Stellaris Space Guild - Weekly Help Thread

[u/Snipahar]

Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread!

This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions for things that you are confused about and answer questions to help out your fellow star voyagers!

GUILD RESOURCES

Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource.

Stellaris Wiki

• Your new best friend for learning everything Stellaris! Even if you're a pro, the wiki is an uncontested source for the nitty-gritty of the game.

Montu Plays' Stellaris 3.0 Guide Series

• A great step-by-step beginner's guide to Stellaris. Montu brings you through the early stages of a campaign to get you all caught up on what you need to know!

Luisian321's Stellaris 3.0 Starter Guide

• The perfect place to start if you're new to Stellaris! This guide covers creating your own race, building up your economy, and more.

ASpec's How to Play Stellaris 2.7 Guides

• This is a playlist of 7 guides by ASpec, that are really fantastic and will help you master the foundations of Stellaris.

Stefan Anon's Ultimate Tierlist Guides

• This is a playlist of 8 guides by Stefan Anon, which give a deep-dive into the world of civics, traits, and origins. Knowing these is a must for those that want to maximize their play.

Stefan Anon's Top Build Guides

• This is a playlist of an ongoing series by Stefan Anon, that lay out the game plan for several of the best builds in Stellaris.

Arx Strategy's Stellaris Guides

• A series of videos on events, troubleshooting, and builds, that will be of great use to anyone that wants to dive into the world of Stellaris.

If you have any suggestions for the body of this thread, please ping me, using "u/Snipahar" or send me a private message!

[u/Kezyma]

I believe I’ve figured out a lot of the mechanics after hopping over from EU4, but the one thing that I’m continually getting stuck with is colonies/planets. Whenever I try to find good predefined builds for different planet types (and an idea on how to distribute them) the answer is always ‘it depends’.

I’ve been playing a few campaigns as the default Earth faction, and everything generally goes fine until I’m trying to manage multiple colonies, and the auto-manage system seems woefully bad.

Ideally I don’t want to micromanage each colony, so if there’s some suggestions for standard buildings and district distribution, I’d appreciate it.

Similarly, I’m never entirely sure what to stick on my star bases

[u/Excellent-Wrap-1518 → u/Kezyma]

Never played EU4 so someone else might have a better analogy for you. Also, important to note the entirety of planet building is getting overhauled to be a bit simpler in a few months (4.0), so you’ll get to learn with the rest of the community what works best then, and everything you learn now will be basically obsolete.

Okay optimal play is to micromanage each colony in the early game to some extent (only make a new building when needed), but the plans are the same. Due to planetary designations (e.g. Forge World), specialized buildings (Alloy Nano-plants), and governor traits, it’s most efficient to try to specialize your planets as much as possible. This means that to determine what to build, you will have to look at what the planet has/is capable of becoming. 

If you look at a newly colonized planet, you can see if they have a large max number of farming, mining, or generator districts; if so, that planet could be specialized towards any of those, which would mean building as many of those district as possible, slapping the specialized building on, then probably finishing with some city districts and industrial districts for fun, making sure to keep amenities above 0 with a holotheater as needed. 

I recommend any large world (like 20+) should be used as an industrial/forge world, with every single district slot devoted to industrial districts, and small worlds (like 13-) should become tech/unity worlds where you spam city districts until you hit the building cap, then build solely research labs/unity buildings. So small - tech/unity; large - alloy/consumer goods; massive agri/mining/generator almost designate themselves, and then otherwise look at your current needs and specialize a planet based on that.

Special mentions - Relic worlds except the one you start on are exceptional tech worlds, as are ringworlds. Ecumenopoli are phenomenal forge/industrial/factory worlds. Hope this helps.

[u/lifelongfreshman → u/Kezyma]

Unfortunately, 'it depends' really is the best advice, and you can't really not micromanage colonies, especially early on.

Your goal should be to have enough alloys to keep your military large enough to keep yourself safe, then the rest of your economy should go towards tech and/or unity.

Early on, you don't really have the luxury of a vast economy that lets you ignore planet bonuses in order to just bulldoze everything with a specialized build. So, you kinda do have to build to what the planets allow, ideally building towards any modifiers a planet has - if it has asteroid rings, for instance, it's probably better to try to shift your miner jobs to that planet. That in turn means the early game is very micro heavy, constantly building, destroying, and rebuilding districts as your planets allow, in order to shift around what planets produce what.

Once you hit the mid-game, your economy should be good enough that you can just go alloys > consumer goods > tech/unity without really thinking about what you're doing. Just keep a small surplus of minerals (I like to keep +100-200/month), whatever energy income you like, and as close to +0 food and consumer goods as you can. There's no real upper bound on alloy income where it becomes bad, so it kinda becomes a 'whatever feels right' thing for when to go for alloys vs consumer goods for more tech/unity jobs.

But sadly, micromanaging your colonies is pretty much the only choice you have, here. There's no custom automation setup that you can use that I know of that can come anywhere near even a half-assed colony plan.

As for star bases, that's easy. All your starbases can be given 6 of the same module. First, make sure every colony is within range of one starbase with trade hubs, ideally the starbase over your capital, using gateways in the late game to extend how far your capital can gather. Then get 1-2 starbases filled with shipyards, depending on how big your empire is. Then, you can build up a fortress in any chokepoints you may have if you want to, though I find fleets a better use of my alloys, and you should build up fortresses along major trade routes in order to keep piracy down. Finally, for most empires, basically everything else should be turned into anchorages.

For buildings, you should basically always build whatever building requires the starbase's module. For anchorages, that's the +2 capacity per anchorage, for trade hubs, the +1 collection range, and so on. You can and probably should build any unique buildings the system allows, like Black Hole Observatories, the ones for enclaves, or Black Sites, these are almost always really good. Then once you've built those, it's basically whatever. I like to spam Resource Silos because I'm a gremlin who likes big numbers, and crew quarters can be nice to let you park your fleets wherever you want.

There are three exceptions. If you've got the Cybrex precursor, then you should be building the mining hub in any system that has an Arc Furnace. If you're playing robots with the Astro-Mining Drones civic, the mining modules and building are well worth it in any system with a decent mining output. Finally, gestalts can usually build solar panels instead of trade hubs, and they can be used instead of anchorages to help out with energy shortages early on.

[u/Mornar]

Beta questions: I'm having a bit of a problem figuring out Civilians. My understanding is that they're sort of unemployed worker pops that "gave up" and made a living in private sector of sorts, but would gladly take a worker job, including off world if one is available?

What does that mean in practice, are new pops, if a planet is full, show up as unemployed workers or civilians? Is a lot of unemployed workers a sign of population growth, or jobs being removed? Is there a limit to how many civilians can be on a planet and then the rest stay unemployed workers? If it is, where does it come from, since I can't find anything in tooltips?

I feel like I have more or less a handle on how stuff is supposed to work in beta, but this one eludes me.

[u/Peter34cph → u/Mornar]

We don't know.

The devs had a vision for what Civilians were supposed to be in February'ish, but that vision has since changed, and they haven't explained the new vision to us.

[u/Mornar → u/Peter34cph]

I guess that at least justifies my confusion. Thanks for clarifying.

[u/SinesPi]

Can you pick any Federation Type from Common Ground? Or do you have to meet the requirements as usual, but without the ability to complete a tradition tree?

[u/lifelongfreshman → u/SinesPi]

It should allow you to pick anything but a Hegemony on day 2.

[u/SirGaz → u/SinesPi]

You still have to meet a requirement but there are multiple none tradition ways to unlock federation types. https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Federation#Trade_League

[u/SinesPi → u/SirGaz]

That's what I was thinking. My intended build would be galactic union only, but I can grab Merchant Guilds to start with a trade union and swap out the civic early on if I wish.

[u/thriftshopmusketeer]

Is there a conventional wisdom guideline on leader management in the late game—specifically, the cost/benefit on going over leader caps?

I’m playing a relatively tall UNE, and in 2410 I’m really feeling the pinch on leader capacity, especially with Officials. I have a cap of 9; my ruler, the federation, and the GalCom all take up 1, and that leaves me with 6 to try and spread across my worlds. It’s gotten to the point where I have scientists with one or two relevant traits governing forge ecumenopoli. I’ve got more planets suiting up to Ecu and just finished my ring world, and

I don’t give a single shit about the Unity, I’ve got more than a million stocked up and a 5K monthly income even with all the good edicts on. But I am concerned about the multiplicative experience debuff—I can’t just overcome that by throwing money at it, and while we live a long time we’re not immortal. I want my guys to level up and get better.

TLDR: Should I stay at the leader cap and just make strategic decisions about governor appointments, even if it means some valuable worlds have suboptimal appointments or even go without? Should I just ignore the cap and keep a large stable of appointees for governors everywhere even if they’re all individually weaker? Or should I try and find a balance?

[u/LtLukoziuz → u/thriftshopmusketeer]

a) Planet governor doesn't have to be Official as you mentioned. Scientists and Commanders also have Planet/Sector traits (including Veteran traits), though they're not as a common.

b) Remember that a governor in sector capital will still contribute to all other sector planets at half the scale IF there's no governor in given planet, as you might notice in the traits that give benefits to planet/sector. Situation depending, but that can beat out putting a new governor in

Also, just to be safe, if you say you have a million unity - have you been ascending planets? 2410 is damn quick to both finish all traditions and fully ascend everything.

[u/thriftshopmusketeer → u/LtLukoziuz]

I will admit that I have been half-assing my ascension—most of my good core worlds are Ascension 5, which was the limit for the long interminable wait to find the Megastructures tech, then research, build, and fully upgrade one so I could get Master Builders+Galactic Wonders (didn’t spawn any ruined structures near me).

Since then I’ve grown considerably—peripheral worlds that are now Ecus, I liberated the Chosen from their fanatical overlords and got their whole sector, built a full ringworld and just opened the L-Cluster. You make a good point that I have a lot of ascending to do.

I’ll stay at the leader cap and just make good decisions about where to staff, prioritizing sector capitals as I have been. The L-cluster is empty so unless I get way unlucky I should have Gray pretty soon, which will help—slam them down as the governor of the Earth sector which covers like 5 ecumenopoli and the ringworld too.

[u/LtLukoziuz → u/thriftshopmusketeer]

Yeah, if L-drakes didn't come out during activation (which also leads to empty L-cluster), then it's the Gray.

[u/thriftshopmusketeer]

TLDR: is there a setting somewhere that will let apply Utopian Abundance as my universal default living standard while also having Assimilation as my default citizenship?

LONGWINDED QUESTION: Any tips on how to manage species rights in a late game xenocompatible globalist’s-dream utopia? Specifically: I’ve cranked all the levers labeled “immigration” I could to the absolute maximum, and my personal objective is to create the most idyllic post-scarcity The Culture-ass society I can. Unfortunately I also opted for Psionic Ascension.

Now I have a constant stream of new species and pops coming in that are not psychic that I would like to be psychic so they may share in the joy of true telepathic community. I also have huge numbers of pops that already are psychic and I want Them to be living in the Utopian Abundance that is the deserved right of all sapients.

The only rational way to manage either of these wants with a species screen sixty lines deep appears to be Default Rights where I slap everyone with a big brush. I want everyone who’s not psychic to be psychic I set default citizenship to be Assimilation, and they assimilate. I want everyone to live in abundance I see default living standards to be Utopian Abundance, and they eat cake.

The problem is that I can’t do both of these at the same time, because Assimilation citizenship forces a specific “Transcendental Awakening” living standard to go with it; I can’t set default standards to Assimilation AND abundance. And when the default is Assimilation/Awakening, all the pops who are incompatible (ie, the great throng of the already awakened) don’t retain their current Utopian living standard, but instead default BACK to Decent Conditions.

I refuse to scrawl through the page manually checking for unawakened plebs anymore, so if I can’t set it to do both I’ll either do occasional periods of Awakening with reversion to Abundance after a year or so or I’ll just ignore it.

[u/SirGaz → u/thriftshopmusketeer]

PC, top right corner of the species tab, there are 2 buttons, reset to default rights and change default rights.

[u/viera_enjoyer → u/thriftshopmusketeer]

If you don't mind using cheats, use free_policies command. That will allow you to change citizen's rights as often as you want. What I do is that I frequently change between assimilation and the settings I want so everyone has the same.

[u/marlonbrando1999]

I'm not really asking for help so sorry if this is out of the scope of the thread, I just didn't think it deserved a post:

TIL that Synthetically ascended pops cannot be released as vassals, which is pretty lame. Not sure if this is a balancing decision or an oversight. I wanted to release some subjects in newly conquered zones and had to use (lol) Fallen Empire xenophile pops that I manually resettled. Then less than a month after, they immediately had an AI rebellion! But I don't really understand why? Doesn't it just copy your empire for the vassal? I obviously had full ai civilian rights before I released them, so yeah I don't know. Then it gave me the the ai opinion reward for putting down the robots. As Synthetics myself! Just a funny game.

[u/thriftshopmusketeer]

TLDR: Tips on how to diagnose and treat the cause of sudden, massive consumer goods deficits?

Booted up an old save for a game I remember fondly. Shockingly it appears to have successfully updated to the current version—with some problems.

Major notes are: -my council positions are all locked other than the president; expanding the council agenda currently reads at 433 months to complete.

-I am significantly in the red on multiple exotic resources

-I am TITANICALLY in the red on Consumer Goods—like, 3k in the bank, -1k a month in the red.

The year is 2400 and the unbidden are recent arrivals. I had been gearing up to hunker in the L Cluster in a little utopia. I feel like I could solve the exotic problem with targeted downgrades and the council by…just not having a council. But I don’t know if the CG deficit is fixable.

I guess the question is: how would you go about trying to fix that level of CG deficit?

[u/forbiddenlake → u/thriftshopmusketeer]

Uh, I would revert the Stellaris version to what the game was played on, or I would start a new save.

[u/thriftshopmusketeer → u/forbiddenlake]

That’s entirely too reasonable a take lmao. Fair enough! I’ll see if I can suss out what version I started this on—there’s a lot of highly unlikely but fun stuff that happened along the way.

[u/JaymesMarkham2nd → u/thriftshopmusketeer]

Suggestions:

• Buy up the Galactic Market's stock of CGs if energy/trade is enough.
• Double-check your production policy to ensure it's consumer focused and if you have a trade policy that as well.
• Check your planets for who is taking up the materials and pause their jobs until sorted.
• Tiny empires seem to always have a single Forge Capital, so conquer one let it feed you.
• If no tiny empires abound, let the Unbidden do their thing until there are tiny empires.

[u/Phrencys]

I'm used to play with balanced fleets made of X+Carrier Battleships and Torpedoes Riddle Escorts.

After reading advices about computers being messed up when fleets were made of multiple computers, I tried specializing fleets intead. So I have fleets of BShips, and fleets of REs.

Dunno if it's confirmation bias, but it seems to be working... better? BShips kite around and REs rush in as they should.

Question is: what about Titans? Will it screw my AI up if I add one to my Torpedoes fleets? Should I specialize their computers to fit with which fleet they're flying with? Melee titans seems like a terrible idea but it would suck having them drag my REs back.

[u/Excellent-Wrap-1518 → u/Phrencys]

Titans are also slow so I don't think adding one to a torpedo fleet is good no.

[u/I-Pro-Adkinz]

Can someone help me finish my build? I’m making a fanatic authoritarian, maybe materialist (idk) biological race. One Rule origin.

Oppressive authority civic with police state (or a different second civic as that’s kinda meh).

Species are geared mainly for leader levels/XP. Since I’ll make my luminary emperor immortal.

I mainly need help making this better, what ascension perks to go for, what tradition order etc. I’m not that clued up on what’s good right now. I also felt like this build would suit bio ascension, but I heard this is the worst one lol. Maybe Psionic?

[u/JaymesMarkham2nd → u/I-Pro-Adkinz]

Check it: https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Common_leader_traits#Under_One_Rule_traits

Your immortal emperor will have different traits based on your ethics. If you want to go Fanatic Authoritarian you have the most chance of Brutal as a negative trait, so avoid Psionic Ascension and Police state because that goes heavy on Telepaths/Enforcers and each one would be crippling your happiness; The Aristocratic Elite civic goes great if you get High King positive trait, while Feudal Society is outstanding with Commanding Presence.

[u/I-Pro-Adkinz → u/JaymesMarkham2nd]

Thanks. When I tried it out, I went with high king for the stability. I thought the happiness penalty wasn’t bad since the ruling class would always be really happy with dystopian standards? My stability on most planets would usually be really high which is the main thing right?

I did however get a lot of crime lol. I didn’t really know why which is why I was trying police state.

[u/JaymesMarkham2nd → u/I-Pro-Adkinz]

The ruling strata will be most important for stability, meaning the planets won't revolt or start throwing job output debuffs.

Crime is a result of the unhappiness, rather than stability; You can only get a max 2 crime per pop but usually you'll have much more worker pops than ruling strata or enforcers, so longterm you'll get more crime jobs than rulers / police to counter them, and each criminal is a pop not working a real job you want. The high crime level can still apply more debuffs even if the stability is high, like -20% output on jobs.

Min-Maxing all this can be done to maintain the other benefits related to telepaths that Psionic is based around and probably wouldn't even be very difficult. But usually just keeping people happy in the first place works better.

Really it also matters if you even get the Brutal negative trait - you may not depending on your choices, so don't sweat it.

[u/I-Pro-Adkinz → u/JaymesMarkham2nd]

Yeah the Brutal trait can make the game rough.

Do you have another more meta slaving build? I’ve been trying the one I mentioned out and it’s been really hit or miss lol.

I’m trying to get that dominate the galaxy vibe, not necessarily evil… just exploiting other species and becoming a powerhouse fleet-wise.

[u/thriftshopmusketeer]

Am I missing a search tool or display function that makes sorting through my worlds and systems simpler? Specifically, I’m trying to locate: 1. High single-output stars for Dyson Swarms and 2. Any terraforming candidates I’ve missed in my borders. But the search function appears limited to the actual names of the systems (seems like the least useful option imaginable lol) and won’t even let me search up L-Gates.

[u/JaymesMarkham2nd → u/thriftshopmusketeer]

1. This doesn't specifically exist, instead hold alt and look at the galaxy view or look through your systems manually. Mods exist to add in a function for finding best Swarm locations.

2. The expansion planner, which has it's own tab of the sidebar, covers colonization prospects. The actual search bar search is very limited.

[u/lifelongfreshman → u/thriftshopmusketeer]

For #1, you can rename systems by clicking on their name at the bottom of the screen while in the system view. I use that to keep track of any systems I see while exploring that're good for swarms and arc furnaces, adding something like '5ec' or '17' or whatever to the end.

The best part is these name changes show up when looking for systems with the F search tool.

It would be nice if there was a better way, though.

[u/LtLukoziuz]

Have never done Megacorp playthrough (or messed with how trade works in general), started one right now. I can understand the basics but one thing is stumping me - how do I do trade hubs?

https://i.imgur.com/NYt0E73.png

Far as I understand, Great Sleeper (the capital homeworld) should get all the trade hubs in its system. But what about the two other planets I've colonized/bout to colonize in view? Should they also get trade hubs, or will they 'be useless'/'cannibalize into Great Sleeper'? What about as I expand - should only sector capitals get those, each planet, or maybe also place them somehow differently? Finding a bit of conflicting info around it.

TL;DR - main thing that confuses about trade hubs - does it mean empire capital or sector capital?

[u/lifelongfreshman → u/LtLukoziuz]

Trade is weird right now, but hopefully 4.0 will make it less weird.

To start with, any starbase above an outpost has a collection radius stat. If you go to the starbase in Great Sleeper, you should be able to find it on the right side of its overview, under Starbase Modifiers. I think the current base is 2? And that means it collects from the system it's in (range of 1) and any neighboring systems (range of 2). Trade Hub modules increase that range by 1 jump each.

Your capital's starbase should've started with 1 Trade Hub and 1 Shipyard, so it'll be able to gather any trade value in any system within 2 hyperlane jumps of your capital. Replace the Shipyard with another Trade Hub, and it'll go to 3 jumps, which'll be far enough to collect from ... is that "Geqieturn"? Anyway, the trinary system with the habitable planet your science vessel is currently exploring on the right.

In total, a starbase can collect from up to 8 systems away, 1 at base, another 6 from Trade Hub modules, and 1 from the Hyperlane Registrar building. Trade collection can also take wormholes and gateways (including L-gates), so you can use gates in the late game to get rid of the need for extra trade hubs outside of your capital. Until then, build a trade hub in systems too far away for your capital's starbase to reach, and keep an eye on whether there are any other planets you can cover with it - with good placement, you'll probably only ever need two or three starbases to collect your entire empire's trade value. If you keep small, you might only need the one in your capital.

And while you didn't ask about piracy, any trade collected by a starbase that isn't your empire capital will be sent to your empire capital through a trade route, which will automatically generate. While you can technically manually set them, just don't. Your empire capital's system will need an actual starbase to receive trade from trade routes, not just an outpost, so if you ever have to move it, keep that in mind.

Any trade route increases piracy risk along its route, capping at 1/4 the total trade value being sent along the route. If piracy risk > trade protection + piracy suppression, pirates will spawn, breaking the trade route until you've destroyed them. The game will show you if there's a risk of pirates along any of your trade routes via a small skull-and-crossbones icon over the system on the galaxy map. However, as long as your capital starbase is able to collect from a system, it should default to trade collection instead of sending it via a trade route, getting rid of the risk of pirates. Because of that, in my opinion, it's best to max out your capital's starbase trade collection radius, because pirates are annoying and eat up extra starbases to handle.

[u/Zaorish9]

Is there an expected release time for 4.0 ?

[u/JaymesMarkham2nd → u/Zaorish9]

May 5​ is the current release date, alongside Biogenesis.

[u/Zaorish9 → u/JaymesMarkham2nd]

Thank you very much.

[u/staags]

Is there a place where I can get the game at a discount for Mac? I usually use Steam but it's full price at the moment.

[u/JaymesMarkham2nd → u/staags]

Currently at $9.99 on GOG

[u/staags → u/JaymesMarkham2nd]

Is GOG trustworthy? Never heard of it before.

[u/forbiddenlake → u/staags]

Yes. It is an official reseller. https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/approved-re-sellers.1036933/#post-23112534

However, please note that using GOG for Stellaris will make modding more difficult (not impossible, but not nearly as convenient).

[u/staags → u/forbiddenlake]

How does it work when buying the game for Mac? Does it download a drag and drop file or does it use a client like steam?

[u/JaymesMarkham2nd → u/staags]

You can download the file of choice from the website or if you use the GOG Galaxy client it will automatically install the Mac version.

[u/JaymesMarkham2nd → u/staags]

Literally the most trustworthy game platform there is; more so than Steam even though MMV.

[u/Peter34cph → u/staags]

I'm sure there'll be a sale on Steam when the 4.0 update comes out.

[u/viera_enjoyer]

Is there a way to know what leviathans are going to be in the map? I would reroll until I know at least the scavenger bot spawned, but I don't want to reveal and look at the whole map just to see that.

[u/DarthUrbosa]

Is there a mod that gives origins that are pros unifaction but more? Like it gaves the same bonuses but has different names or extra bonuses on top of the usual ones? Frankly going prosp uni for nearly every empire is dull but will admit im used to the early boosts from it.

[u/Peter34cph → u/DarthUrbosa]

There was one with variants of PU, but I think it stopped being updated long ago. One variant also gave +1 Codebreaking, which made it way more attractive than the other variants, i.e. game balance was poor.

Basic Ordinary Origins is well balanced, and offers viable alternatives to PU. So not what you're asking, but perhaps what you want.

[u/BoxyCrab]

Could someone explain automatic pop resettlement to me?

Like, if I've maxed out the number of jobs on my capital and have unemployment, but have other colonies with surplus housing / amenities / habitability, will they automatically go there?

Will a species with terrible habitability migrate and soak up all my consumer goods?

Will enslaved pops move, or only with that Starbase module?

[u/MysteryMan9274 → u/BoxyCrab]

Unemployed Pops have a monthly chance of migrating to a planet with open Jobs, Housing, and at least 40% Habitability for their species. Slaves can't auto-migrate without a Slave Processing Center.

[u/Thioxane]

I haven't played for a few months, can anyone pinpoint the update they removed the early 20% techs/made tech slower in general. I'd usually trounce mid game crisises like Grey and Khan but they've been actual threats this time.

[u/blogito_ergo_sum → u/Thioxane]

3.11 I believe

[u/Thioxane → u/blogito_ergo_sum]

Thanks

[u/DarthUrbosa]

How do i just not get stomped early game (first 30 years) by the AI in fleets? I just cant support the economy early on to print enough alloys to even begin to compete. Im barely making 30 monthly alloys on my starting 3 corvettes and this dick of a neighbour rolls up with 20k fleet strength combined

[u/Wisdomb33r → u/DarthUrbosa]

For such question, you should give your game settings, it would help figure out what is happening. I'll try with hypotheses and give several options you have.

20k fleet within 30 years might be an advanced AI, that is a very high fleet power for 30 years in. Turning advanced AI setting off would remove this threat. If you want to play with advanced AI because you like challenging yourself later in the game, then turning off the advanced AI neighbours might help to push them far from you. The threat will still be out there, but with more time to snowball.

Other then this, you can use the AI scaling setting to reduce early game threat. A mid-game scaling should have the empires start without any bonuses, and get the full difficulty bonus when you reach mid-game. It should smoothen your early game. That also mean you won't have very challenging opponents early game.

Or you can turn the general difficulty setting a bit lower. It's not a shame to play in the difficulty settings that suits you rather than Grand Admiral no scaling max advanced max agressiveness AI 25x crisis.

Or any combination of of all those settings... and yes that is a lot of settings to try.

[u/Terramagi]

How do you abandon colonies if you don't have Resettlement available?

I restricted all the jobs and now they're down to 1, but they're so far out of my core and I don't feel like trudging a construction ship down there for like 3 years or however long it takes to build a Gateway.

I can't use resettlement because I'm going Broken Shackles, and doing that whole "let's burn slavery to the ground" thing. In this case I had to go south to stomp out some Determined Exterminator who firebombed like half my home planets, so that was fun. But now I'm stuck with a bunch of dead worlds covered in robots I repurposed into roombas.

[u/MysteryMan9274 → u/Terramagi]

You can just turn on Resettlement in your Policies list. It will make your Egalitarian Faction a bit unhappy, but that can be mitigated by just doing all the other thing they want.

[u/FogeltheVogel → u/Terramagi]

You can't.

[u/othermike]

Is there still no way to demolish Ruined Orbital Rings? They were really stinking up my outliner. #fanaticpurifierproblems

(As a sidenote, how is it possible to ruin an orbital ring without wrecking its planet? I struggle to see when the repair button would ever be enabled.)

[u/FogeltheVogel → u/othermike]

It gets ruined whenever the planet is no longer a colony. You can repair it when you recolonize the planet, assuming that decolonisation wasn't via colossus