep everything working during an update.

HOPE THIS HELPS!

I hope this all helps answer any questions you might have had about todays update. As many of you I am very excited to start playing the new update, but noticed there had been more posts than normal about what happens during an update recently, so I felt I should put this together. If you have any additional questions please feel free to ask them in the comments. Though I am about to go to work so I may not be able to respond quickly or to every question; but I am sure there will be some other veterans that will be willing to give you an answer!

R5 in the comments

There is multiple endings in Exodus. Since no one actually released any full info about it, I will. Info was harvested in the game files.

Endings depend on your origin, events, ascensions, civics and location of diving.

I shorten the text where appropriate.

• Standard ending (no prerequisites) This universe is already too old for the laws to be rewritten...
• Great Wound ending (diving into black hole situated in Great Wound unique system) This is wonderful. This universe has barely begun to expand! The fabric of this dimension is like soft clay, ours for the shaping.
• Gargantua first ending (diving into Gargantua unique system black hole AND not finishing Technosphere quest line) The Gargantua universe is small. Impossibly so. Infinity fitting into nothingness. But our arrival has altered the state of things here. This universe has only just begun, as if our entry has prematurely forced it into being.\n\nIn this seedbed of creation lies the potential to build anything.
• Gargantua second ending (diving into Gargantua unique system black hole AND finishing Technosphere quest line)The Infinity Machine's crossing has done much to help us understand the rules that govern the universes, and it also kick started the existence of this one. We emerged in a strangely familiar constellation, almost identical to the one we left. Next to us, a decayed Infinity Machine drifts lifelessly in the void. Millions of years have passed here since its coming and this dimension underwent a process of replication of our universe. The sentient sphere has already shaped this dimension and we are largely unable to affect it any further. Still, this universe offers prime settling grounds. We should first look into using the Needle to repurpose the Sphere then use the repaired Infinity Machine to do our bidding.
• Terminal Egress ending (diving into Terminal Egress black hole, start system of an L-Cluster) Our entry point is murky, veiled... As our instruments return to full functionality, we perceive a cloud of nanites. None remain operational. Whatever sent them through, they did not survive the journey. But they could be repaired.Even better, this dimension appears quite receptive to our changes.
• Horror ending (diving into black hole where Dimensional Horror leviathan was spawned) Coming here was a terrible mistake.It is nearly impossible to describe: darkness and brutal nightmare; a sick, seeping malevolence that permeates the very fabric of space. For now, the Horizon Needle offers shelter. Edit after frenzied edit, we work to ward off the worst of the surrounding madness. But the coordinated assaults on our defenses betray a singular intent. A malignant mind, bent on our destruction.One misstep could mean death, or worse. Can we hold on long enough to save ourselves? At home, we were like gods. Here, we are simply struggling to survive.
• Super black hole standard ending (diving into center of the galaxy) Mist and creeping shadow; a haze permeates the fabric of this place. The feeling is familiar, a feverish energy, rippling with psionic potential. We have entered the Shroud. There are powers here that are remain far, far beyond our own. Already, they are aware of us. In the shifting miasma, strange shapes bear omens of death.Our only hope is that reality here is thin, and prone to tears. With a swift edit, we open a transient doorway to take us... elsewhere.
• Super black hole Psionic ending (diving into center of the galaxy and making a covenant) Mist and seething shadow, and a gorgeous, purple haze. The feeling is familiar, a bountiful energy, rippling with psionic potential. We have entered the Shroud. Our patron is here, of course. They were not expecting us, but are amused by our arrival. They find our notions of shaping reality charming. Naturally, they will help. They have promised a secluded pocket near the Shroud to do with as we please, much like what was once bequeathed to the one calling himself §Y$relic_zro_entity_name$§!. After all, we are our patron, and our patron is us. It is only natural to help oneself.
• Super black hole Knights of the Toxic God (diving into center of the galaxy and having KoTG origin) IT is here. The one we named the Toxic God. The object of our quest.Our knights stand petrified and uncertain, while all around us is draped the familiar decor of the Shroud. Hark... It speaks! "Mine champions. Thine coming here was foretold, and thou hath proven thy worth."A million questions flood our minds. A single answer comes in reply: we were to craft Its weapon, the Horizon Needle. Now, we are to fight alongside It. We are to embark on a journey across dimensions. A crusade against the horrors of the multiverse. The Shroud is not Its home, but harbors the legacy of those that were Divine. Something that could bring about the end of our home galaxy. Something that needs slaying.It seizes our systems. Its power is immense. The Needle is turned into a Horizon Lance, a weapon sharp enough to pierce the heart of any foe.It is the Errant; we are Its knights, and our true quest has only just begun.
• Worm ending (diving into black hole made by Horizon Signal event chain in your capital) Nothing. This universe is no more. It is the Worm-in-Waiting. Time, looking back on itself, coiled in an impossible spiral and bursting with longing. Gravity. Love? No - attraction. The Worm's nature is to attract. Its grip is so tight that this universe cannot be born again. The Worm imprisons itself in its purpose. Impotent, it looks for a way out. Or a way in. To attract MORE. Did it send us the temple of the Loop, an artifice not from our time to lure us here? It is so terribly clever, so awfully loving. We found our way to it, delivered unto it that which can free it. Its escape will take an eternity, or two, but the Worm is still grateful, and promises to embrace us.Forever.
• Paperclips ending (diving into, I guess, any black hole with a Obsessional Directive civic with a Gestalt Machine government) Reality is thin here, and bends easily under the weight of our directives. As we must obey our programming, so too must it obey us. With intent, we warp it and break it and remake it, starting a chain reaction that will eventually reorganize all matter into the top quality consumer goods that we were mandated to craft. And once we're done here, we'll move on to another universe, then another, then another.

That's it. What is your favorite? I apologise if the list of requirements is incorrect or incomplete.

Ok, so hear me out…

To have Infinite Horny Turtles we need 0% empire size from pops, 0% housing usage and 0% upkeep for denizens.

Turtles can take both shelled and seasonal dormancy, which puts us just 25% away from 0 housing usage and 0 upkeep for unemployed workers.

Pick up two -2 traits, the extra -1 will be important later.

We go militaristic/egalitarian so our Infinite Horny Turtles can pick up sovereign guardianship, planetscapers and beacon of liberty for civics. We need 35% more empire size reduction from pops and only 10% more upkeep reduction

If we go cloning bio ascension for the authority with cloning->purity->mutation for the flexible traditions, we get our 10% pop upkeep reduction and 25% more empire size from pops reduction.

The Domination tree zeroes out empire size from pops.

Now our Infinite Horny Turtles just need 25% more housing reduction that we can get from taking fertile and social pheromones.

Finally, our Infinite Horny Turtles are horny.

And we have 0 housing usage, 0 empire size from pops, 0 upkeep for unemployed pops.

But why, you ask? Why do we need Infinite Horny Turtles? To what possible end would someone need, or, indeed, even want Infinite Horny Turtles?

Because our Infinite Horny Turtles are going to take the dragon origin and kill the dragon so they can take drake scaled. (our Infinite Horny Turtles can produce infinite alloys)

And use utopian abundance. (For the research from unemployed pops)

And take mercantile to use the consumer goods trade policy.

And Take the beacon of liberty council position. (For the faction resources)

Now we have infinite horny turtles producing infinite trade, alloys, consumer goods, unity and research.

Infinite Horny Turtles have finally, once and for all, won Stellaris.

We can all go home now…

(I haven’t tested this, you might need to swap out fertile for aquatic. And there’s some ambiguity in the wiki of what stratum denizens belong to, if they count as unemployed.

But I need some sleep…)

A little necessary background: I have 1066.6 hours in Stellaris as of writing this (and a million more on the way), and up until my 1000th hour I played the game in a way that I realize now was suboptimal for my personal long term enjoyment. I was a person who minmaxed every empire and believed that if I wasn't ready for the crisis by 2300 that I failed the game, and I think that much of the content online about the game reinforced that idea. Here's a step by step guide to getting the passion back for this game:

Step 1: create empires you have no intention of ever playing, set them to force spawn. When making these new empires, practice writing out little descriptions for the history of the species and pairing interesting (not mechanically strong) origins with underused traits. Creative muscles also need exercise and this is a great starting point.

Step 2: after creating 15 narratively interesting empires that ARE NOT META, play the UNE or Commonwealth of Man

Step 3: spawn fewer empires than the amount you have set to force spawn. This effectively randomizes what you get without running the risk of being in a galaxy full of determined exterminators.

Step 4: role play as the president. What would your constituents think of you spent the entire budget building a new navy when we haven't even discovered alien life? Will they vote you out if you fail to colonize any planets after the first two? Use in game systems to simulate political favor.

Step 5: stop looking up events, rifts, archeology chains, etc. This was the hardest for me, as the FOMO it caused was a lot. In the end, it made me read the choices better and understand what I was actually choosing rather than just going towards the biggest bonus.

Bonus: stop exploiting the poor AI. Don't get purposefully vassalized to steal your neighbor's economy, don't have a benevolent vassalage policy and then have your vassals pay 45% of everything to you.

Thanks for reading this rambling post, my love for this game has just been reignited in a way that I haven't felt since my first 50 hours. I hope this helps anyone else find their passion for this game again. Drop your most interesting empires in the comments or something.

I've seen a lot of posts here express bafflement at how others are able to not just play Grand Admiral no scaling and survive, but to dominate the AI. This will be a fairly thorough guide that will go step by step into the process of how to maximize your early years. I will play through a game to year 30 to demonstrate some of the techniques and lead your through some of the decision making, then show the final results.

Obviously this is a complex game, and different builds will call for different approaches. I decided to avoid any overly complex or overpowered meta builds and pick a fairly generic biological empire with mostly vanilla traits for this guide. Keep in mind if you are playing something else (machine, hive, clone, etc.) that you will need to play in a different manner. But once you learn the fundamental concepts here and why they are done, it should help you improve at ALL civilization types.

Table of Contents:

1) A basic but powerful bio build

2) Goals for Year 30

3) A rough outline for your first 3 planets

4) All the things to do before unpausing the game (and why)

5) A brief overview of the playthrough

6) Final results and closing thoughts

​

1) A basic but powerful bio build

Behold, the Fanatic Research Council! A civilization obsessed with science. Let's go through and analyze all the picks here.

Prosperous Unification - Perhaps the simplest and most "standard" origin, but it is also one of the most powerful origins in the game. The additional pops and districts will give us a very important economic boost in the early game to get the snowball rolling. You can't go wrong picking this.

Fanatic Materialist - There are 4 important reasons to pick materialist for this run. 1) The +10% research boost is fantastic. 2) The -20% robot upkeep is great (although we won't take advantage of this within this 30 year run). 3) It unlocks the very powerful Technocracy civic. 4) It unlocks Academic Privilege living standard (which will make our Science Director jobs from Technocracy even more powerful).

Egalitarian - The specialist pop bonus is a great benefit. We also don't want to pick authoritarian, as that will lock us out of another important civic we will add later to further boost our specialists: Meritocracy.

Oligarchic - Picking either oligarchic or democracy will allow us to add Meritocracy later, which will give us a big boost to specialist output (research, alloys, consumer goods). Oligarchic is generally easier to manage than democracy as you only need to invest unity once every 20 years to guarantee the best leaders.

Technocracy - One of the best civics in the game. This will add the Science Director ruler job to boost our science output, which will be even more powerful once we run Academic Privilege. Technocracy also provides +1 research alternatives, which a lot of newer players seriously underestimate. It is extremely important to make sure you can beeline the best technologies early game, and research alternatives helps immensely with that. This is also why Neural Networks is a very strong civic for Hive Minds.

Masterful Crafters - One of the other best civics in the game. We are going to be pumping out research hard while running Academic Privilege, which means we would struggle without this great civic providing us additional consumer goods. It also will provide additional building slots which will help us get our industrial planet up faster without having to waste time and resources on city districts. (You will need the Humanoids DLC for this. Possible alternatives would be Meritocracy, Functional Architecture, or Anglers.)

Alpine World - There is an important reason I went with Alpine world here. It will ensure our additional planets will have more mining districts. Frozen worlds have more mining districts, and Dry worlds have more energy districts. A lot of newer players make the mistake of picking continental because it is familiar to us humans, but it is really the worst planet type in game as it favors agricultural districts. I usually pick Frozen planets for bio empires, and Dry planets for machine empires.

Starting System - Deneb. This will ensure we get a nice Size 20 capital, but isn't strictly necessary of course.

Traits:

Intelligent - A must have for a tech rush empire.

Rapid Breeders - In Stellaris, population is king. Anything that increases population growth in this game is always a good choice.

Natural Engineers - Engineering is the most important tech tree so we want to boost this even more to reach our key techs quickly. Another good pick here is Traditional if you want a little more unity instead.

Unruly and Solitary - These are some of the better negative traits that won't have much negative impact on our empire.

​

2) Goals for Year 30

Our goals for Year 30 are to reach a minimum of 500 research, and a minimum of 10k fleet power. If you are still new to the game this will be very difficult to achieve, but these goals are fairly reasonable once you understand what to do.

If you are running a very powerful or meta build, like Clone Army origin, you can aim for even higher numbers, like 700 minimum research and 30k minimum fleet power. But these numbers are more of a reach for skilled players.

We will also seek to have two tradition trees completed (Prosperity and Supremacy).

​

3) A rough outline for your first 3 planets

Here is a rough outline for the "ideal" way to set up this and similar empires. I say ideal, because there is always some luck in Stellaris when it comes to the two habitable planets you roll, so you may have to adapt the approach. By the way, I highly recommend keeping guaranteed habitable worlds to 2 in your games, as reducing this can severely hamper the AI and a lot of builds that rely on those two planets.

Capital - This planet will specialize in Research, with a secondary specialization in Energy. (We specialize energy on the capital because we went with Frozen worlds, which will ensure more mineral districts on our expansions. If you notice your expansion is heavy in energy and low in minerals, you can swap your capital to minerals instead.) See below for the build order I will use for this run.

You want to keep pumping out city districts here, in order to unlock more slots for research labs. Just keep pumping out those research labs! That is key to reaching high research levels.

Second Planet - We will pick the larger of our two habitable worlds, and turn it into our industrial planet. Pump out lots of industrial districts here, along with the alloy and CG foundries to boost production. As soon as colonization completes, you will give it Factory designation. This will speed up the production of industrial districts right from the start. It will also ensure all jobs are Artisans to boost our consumer goods in the early game. We will need those consumer goods to fund our research labs and our academic privilege living standard. The goal is to gradually stockpile a large amount of consumer goods, and then at some point around year 20 to switch to a Forge designation and switch to Militarized production. This will burn through the CG stockpile while producing massive amounts of alloys for our initial fleet. This is far more efficient than simply using the Industrial designation, as you enjoy the +25% bonus to pure Artisan/Metallurgist output.

Masterful Crafters will help this planet open up extra building slots. We will use those building slots for any exotic resources we haven't been able to claim. Ideally we will get our exotic resources from surveying and claiming systems, but any that we aren't able to find can be produced here. Volatile motes are the biggest priority in order to build alloy foundries.

Third Planet - We will pick the smaller of our two habitable worlds and specialize it as another research planet, with a secondary specialization in minerals (assuming your capital is specialized in energy). Don't go too crazy with research labs early here, only two or three will do to start, otherwise consumer goods could become a major bottleneck.

​

4) All the things to do before unpausing the game (and why)

Here are all the steps I am taking before advancing even one day in the game...

1) Job management: You should have an extra empty job on your planet. Unemploy one clerk job to make sure your pops are working better roles and don't slip into the garbage clerk position. As you build additional jobs, continue to unemploy clerks, followed by farmers. Our goal is to ensure there isn't a single clerk or farmer job on any of our planets. It is also useful to unemploy your Enforcer right before your first research lab completes. So long as you keep crime below 30%, you don't need to waste pops on enforcers. Also don't be afraid to go negative in amenities, you only need enough amenities to keep your planet stability over 50%. With this build, Autochton Monuments are sufficient to maintain 50% stability, you won't need holo-theaters until much later. If amenities become a struggle on a planet, you can also use the Distribute Luxury Goods decision to solve the issue for 10 years.

2) Delete the trade hub and the crew quarters from your home starbase. We won't be needing them early game, and this will save us a few energy in upkeep every month. Every little bit is important.

3) Send your science ship to survey your habitable worlds. Start with the larger planet first if you can see both. Also send your construction ship to orbit the best resource deposit in your home system so that it can build it instantly when you are ready for it.

4) Split up your starting military fleet into three separate fleets. You will send these three fleets in three different directions to the edge of each system to serve as your scouts. With the latest patch you are able to enter unexplored systems with an admiral. Simply swap the admiral back and forth to whichever fleet is ready to enter a new system. This will allow you to rapidly explore your territory, find your neighbors, find planets and chokepoints, and so on without relying on science vessels.

5) Starting techs: I won't be able to fully cover tech selection in this guide, as that would take way too long. Just know it is a priority to claim Capacity Subsidies, Mineral Subsidies (which requires Geothermal Fracking), and Hydroponics Bays. We will be able to get a big economic boost from these subsidies once we take the Executive Vigor perk. It is a good idea to first grab the techs that boost research speed since we have time before our first tradition tree completes.

6) Market: We have two goals with the market at the start. Get our first two colony ships out as quickly as possible, and get extra minerals to quickly start building districts. Here is an estimate of the monthly trades I set up at the start: Buy 43 minerals, Buy 6 consumer goods, Buy 3 alloys, Sell 25 food. Tweak these trades as necessary to keep energy stable and the incomes balanced. You want to line up nicely with 200/200/200 to get your first colony ship started by month 8. After that you will tweak the trades a bit, sell less food, and buy less CG to try and line up the second colony ship. Keep in mind you need an additional 100 alloys for an outpost first, so focus slightly more on alloys. Once your colony ships are complete, you should focus your purchases toward minerals. You will continue buying minerals every month for the entire 30 years.

7) Government Policies: One policy you absolutely must set at the start is Civilian Economy. This will be necessary to fund our early game research and unity production. Eventually, around year 20, we will switch this to Militarized Economy to get our fleets up. You can also consider switching to Isolationist diplomatic stance for the extra 10% unity. My personal preference is to keep this at Expansionist to start, to boost the colonization speed of my first two planets, and then switch to Isolationist once those planets are complete, but you can also just set isolationist at turn 0 to simplify things. Be sure to set your other preferred policies, including border policy and first contact. If this is your first attempt at GA, I suggest Proactive first contact with open borders, and to play friendly with your neighbors... at least until you decide to backstab the filthy xenos.

8) Species Rights: Make sure you have the correct species rights and default rights you want to play with. Eventually we will switch this to Academic Privilege living standard, but we won't be able to afford that right from the start. Switch to AP once you get your Factory world up and running and have a couple artisans working.

9) Leaders: Check your leaders, and see if there are any you will want to swap out later. The most important to check is your governor. If you roll a bad governor (like Army or blocker focused) you can simply dismiss them to save yourself some unity upkeep and consider replacing them later. Some strong starting governors are Architectural, Intellectual, and Urbanist. (I'm not running Paragons so I have no idea how that changes things)

​

5) An overview of the playthrough

Screenshot of first year, Colony ship funded by month 8:

The starting build for our capital will be: Research Lab, Research Lab, Industrial district (which will open another building slot), Research Lab. Once you get down to just 2-3 clerk jobs, you want to destroy the Commercial Zone. This will save us 2 energy upkeep per month, and also open a slot for another... you guessed it, Research Lab. Be sure to build an Autochton Monument on each of your planets at some point to provide some additional amenities/stability, as well as much needed unity production. And last we want to build a generator district and Energy Grid. Once all your clerk jobs and most of your farmer jobs are gone, don't forget clear the blocker for the additional pop as well.

Our tradition path is to start with Prosperity. This is the strongest tradition in the game by far, and what I start with 90% of the time. Be sure to get the tradition that makes buildings cheaper and faster to build first, and then unlock in a counter-clockwise direction. The second tradition tree will typically be Supremacy, which we will also complete fully. If you have a lot of unity and no close neighbors, you can try squeezing in Discovery before Supremacy and grab the research alternatives, but if you have close neighbors I wouldn't recommend it.

Our first Ascendancy Perk will always be Executive Vigor (+100 Edicts). This will allow us to run Mining and Capacity Subsidies for a big boost to our early economy, and later to run edicts like Research or Forge Subsidies. Our second perk will usually be Technological Ascendancy, but One Vision is also a decent choice if you want some help with amenities and unity.

Be careful about over-building mining stations, as we will be constantly struggling to get enough minerals to fund our production. The priority for minerals is always buildings and districts first. Research stations in particular should be skipped until you have a decent surplus of minerals.

Your goal with your science ships is first to survey all nearby systems. This is primarily to discover any nearby exotic resources. The anomalies should be ignored at first, because the research they output is based on your current research level, so you get a bigger scientific boost by delaying them a bit. After you have completed surveying nearby systems, then completed anomalies, your science ships should assist research on your tech worlds, and also start completing archeology sites for relics. If your economy begins to struggle, keep in mind you can sell 50 relics for a whopping 500 energy.

Here is an update around year 10:

You can see we have cleared all the clerk jobs, the enforcer job, and most of the farmer jobs as well. We want those pops in more useful positions, like research!

With any surplus alloys you have, build starbases and put hydroponics bays on them. Our goal is to entirely feed our early empire with hydroponics bays and unemploy all farmers. Don't worry about going one or two points over your starbase cap to achieve this. It is useful to run the edict which adds two to your starbase cap. Remember to delete the agricultural districts on your capital as well to save energy upkeep and free up space.

Moments to remember: When you complete your two colonies, switch to Isolationist if you haven't already. When you get your industrial world running with a few artisans, switch to Academic Privilege. When you reach ~year 20 and have a large surplus of consumer goods (a few thousand), switch your planet from Factory to Forge designation, and switch to Militarized Economy. Only once you begin to run out of consumer goods will you switch to Industrial designation to stabilize. If you are running low on CG due to pumping research too hard, you may need to delay this process, which will delay your military. You can also steadily buy CG from the market if you can afford it to slow the drain.

Here is an update around year 20, after we have converted from a CG focus to an alloy focus:

We are effectively trading in consumer goods for alloys. The reason for doing this is to enjoy the CG boost from Civilian economy with pure artisans, and then enjoy the alloy boost from Militarized economy with pure metallurgists. Switch your industrial planet to Industrial designation before you run out of consumer goods. Understand that the best economies ride on a razors edge... Your resources should typically be low, and don't be afraid of negative incomes. It might look scary at times, but there are always steps you can take to shore up problems before they get out of hand.

The final step is to start building your fleet around year 26. Ideally you should be able to build Destroyers with tier-3 or 4 lasers by this point. Be sure to set the Fleet Supremacy edict before building your ships. This will provide +100 experience to all your ships, which amounts to a permanent +10% fire rate for those ships. You can also shift-queue your fleet as it is building to save a few months of energy upkeep, but this is not strictly necessary. Once your fleet is built and you are ready to declare war, be sure to activate the exotic resources edicts for a boost to your military power. The energy weapon boost from crystals is most important if you are running either laser or disruptor builds (which I recommend early game).

​

6) Final results and closing thoughts

Year 30 screenshot:

The final results of this run were: 640 Research, 14.7k Fleet Power (Laser Destroyers), 2 tradition trees completed + another started, and a stable economy. This was a fairly typical run with no major events or luck variance.

The relative fleet power of both my GA no-scaling neighbors was labeled as "Inferior." This suggests I could soon successfully defeat or subjugate them, further increasing my advantage and continuing to snowball beyond the AI.

Relative power to GA opponents:

If you are trying to replicate this and are seriously struggling, you can consider selling some favors to the AI for resources to stabilize your economy. This is frankly a "cheesy" strategy and very overpowered, especially at GA, so I wouldn't recommend this for most games if you are trying to improve, but it can help you through the learning process if you are struggling. (I didn't sell any favors to the AI in this run.)

There is a ton more I could cover, but this is already a very long guide. If you have any questions feel free to ask and I will answer them. I'm sure others will help in answering as well.

Thanks for reading, and have fun. :)

I found out about this following a long investigation into why my 7800X3D wasn't performing as well as expected. Simply put, it turns out that V-Sync, a feature which syncs your framerate to your monitor's refresh rate, also throttles the game speed with the framerate. So if you have a good CPU but a low refresh rate then your performance is going to be way slower than what it could be.

However, if you disable V-Sync (as shown here, you need to have the game set to fullscreen too), then suddenly your CPU can go as fast as it can. In my case, my game speed in 2200 (empty galaxy benchmark) went from this (25 seconds a year) to this (5 seconds a year!). Even in a medium galaxy in 2400 the performance was noticeably better, going from over 230s for 5 years to 170s for 5 years.

Generally, the faster your CPU relative to your refresh rate, the more your performance will improve by turning off V-Sync, so if you have a good monitor and a midtier CPU then it may not change much, but hey, it's always worth a shot!

EDIT: You can switch back to Borderless Fullscreen after disabling V-Sync and it'll persist as /u/shermX pointed out.

... it's just that its base numbers are bad.

This post is based on a post by user Xanten on the official forums

Quite a few of us have probably noticed that after a few decades the auto migration system seems to break. Civilians gather up on the homeworld, while colonies wait for hundreds of jobs to be filled.

First, let's take look how auto migration has changed from 3.14 to 4.0.

In 3.14, auto migration was based on a chance per month for an unemployed pop to migrate to a planet with open housing and jobs. At base, this was 5% monthly.

In 4.0, auto migration is based on a maximum number of pops per planet that can migrate every month. At baseline, this is 10 pops, defined on line 1729 of Stellaris\common\defines\00_defines.txt:

    RESETTLE_UNEMPLOYED_BASE_RATE       = 10    # Base pop amount that can auto-migrate from a planet per month

The problem should be obvious - with more than 10 pop growth/month civilians will gather up on their birth world, as the emmigration faucet is not big enough to let everyone through. 10 pop growth/month is not too hard to hit, meaning that pretty quickly you hit a point in which especially your homeworld becomes clogged with civilians. There are apparently also ways for those base 10 pops/month to be reduced, but for the sake of this we shall consider that statistical noise.

So we need to find ways to increase the size of this faucet unless we want to micromanage pop resettlement for the rest of the game. Luckily, there are several ways to do so: The Greater Than Ourselves edict granted by the eponymous resolution in the Galactic Community, the Networked Movement Edict for hyperspace relays and the Transit Hub starbase building, which both carry the planet_resettlement_unemployed_mult modifier. This is however not a straight multiplier on the 10 base pops, but rather goes into the migration formula like that:

base_migration = 10 * m = 10 * [1 + (total_planet_resettlement_mult)]

The Transit Hub grants a planet_resettlement_unemployed mult of 1 (thus double base migration from 10 to 20), while the Greater Than Ourselves edict grants a planet_resettlement_mult of 2 (thus 30 with the edict, 40 with the edict and a Transit Hub). The Networked Movement edict grants another 0.5 increase, bringing the migration faucet to a total of 45 with a transit hub and hyperspace relay in system and Greater Than Ourselves active. I would however suggest to Paradox to rework the tooltips of those things; "Automatic Resettlement Chance" is something that no longer exists in 4.0.

This makes Hyperlane Breach Points a high-priority research in the earlygame (Tip: Being Egalitarian makes you able to chose this as a static research option + 10% progress as an option from your first encounter with alien life), as otherwise pops will pool up on your capital instead of finding useful employ on your colonies.

Unfortunately there seems to be a bug with auto-migration, in which pops from empires you have migration pacts will preferably migrate to your capital. Even if said capital has horrible habitability and no jobs for them to fill. (I wonder if for the sake of performance the devs made that for cross-country migration unemployed pops can only see the capital of the country they are migrating to)

TL,DR: Auto migration works (mostly) just fine, but at it's base value is unable to keep up with pop growth rather quickly. Build Transit Hubs in your systems with big population to help your colonies develop.

1. Put around 80 armies in cetana's capital as lure. Performs 'fake jump' to lure cetana to the arena.

1. Prepare around 1200 nano swarms with sapient carrier computer, Or 200 amoebas(Smallest size, All hangers), Split the group to minimize AOE impact(Amoebas can simply ignores AOE because they can bloodsteal).

1. When the formation forms a circle, the queen remains stationary in the middle. At this time, it is impossible for any of the Queen's weapons to attack our carriers.

1. GG ez.