It has been a long time since I have played, but I eventually got sick of diplomacy and just started playing kill bots every game. You at least know where you stand with everyone. You get big boosts to your military as kill bots.
General I scout and explore as fast as I can, and what I am looking for are choke points which will become my future borders. You want as much territory as you can, but its most important to have good choke points. Then when I have seen any aliens, I fall back to the farthest choke point I can that is closest to them and fortify it. I do this for all ‘exits’ for my empire.
I then build up colonies, and fleets. I am not very aggressive at first, I just defend. Once I feel like I am much stronger than an enemy, I preferably wait until they are engaged in a war with someone else and then I attack.
This strategy has always worked for me.
I heard they tried to fix diplomacy, but I do not know if they ever really did. The two things I found really problematic was that empires more frequently than not would declare war on you anyway and even when they were friendly they would drag you into other wars if you had any kind of alliances with them. Eventually your allies would lose everything and then the enemies would show up on your doorstep and you would be surrounded by enemies once again, without the advantages of kill bots.
The general pattern I have been having is that at some point while I’m grabbing territory and colonies my economy collapses and then while I’m rebuilding it, my military suffers. At that point someone declares war on me and without the ability to defend myself, I decide to quit and start over.
That sounds like my experience with pretty much every 4X game I’ve ever tried my hand at. I don’t do well with keeping multiple plates spinning in these heavily strategic games. But I’m often entranced by the next shiny game to turn up and want to give it a try, and here we go again.
Don’t build resource extractors on every resource node. For the early game you can skip the 1s and 2s, as the cost to operate is higher than what you will pull out of it.
Later on you might need to build on those, but your economy should be able to handle it by then.
I haven’t played a full game since the planetary management rework and the combat rework of the last year or so. I’ve done a start or two and some early exploration, but no more. So I need to some time figuring out the new bits. I picked up First Contact this morning through Fanatical for about $13. So a small discount. It looks like the DW2 dlc lands on Thursday so a good week for space gaming.
Maybe you are expanding too quickly? I do not really know why your economy collapses. Maybe you are building too big of fleets too soon? Not that you should ignore your fleets, but watch your income and stop building ships if your net income gets too low. Make sure you have enough to keep expanding your economy.
I have never had my economy collapse, so I am not quite sure what to make of that situation. I just keep an eye on my finances. If my income is getting low, then I just stop building things that cost a lot of maintenance, and start building economy stuff.
I just have some thresholds I try not to cross. I do not recall what they are, but for example, energy credits must always be +50 per tick and if it gets close to that or even dips below that, I really try and fix things before it becomes a problem. In the early game, +50 per tick might be a bit much, but you just need to get a feel for it. If it ever becomes negative, then that is a full emergency, even if I have a tun of credits in the bank.
Do you know what specifically is collapsing in your economy? Lack of energy/credits, or are you missing another resource that is causing you problems?
If you’re not already doing so, I would strongly recommend using the market and set up ongoing trades to sell resources you have a surplus of and buy ones you’re short on.
Interesting that the last four DLCs were from Paradox Arctic. With that studio to be closed, I don’t know if that indicates to me that Stellaris is in trouble. I think it’s also plausible that Stellaris 2 is in development in Stockholm.
That video seems like a stretch. Corporate restructuring doesn’t necessarily mean anything at all for Stellaris… And Stellaris has been very popular. I wouldn’t think they would just pull the plug
It’s not the end of the world if they did stop updating Stellaris. Not like there’s any major content or features missing that were planned for future DLC, and after so many years of development, any gameplay problems (and there are many) are either not considered as such by the designers, or they are not capable of resolving them.
This is as good a time as any to declare the game finished.
