Stellaris grand strategy space game by Paradox discussy thingy thready thingy

How do you handle economies for large empires? Do you build a lot of colonies? My kill bot game is going well, but since I need to conquer so much territory (which I do not really want), my upkeep is going through the roof due to my empire size.

Also, does having a war increase your costs? I just finished a war, and I was making like -84 credits a turn, but then several months later it turned positive again. Although sometimes I jump from a high income to a negative one without any wars and I have no idea why.

Also, is there a faster way to take kill a planet other than bombing it until everyone dies?

As a devouring swarm I invade with ground troops then ship the pops back for some fine dining at the capital. Not sure what options you might have with the robots.

Being at can can increase costs because your fleets undock, which bumps up their maintenance costs. Not sure if there’s costs beyond that. When you see those fluctuating incomes, it might be pops shifting around. Sometimes I’ll build a new building or two on a planet and the farmers want to move up in life and become managers and researchers instead, which drops my food income until some clerks shift over to take care of the food deficit.

Is it possible you hooked up another bunch of organic batteries at the conclusion of the war?

That sounds like a good idea. As murder bots, these pops are slowly purged. To slowly for my tastes. I suppose I could ship them off to my capitol world… I wonder if they count as population space (overcrowding) or just are considered trash to be disposed of. I suppose the next time I am at war, Ill find out. I am hoping that capturing all the planets of a faction will end the faction. I swear, the faction I am trying to terminate has endless colonies.

Speaking of which, why do I have to end wars as a murder bot? It should be our greatest joy terminate meat bags. Also, these forced truces seem to last forever, meanwhile the meat bags spread even further. What is a murder bot supposed to do?

Previously, that slow purging process generated scads of energy. No idea how it works now, of course.

Tried out a rogue servitor last night. Ended up sandwiched between a xenophone Fallen Empire to my south and Determined Exterminators to my north. I was deemed “organic sympathizers” so it’s only a matter of time. This might be the first time I encountered a regular AI empire where the fleet power disparity was deemed “Overwhelming”. Not sure if this is going to be survivable.

Not sure how the machines stack up against the organic hives. The original DD talked about machines having better efficiency, but so far I don’t see it. The main advantage is that my regular pops don’t require consumer goods. The main disadvantage is that growing pops is rather expensive in terms of minerals at the start. I probably over-expanded at the start since I don’t have the mineral income right now to expand pop production at two of my colonies. I wanted to take advantage of “free” growth of the organic population, but it’s too expensive to get going and support those pampered butterflies.

My first guess would be upkeep for your ships, which decreases significantly when they’re docked at a starbase with Crew Quarters.

The admin cap is pretty tight. My current game I’m trying to stay under it, and it severely limits expansion. They need better tooltips also, because it isn’t clear while you’re playing what contributes to the admin cap

I thought it was pretty clear when you look at empire size.

Also, don’t try to stay under admin cap. Well, maybe if you are a Megacorp, but even then. Really admin cap is just badly named, since it’s only when scaling penalties START to be applied. In previous versions, scaling penalties applied right from the start (i.e. previously admin cap was zero).

Yes, it is clear when you look at it directly, but there is nothing that shows you while building a district or an Outpost that those will contribute to the cap (unless I’m missing it)

I do realize it is a soft cap, but the first time I blew past it without paying attention, and for this game I want to see how efficient the empire can be by staying under it. My gut right now is that they need a few more methods for expanding the cap. A +20 increase basically means you get to Colonize and grow one planet.

I thought the tooltip was pretty clear? It’s mostly driven by districts, but number star systems contribute as well. It breaks it down where it’s all coming from. Or do you mean how you increase admin cap? That is from civics, a tradition in Expansion, and a few Society research options.

Unless you’re playing a MegaCorp, admin cap should be seen more a soft cap rather than something you must stay under. It’s mostly there to slow the snowballing that tends to happen in these games, but not punish you outright for expansion, from what I can tell.

Edit: I posted this while you were posting yours. Sounds like you were already familiar with everything i said, so ignore this post. :)

By the way, very small sample size warning but I’ve been having a positive experience with the Glavius AI mod thus far. Anyone else using it?

Totally agree. EU IV, BATTLETECH, Cities: Skylines, HOI4 and Stellaris are some of the most played games in my library over the last 2 years. I believe I have over 200 hours in each and over 700 in EU IV. The only game that compares in that time frame is Stardew Valley.

DLC or not, I am getting my money’s worth.

I used it for the game I started last night. If I get steamrolled by the determined exterminator, I guess that will count as a “positive experience”. Or at least an indicator that it is working…

I get why some people don’t like it and like everything else there are tradeoffs, but I totally agree. I think there are things Paradox needs to improve with their model and there are signs they’re starting to with games like EU4 (moving important DLC material into the base game so it can be expanded and built on without requiring the purchase of said DLC in the future). I also think it means the state of the game looks like a sine wave in terms of polish, AI ability, etc as new mechanics and features get rolled out and that’s going to frustrate some people a lot more than others. Thankfully, you can control what version you’re running on Steam if you prefer to wait for the polish, but I get the complaints.

But man… I love how these games evolve. EU4 has kept me heavily engaged every single year since 2013. I just looked on Steam and I’m horribly embarrassed to say I have 1,455 hours in it. That’s so ridiculously high compared to any other game in my library it’s absurd. I loved the game when it came out, but it would not have kept me coming back for more if they had left it after an expansion or two.

I played a game as a Rogue Servitor, so as robot with bio-trophies (organics). I am still not sure about these changes, at least for robots. Robots dont need for but use energy, lots of it for their pops, plus servitors still need food for the organics. I always had energy problems (until i fully built a dyson sphere). So i built a lots of energy districts which caused my admin cap to exceed which give a % penalty to most things, :-(

It was a learning game that i kept playing. One thing i didnt like and had to learn: the screen said i could upgrade some buildings so i did, but then it said i was missing a critical resource since the upkeep was that special resource which resulted in an empire wide negative. I feel it should warn you about that before you do it, i had to look at every popup text to see if their was a special resource, then look at another popup to see how many i had of that resource so i can decide to upgrade. I understand some people like more layers and keeping track of things in games, it is not one of my favorites though. It did make me think of MOO3 were you produce something which is then converting into manufacturing which then allows you to do something else with it.

I stopped playing the game in 2460 after i built the sensor array and looked at the fleets of everyone. Outside the Elder races, i had the highest military with ~20k, then next highest was 6k (the fanatical purifiers), then the others all around 4k or 5k. Maybe it was an outlier of a game but i am not sure the AI can play it right now (i only found a few alloy resources and had to use the market often for it).

I started a new game as organic democracy and things seem to be a little different. So i am still learning.

Oh another thing, the bio-trophies keep growing (they have bio-trophy jobs?!) so i was getting a lot of unemployed for them. I could stop all pop growth on the planet but i wanted to keep the robots growing. i could also go into the species and forbid pop growth for that bio-trophy but i wanted them to grow on other planets. Still interested in learning /playing the game.

I think this is an important point. Some think that Paradox’s patches are simply efforts to fix a broken product and that may the case in certain situations. In most cases they are an attempt to add on detail and complexity into systems that are not fun or perhaps complex enough. These system improvements result in a different game play experience that provides new opportunities to explore the product so a player who likes that game will keep coming back to it to try the new systems and options.

I gravitated back to EU IV to play the Mamluks and Timurids after the Cradle DLC. I have played Stellaris after virtually every other DLC and am chomping at the bit to do so now but I am neck-deep into BATTLETECH post-patch. I find that I keep firing up these games at the expense of even new titles because these patches and DLCs always offer new experiences and strategies to tinker with.

Can’t you just halt reproduction for a while, and relocate the unemployed bio-trophies to where you need them?

I paid dearly for upgrading buildings in my first game of the new DLC. Wasn’t paying attention to how the raw mats are fed in to produce alloys and consumer goods and amenities, and suddenly I was in a deep resource deficit

The new beta patch is increasing base alloy production by 50%. That should change the balance of quite a few things down-stream.