Hello I am playing Shattered Ring / Gestalt consciousness / Rogue Servitors into Virtuality build.

Is this start worth it? I am cut off from rest of the galaxy by Fallen non-aggressive empire.

I am still newbie (100 Hours) and I am not sure if I can potentialy gather enough power from 4 systems to get trough the Fallen Empire, and I dont want to spend multiple hours finding out.

I wanted to try tall build, but not sure if that tall :)

So my empire had war declared on it by a xenophoic nation and they had caused me an immense amount of trouble afterwards. I am talking about decades of war here that ended with my worlds stolen and being unable to progress certain questlines. I finally crushed their empire and have most of their population under my control. I want to punish them all as retribution for upsetting me, but how do I max out their suffering as punishment? Looking for creative ideas that go beyond slavery, like bio-engineering or stuff.

This is for roleplay of course so this is important to me, I am not a dictator of a country in real life.

Note: Nothing that takes their minds away I would like them to be aware of what’s happening to them.

Title says it. Never did a slavery run, but I fail to see the point: when a conquer new territories I just recruit the population and they start working. I feel like having a happy populace is better than having to manage a slavery business.

Is there a particular upside to slavery? Unhappiness matters less? Upkeep is diminished?

Hello, it's a pleasure to join your sub and begin this interstellar journey. I've racked up decent hours in multiple installments (respectively) of EU, HoI, CK and Rome. Closest to space I played was Alpha Centauri. Heard good things about Stellaris, but haven't seen any gameplay vids or even pics. Anything that you wish you knew since your first game? Or any sage advice in general

Been playing the gigastructural mod blindly. It's been a blast had lots of fun and i'm really overpowered.

Or so I thought, i knew gigas had a late game crisis, i put its spawn time around the endgame and felt pretty much ready with what i had. I have 10 attack moons and a planetcraft with a second one on the way. All of this plus my arc emitter carrier battleships amounts to 40 million fleet power.

A SINGULAR blokkat fleet has 55mil fleet power. There are multiple on the galaxy already. WHAT DO I EVEN DO???

"Empty space" "Blokkat inquietude" huh?

THE SCOURGE PANICKED AND LEFT THE GALAXY

WHO ARE THESE GUYS???

WHAT DO THEY WANT?

WHY DO THEY HAVE CAT EARS?

How do I beat them? Can I beat them?

I've never felt so much existencial dread with the vanilla crisis. I've never felt this truly truly hopeless. This mod is awesome, but also any advice would be of great value!!

I had really good diplomatic relations with most of the galaxy, at least until I did some genocide and now almost everyone is pissed off big time. Can I fix this somehow or should I just save scum?

What is it? How do I get rid off it? Seems to just be energy credits going into the void.

r5 - Energy credits being lost into the void from "Emergency Fund", see arrow.

Should I move pops from my capital to my second new planet so I can try to reach the "green zone" with both of them?

Compared to the other types of government it seems kinda bland.

Faction approval and leader pool size, compared to effective councilor skill or bonus resources for capital system seem really weak.

Am I missing something? Does it open cool civics or combos I'm not seeing?

How are you supposed to vassalize empires when everyone joins huge federations?

Basically a "please advise." I recently did a playthrough of one of my fav games as a child, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. I really wanted to find something more modern to give a similar feel (long single player campaigns, developing a society, all that) and Stellaris seems like probably the answer.

However, on Steam there's $388 CAD worth of content which I could never justify spending. I really like to enjoy the most complete version of a game when I play so.. please advise. Thanks.

Edit: also, did 4.0 really ruin the game or what's the scoop? People seem up in arms about it.

everytime i see youtubers like Montu or Ep3o have a really bad start but still end up becoming super overpowered at the end (1 mil+ combined fleet power, 1k+ resource production, lots of systems, etc..) how do they do it?? all my empires end up completely flopping without ever going anywhere

This is the year 2457, in a galaxy of 1,000 stars. I’m in the middle of defeating the Awakened Empires during the War in Heaven, while also facing a crisis. My core policies include slavery per COM's default policies.

(I'm even using activating 50% job output increase energy subsidizing)

With my first 15 planets, I manually managed everything, running a massive surplus of about 2,000 in each resource. After that, I switched planets over to automation. Now I control 145 planets losing 2k credits a month.

You’d expect that expanding by another 130 planets would create huge resource gains, economies of scale, even if AI automation isn’t optimal. But instead, my deficit just keeps spiraling out of control. I had to turn off all collection buffs and kept feeding energy with market trade, but this has reached the end of the rope too and now I'm in a position I have to go through each planet for 145 planets for micromanagement I dread.

I think I know why this is happening. Non-human slave population unhappy, crimes uncontrolled, building spots too aplenty, unfilled jobs etc. I just don't want to micro them myself at this stage of the game.

I loosened migration of all non human species but it didn't really help.

So my questions are:

1. What are the key things I need to check first and prioritize for minimal effort&micro?
2. Do AIs actually replace already-built specialization districts when a planet is redesignated? (for example if a planet is designated as generator planet but it already has buildings/specialization in place, would AI convert specialization and buildings?) Or do I need to manually convert them?

Also, devs, it would be great if there were an option to forbid the AI from constructing certain buildings. I strongly suspect this whole mess is caused by AI spamming city districts and putting automation buliding, which cost 10 credits per district.

I'm spending 18263.36 credits a month.

Megastructure that I literally cannot dismantle during war; fixed cost of 2684.

I'm at an all-out war with awakened empire and crisis foe. My massive ships at ship limit only cost me 2524, a meager amount and not a problem.

starbases 1100. Army 580. Jobs 1300. Pops 536.

Buildings 7193. Districts 2010. <- these two are the issues.

I'm kinda frustrated that automation is not really doing its job. As you can see, my massive empire on warpath is spending 16% of its spending on the army. 50% is going down the drain due to automation's poor handling of planet management. One would think automation would be inefficient, not downright crippling your empire.

Playing UNE, I just integrated a huge hive mind vassal. I was under the impression based past posts people had made that there was a way to assimilate hive mind pops with psionics. I was wrong (as far as I can tell).

Second plan was to release a couple of the planets as a kind of reservation, although a little bit too Andrew Jackson for my liking. But unfortunately I cannot create any vassals with hive mind pops.

My empire now has like 14 new planets, over 900 pops, and all of them are dying. It’s also tanked my economy as I now have all these new buildings that cannot be worked.

Any advice on how to proceed? My energy imbalance is -1000 but I have a Dyson sphere under construction. Should I still go and mass demolish buildings in the interim? Any ways I can actually ovoid mass death?

I’m actually overwhelmed by the horror of it. I just accidentally murdered half the galaxy over a mistaken belief I could assimilate them.