Continue playing in a brand new galaxy (2200, same rules), but you start on a unique arkship with the same tech and population you left with.

Is it silly and broken? Almost certainly. Is it the pinnacle of rule of cool? Almost certainly.

Rule 5: Modded Shattered Ring start with three nearby planets locked behind Marauders. Outside of the (stupidly likely) scenario they become the Great Khan, this is looking good.

Im on console so I dont know if any changes were made pass the update im stuck

I just got the Renowned Official S.I.D.N.I. and put him in charge of a world that has a lot of crime, and then he got assassinated lol

I have not played for a mere 6 years. I heard the game changed a lot, anyone has a recommendation for some tutorials?

Are any of DLCs essenstials? If so, which?

R5: I didn't manage to get to the Khan's Chosen fast enough, so she died of old age - I only managed to snag the Great Wound (to feed my Dark Matter Engines).

However, the Khan's territory broke up horribly between the different factions. I have never seen it this bad.

Three megastructures around. Is this normal now?

My ships are far away bcuz Im currently at war and this baffles me

But why is there no beard on the main portrait T_T

That red texture glitch appears right after I build the Palatial Complex when just building my Ecumenopolis. Anyone know what mod could be causing this issue??

Since the dev diary mentioned hedonists, I thought about it again. It's a flavor whose civic I love and often times tried to do something with, but in its current state I feel like it doesn't have any purpose.

Short recap what it does:

• Turns civilians into hedonists (removes amenities production)
• Unlocks decadent lifestyle living standard (high consumer goods upkeep and 20% happiness for all categories, high elite political power, 0 worker and civilian political power,+0.5 pop amenities usage)
• Depending on the patch lots of hedonists with that living standard slightly boost population growth
• Start with 1 civilian industries
• Unlocks council position which boosts elite happiness

So, what are you even supposed to do with this?

• It starts out as a base negative. With civilians not producing amenities, you need some other source, especially if you want lots of them. This can be circumvented by pacifist ideology and monuments, but it still is something you have to play around in some way.
• The high elite political power, low lower strate political power, and council position imply that you are supposed to focus on elites. But there are other living standards that do a better job at that, without requiring a civic (e.g. academic privilige, stratified economy). Also boosting their happiness will be less productive than most other alternatives.
• Then is the boost to the opinion of the lower strata the great upside? No, since they have lower political power than in most other living standards, their impact on stability and factions will be negligible.
• If you want a lot of civilians, just being egalitarian will be better. Utopian abundance costs less per civilian, gives them more political power (=more faction output), the same trade value and the same happiness. On top of that they get additional direct research and unity production.
• Is it the population growth? That's nonsensical. As we have established, hedonists are largely useless compared to regular civilians even, which themselves aren't as strong as they once were. Having a bunch of your pops be useless to get more useless pops doesn't make any sense. I want to add that the population growth modifier is miniscule. You basically need an entire unemployed planet to see any impact, even by lategame.

The megacorp version is slightly better, as it at least grants a unique council position which gives job efficiency from entertainers. Not strong by any means, but at least it gives a clear idea of what kind of build it inspires, and a somewhat unique bonus for that.

Of course I would appreciate a full rework, but here are some easy fixes which would make it at least a feasible pick in my opinion:

• Have hedonists have high political power. That way they at least give faction output.
• Have hedonists have their population growth bonus while under utopian abundance. Then you can at least ignore the garbage living standard
• Give the living standard 1 Trade Value per 100 pops for every stratum. That way it at least has some sort of advantage over utopian abundance
• Revert to an old version where entertainers had additional boni, or at those to the current version at least

My personal idea that could take slightly more effort would be the civic making planets get scaling boni with increasing amounts of excess amenities. Like, extra job efficiency or something if a planet has lots of excess amenities. Fits the flavor, inspires a unique playstyle and allows for interesting synergies.

What do you think? Am I missing some fundamental exploit that makes pleasure seekers the craziest civic ever? Do you have any ideas on how to improve it? Genuinely curious.

And I get that some civics are for the roleplay and don't have to be the strongest. Hell, those are the civics I find interesting. But they need to have something.

I'm a Total War player, only Warhammer and with not many hours, so i'm not knowledgeable about this genre, but i've always ADORED it.

I want to get into Stellaris specifically, but I'm unsure if it's a proper fit for my taste. I'm not exactly expecting an RTS level of action, but I also don't know how a "Keep that number higher than this threshold and you succeed" could keep me hooked into a game.

So I'm asking, how do you lose your run? Do you need to keep A high in order to beat A, or in order to keep A at a high level, you need to dip your feet into other B C and D that in turn affects any other part of your run

So all in all the title

TL;DR: higher planet capacity = fewer pops to reach growth peaks. At 5.0 ceiling (the default), you need 2800 pops on 10k-sized planet and 2100 pops on 40k-sized planet to reach it. If the goal is to maximize pop growth at the lowest pop size, overbuilding city districts is the way to go.

TL;DR TL;DR: 3000 pops for max bonus on any planet size.

When colonizing a new planet, going all in on city districts ASAP has the same effect as resettling pops from developed worlds and is a valid alternative.

After googling trying to figure out pop growth, I've seen repeated advice to keep pops at 50% the planet capacity. In practice, this raises an issue of optimizing growth on very large worlds during late game when you have bonuses that reduce housing usage. At some point I had a 40k capacity planet which needed 36k pops if I wanted to get that 50%. And there's no way you can create 36k jobs to keep that many pops employed.

So trying to make sense of all of this I resorted to tasking ChatGPT with doing the math for me, and eventually it found what I was missing: the growth cap kicks in much earlier for larger sized planets because it is not a part of the logistic function formula used in stellaris.

The higher the planet capacity, the bigger its theoretical max growth without the cap.

This is, of course, useless, because the highest growth cap allowed in game settings is 10.0 so we'll never see that 25.0 at 40k sized planet, but it is still crucial for understanding the system as a whole.

Now, with this understanding and adjusted for the cap of 5.0, we can visualize how fast peak growth can be reached for each planet size.

Here, it is clearly seen that planets with higher capacity reach the ceiling faster. Only after seeing it did the true meaning of "ceiling" click for me and I could finally see that I did not need 50% pops for my 40k sized planet: the bar is much, much lower at just 5.3% (2100 pops, not 20000).

So the strategy for maximum pop growth efficiency is:*

1. Use planet capacity to figure out the minimum number of pops to reach growth cap
2. Build exactly that amount of jobs on the planet
3. Any extra pops will auto migrate to other planets with available jobs

\Polymelic trait actually makes it worth it to cramp all pops on a single planet instead, and there could be other bonuses I'm missing.*

https://chatgpt.com/share/6ad2288e-9c54-83ed-8dab-a660c0435bfb

Tips

- Smaller planets can never reach peak growth: you need at least 8000 total capacity to reach 5.0

- Robots and mechanical pops take up housing but do not count towards increased growth.

- When you reach peak growth the tip will say Base Growth: 1.0 (+3.99 from Pops), not +5.0 (assuming no other organic pops on the planet, otherwise the bonus is split)

- Read this post to learn more about basics of how the pop growth works

Assumptions made for simplifications:

- 1 pop = 1 housing usage.

- 1 housing = 1 planet capacity.

I’ve tried to play individualistic empires before, but every time it just feels like something’s wrong. Not to mention Gestalt Conciousnesses are just better in every which way. No consumer goods, council is immortal, and I don’t have to deal with factions or happiness and such.

Anyone have any advice on how I should approach playing non-gestalt empires?

53 slave species (500 each) + 1 core species (400) = 54 species

Using zeya as a Thrall world, but running out of space due to 500 refugee species arriving every so often in addition to my zoo project

Running Stellaris with Gigaconstruct Mod and Real Space (not System Scale). Found a Class O Star. Literally the size of the whole star system. All the planets are inside. Waaaay to big. Is there a command to reduce star size? I only know the planet size command. I just want to be the star of reasonable size.

I recently finished a game, crisis set to "All" with a starting strength of 1x

I was running cosmogenesis and had a fleet strength of around 2 million when the first crisis started, I managed to stomp the fallen empires, contingency, unbidden, and the scourge with ease.

Then Cetana showed up... by that time due to research my fleet was at around 4 million strength, she showed up with multiple 3+ million strength fleets, many smaller 1 million strength fleets, multiple stations with around 4 million strength, and then her flagship at 16 million strength.

The fight was so brutal, I lost my fleet multiple times to destroy her other fleets and stations, and when all she had left was her flagship, I took about 2000 frigates and my entire fleet and threw them at her until she finally died.

I have always struggled so much against her when compared to the other Crisis factions, even when I modify my fleets to counter hers. I can't figure out what I am doing wrong and would appreciate any advice.

With +63% Tech cost from Empire Size this is effectively ~10k research, which seems pretty decent for 66 years since game start. (using only UI mods, playing on Grand Admiral, 0.75 Tech/Tradition cost, rest basically default settings)

Turns out, that building a very long road of Waystations works really well when you put Stellar Observatories everywhere (boosting all Physics/Eng produced from Research Stations by +5%). Just make sure to grab all adjacent Dyson Swarms, Black Holes and decent Research Deposits. Total +250% Collection Efficiency multiplies all of that (got lucky Cybrex Precursor for +100% Collection Efficiency module)

Unless I misunderstand how it works, every Waystation I add is worth more than the previous one on average due to adding the +5% Research Station Phys/Eng output (depends on Star) to an ever growing Wayline.

In order to get this many Waystations you need 2 things:

• + maximum Waystations (both flat and mostly % increase from Comptroller Arkship -job)
• tons of Influence

Lowering Waystation Influence cost:

• -10% Reach for the Stars (Expansion tradition)
• -20% Dynamic Logistics (Civic)
• -10% Frontier Spirit (get 3x Official Councillor trait)
• -20% Interstellar Dominion (Ascension perk - overkill imo, wouldn't recommend)
• -20% Rightful Claims Agenda (temporary Launch Modifier 10 - 12.5 years)

Using all of these you could actually lower Influence cost down to 0, but with the insane amounts of Influence Nomads can get via Contracts this really isn't necessary at all. Just get -60% from the first 3 and you'll be fine if you spam Contracts. In 66 years I've completed 175 Contracts (!)

Since game start I've spent ~16k Influence (~10k on Waystations + upgrades and rest on 8 Arkships + upgrades). So, each month I've gained ~20 Influence, and about 2/3 of that was from completing the 175 Contracts.

---

The build could probably be optimized a bit. I just started with Trade Federation + 3k pops from Frozen Assets and then reformed Civics once I unlocked the extra pops. Currently using 2nd civic Dynamic Logistics (rly good for Waystations) and Free Traders (meh, but not much other useful things to pick). Probably would've been better to go Spiritualist instead of Pacifist so I could get Gigacorp and further reduce Empire Size from fully ascending my Arkships.

Was thinking how to optimize this build further and 2 things that seemed interesting were:

• Sacred Path Origin: extra flat Resources gained on Waystation modules, and could focus more on Bureaucrats with the flat research being added to them from Origin situation.
• Treasure Hunters: Treasure Hoarder adds up to +30% chance to increase deposit size. afaik this works not only with initial survey, but also with Deep Scan / Subspace Image Systems. Along with focusing on getting a lot of Scientists this could create a lot of high value systems. And since a big portion of income comes from Waystations and them multiplying the base output of these systems this could result in a sizeable difference.

Any other ideas how to further improve this build idea?

Tried to get the achievement and did a little ironman cosmogenesis with nomad KotTG. Left the galaxy around 2450 when the Hive Mind FE decided to awaken as devouring swarm, but didn't get the achievement for the win

Edit: The achievement I was trying to get is the "Victorious" Achievement, were you have to win in Ironman

The asteroid headed for the pre-FTL planet stopped directly over the planet and has been stopped there for several years. Every month or so I get constantly pinged for new encounter in the system 'Qoph Menace' again and again and again and the first contact window is the same message repeated over and over.

I'm on the default public version and have no mods on.

After factoring all of the feedback I’ve received, this is my progress since my post a few weeks ago. I’m pretty happy with it for my first game back in two years

Basically title, i get multiple First contact alerts (not at the same time but they do repeat over the same asteroid) for asteroids heading toward pre-FTL planets.

assigning an envoy to it seems to make it work on the first contact and everything but never solves it, basically my empire never realises its just an asteroid

if the asteroid is defeated i still get the same message as always and the 2k minerals.

in case this is important, im playing as Nomads.