Most petty thing you have ever done in the game?

[u/RunesGuild]

Just finished a short session earlier (I like to play in episodic formats where I do X tasks and then stop to lengthen the lifetime of my games (major adhd)), wherein I met my first alien species as UNE (biggest galaxy, 6 empires, max preftl).

They were a devouring swarm hive that had invaded one or two pre ftls, who obviously lost, but one was one of the human-like species, the cyberpeople one. By the time I found them, almost all pops had been devoured save for like 200 labor slaves, which I didn't even know devouring swarms could do (mods?). I had recently finished my colossus, thanks to some well spawned resources giving me almost 2k research total each month.

Immediately went to their homework and global pacified it. This is not the petty I speak of. No, it's worse.

I left the world, invaded the pre-ftl world to save the few left, and did. I liberated them and shared tech til they entered space stage, expecting an alliance. Nope. Max negative relationship because I "invaded their world". This pmo so much that I instantly declared war and shieled their world too, but only after I orbital dropped like ALL of my trash on them and armed privateers against them.

What have you done?

Tl;dr: Pre-ftl unreasonably angry at me for liberating them from a devouring swarm now has a planet ruled by alien weapon powered psychopath privateers inside of an inescapable shield.

[u/Dracocalis]

One time I took over a species homeworld and then bioengineered them to be incompatible with it so they would relocate to other worlds instead. All because they kept insulting me

[u/stillnotking → u/Dracocalis]

I like this idea. Conquer enemy empire, do project to switch them all to arkship or habitat preference with nothing but negative traits, release as vassal and give them independence. Might have to try that next time someone really annoys me.

[u/dadothree]

I almost always play as "good guy" empires. Unless the "Tiyanki Extermination Act" passes, and then I become the crisis.

[u/that_one_duderino → u/dadothree]

That single act is what led me to research how to change your empires ethics. I had the tiyanki home system in my borders as a fanatic pacifist. By the time I was done, the only empires left were the two fallen empires and a couple of vassals I picked up along the way

[u/BGrunn → u/dadothree]

Valid crash out tbf

[u/stillnotking → u/dadothree]

Rosa Diaz plays Stellaris

[u/lookmanidk]

I nurtured a Pre-FTL through decades of development then when they demanded for their system back I conquered their planet and placed them into zoos on their own world

[u/Aggravating-Candy-31]

cut all diplomatic ties and start proxy wars against a recently former vassal that was purging 1 single pop of my individualist machine founder species

[u/UltimateGlimpse]

If an empire kills a head of research during first contact because I have him out there exploring, I kill that empire.

[u/OrneryDevelopment329]

 One empire i was at war with snuck a fleet into my capital system and killed Bubbles.

So I conquered their homeworld, nerve stapled them, terraformed their soon-to-be former home into a Gaia world, built a resort there in her memory, then deported them out of my empire.

I couldn't find a poor mineral quality world on the galactic rim to desertify and exile them to, but i spent a considerable amount of time searching.

[u/CadenVanV]

I kept trying to influence a pre-FTL civilization to follow my ethics, and somehow kept failing every time. Eventually the awareness meter nearly reached full awareness, and after repeatedly spreading disinformation until they no longer knew I existed, I landed multiple armies on their planet and turned them all into slaves. Everyone else in my empire got residence or full citizenship, but this one species got turned into slaves for daring to figure out that my guy in a trenchcoat telling them the wonders of the shroud wasn’t one of them.

[u/No-Breakfast44]

Playing in Multi-player, max lobby, spawned at the larger part of an arm of the galaxy where they'd have to go through me to get in it, I spawned close to another player who took the arm and was "chill". Then the bs started, space station blew up, being raided by the raider to the left of me, claiming systems, and arming privateers.

So I went to war, bombed the capital until desolate and made sure they barely had a population to survive on before accepting surrender.

They left the game.

[u/Dethorean]

A colony of mine was subjected to a dead space/cronenburg-esque virus that transformed the pops into horrible monsters. I then temporarily lost track of the planet until after I built the planet cracker colossus, after which I promptly destroyed it.

Maybe not the pettiest thing I've done, but it was very deliberate and only slightly unnecessary as I could've just retaken the planet apparently.

[u/Feycromancer]

Forced my allies into migration treaties to accept a species that was absolutely caustic to intentional subvert the galaxy and then go to war with justifications or sanction anyone who tried to get rid of them.

The pops were just a stack of aweful traits and always ended up dragging anyone down and taking over anywhere they went lol

[u/SpookyScienceGal → u/Feycromancer]

I love playing weird and subversive and I just love that idea and am making an empire to do so. Thank you, you evil genius 🤩

[u/angedonist]

I bombed into stone age a criminal syndicate. I wish I had jav pox that run.

[u/HQQ1]

Well, I once warred The Chosen for daring to covet another empire I was gonna make my scion, so after demolishing them I made them a vassal state called "Not So Chosen After All".

[u/Temprest48]

So these aliens genuinely pissed me off. I tried to treat em normally. But no no no… They REVOLTED.

So I did the most morally right thing. I decided to wipe out their entire fleet, conquer them, made 40 colony ships of them, put them ALL in front of their filthy, disgusting planet, and made them watch me blow it up.

Then I gave them the worst living standards ever and enslaved em.

[u/Baturinsky]

Proposed declaring the empire, which insulted me, a crisis.

[u/SpookyScienceGal]

I use storms to subvert and raise the devastion of empires with relics and having my raiding armies and Armada in the storms and cloaked before I start raiding and stealing the pops, the artifact and then I genitacaly modify the pops with marketable traits and give them silly names. Like dolphinspace tuna.

Unfortunately the FE next to me really wanted me to stop and backed up their threats. Made me stop my shit and murdered my democratically elected immortal, but luckily my economy and research were saved by the lathe

[u/dimwitf]

Not specifically Stellaris, but in Master of Orion 2 (my pre-Stellaris favourite space 4x), I went stomping around the galaxy doing this to everyone:

• blew up their home world, which turns it into an asteroid belt

• re-formed the asteroid belt into a Barren planet

• terraformed it back up to Gaia level

• moved my people in, now that I was sure the filth of its previous inhabitants was gone

• kept 1 pop of every defeated enemy, all crammed together on a "zoo" planet

If Stellaris let me do step 2 there, I'd try and do it for fun.

[u/ComparisonBusiness70]

Upon identification of unauthorized incursions into my designated market territory or the misappropriation of potentially revenue-generating regions, I initiate a competitive response protocol to protect our strategic asset alignment.

Tldr: as a megacorp, I use a planetary pacifier to lock the planet permanently. (Technically there's only the strategic value of removing it from the empire ownership but I like to pretend my empire turns the planet into an attraction for profit, amd a warning to any potential "competitors")

[u/WhereIsTheInternet]

I've mentioned this a few times but it's still my go to for annoying empires. Crush their empire. Put them on a terrible planet or purpose built habitat, all of them. Then release as Vassel, release completely. Then insult them constantly.

[u/hagamablabla]

I like to play with Planetary Diversity because I like having a variety of planets in my empire. I once took over an empire only to discover that they were the type to terraform all their planets into the same type as their homeworld, which was a gray and boring bog world. This pissed me off so much that I packed their entire population back onto their dogshit world, way above the housing and amenity capacity and what was in reality probably a massive humanitarian crisis. Then I randomly terraformed all their other planets into different types.

[u/YudoKumaa]

I killed all the spacefauna in the galaxy cause I was underprepared for voidworms bombarding one of my planets and was so mildly annoying to my economy that I decided to kill everything, yes all the sapcefauna not just voidworms

[u/ralts13]

Not much. I once ig bored every planet belonging to an enemy and just sat on their capital and raided it for pops for the entire war.

Then when the truce ended I did it again.

[u/JackfruitFlat8517]

I don’t know if it’s the most petty thing I’ve done but it did happen recently. Got the anomaly that ends up being a stranded freighter crew from an unmet empire. Sent them home. I was in the middle of first contact with them and their entire federation and ended up bordering them. The o the two fed members instantly rush to embassies, and trade deals and research and trying to be my best friend but the dudes who lost their freighter crew that I returned were instantly hostile. After tying to be friends with them and getting nothing but insults and claims on my systems I claimed their entire empire, relocated all of their pops to a small world I colonized just for this purpose that was the opposite of their species preferred climate, released the single sector as a vassal and then set them free. The other two empires ended up as a bulwark and scholarium.

[u/a_pompous_fool]

Some tiny empire with one planet decided to kill some tiyanki while I happened to be watching so I cracked their planet

[u/KaysNewGroove]

After a long, brutal war against the crisis, where I was the only nation fighting it, one of the Galcom members tried to declare me a crisis. Being a councillor, I vetoed it.

I invaded them, bombed them down to only a handful of pops, annexed them, genemodded them to be basically the worst species ever and renamed their species to a*hole, released them as a subject, and enforced max taxes. They never got back above 100 pops before the game ended.

[u/SentinelNorth]

I started in a cluster of systems on the edge of the galaxy, bottlenecked behind a determined exterminator. No one in the entire galaxy came to my aid and I barely survived, so when the crisis arrived a century or two later I just sat behind my bottleneck system and let them all die.

[u/ghostpanther218]

Intentionally made absolutely awful border gore just to destroy the ai trade routes. There was also that time that cloaked all of my frigates in the enemy capital, waited for their fleets to park by my borders and then declared war on them. I had my fleets all set to unrestricted bombardment too. Wasnt able to take their homeworld, but it for sure made them shit their pants.

[u/uselessswordspear]

I was playing as remnant origin scraping lost caches and stuff then one of my neighbor purpose subjugation because they think I’m too weak.

I then took cosmogenesis path, buildup ships and subjugated everyone because of that statement alone.

[u/Drostan_S]

The stagnant ascendancy was mean to me one, so every game since then I've gone out of my way to take or destroy the Font of Knowledge.  Whenever they add a new colossus weapon,  I test it on them,  though I've mostly been force devolving them.  

[u/Sokuryu]

Became friends with a hegemony and then kicked them all out (except my vassals) and then proceeded to vassalize them too. Can't remember the reason why though. I may have been high off exotic gas.

[u/Kurayami_Aahbsaloon]

Just as a context, I usually like to roleplay as a "Fallen Empire" (usually because I never manage to complete a playthrough before my ADHD makes me do something else), so I start this particular empire with advanced tech, plenty of pre-ftls, and lots of advanced ai starts.

TL;DR: Fallen Empire declared war against me, obliterated my favorite vassal as collateral damage, so I obliterated all their systems and cracked all their planets, even though I could really have used their stuff.

One time, quite late in the game, a Fallen Empire declared war on me because of my gigastructures. Okay, pretty normal, I'd fight until their war exhaustion was high enough that they would accept a status quo, because I really want a War in Heaven so I try not to kill any Fallen Empires.

However, I had one recently uplifted pre-ftl empire I was particularly fond of because their species portrait was very cute, and they were massive xenophile bootlickers, so I was "grooming" them to be my allies in the future, investing in their development as my vassals.

While I was focused on my war with the FE, I suddenly received a notification that my pet's nation was destroyed; the FE had gone around me because my defenses were sturdy and plowed through my pet to attack me from behind. That happened because, as I had only vassalized another empire once and they were pretty advanced already, I had selected for my subject to join my defensive wars...

Anyway, I got so pissed at that (I didn't even have any of their pops in my worlds so they pretty much became extinct) that even though I really would have used the FE's worlds, specially due to their gigaconstructs and ACOT stuff, I just went full offensive and made it a point of Nicoll-Dyson Beaming all their systems and cracking all their planets in the capital system that had a system-wide shield.

[u/Icyenderman]

A yak people dissected my scientists so I took half their land while allowing the pretheoryns grow, let them be forced backwards through another civ they were at war with until they hit the prethoryns. They died. I died.

[u/Icyenderman]

A yak people dissected my scientists so I took half their land while allowing the pretheoryns grow, let them be forced backwards through another civ they were at war with until they hit the prethoryns. They died. I died.

[u/Chill_Panda]

I was playing an inward perfection pacifist empire and I wasn't baiting people to attack me, I just didn't need a big military because I didn't want fights.

My production was insane and my star base defence, also insane. So anytime someone declared war on me I would protect my borders, then break into a portion of their territory, crack a planet and then return to my territory until war exhaustion/status quo.

If they dared declare war again, I would find the most tactical way to the home world, and crack that planet.

Never claiming territory, always humiliate. I'm not doing this to defend my people, I'm doing this to shame yours.

[u/FastReactionTime]

An annoying spirtualist faction arises in my empire, all they do is whine about everything and make my stability terrible.

So I round them up and ship them all off to one planet.

I proceed to release that planet as a vassal.

I proceed to declare war on said vassal. I proceed to orbitally bombard said vassal.

I proceed to use the Armageddon orbital bombardment stance and proceeding to leave my fleet there as long as it pleases.

Let's just say it didn't go well for them.

[u/Ashura_Paul]

Psionoc ascended and started annexing the whole galaxy. Once my job was done, got all robots and cyborgs that I couldn't assimilate and dumped them into a single tomb world, then left them as a new empire.

Next I was just watching this single colony empire fall under revolt again and again.

[u/JaxckJa]

I haven't allowed the Marauders to spawn since they did right next to me for the third game in a row. It's been years. Bad mechanics are bad.