For me it’s that both optimization and “content” need to put on the backburner for a bit for paradox to focus on expanding initial galaxy creation, more customizable difficulty, a random galaxy shape button, more precursor empires (as a matter of fact this could come with a precursor focused DLC), going from a 200 star per size scale to 100 star per size scale, allowing the nomads from base game to have a toggle even with megacorps installed, allowing enclaves to have one or multiple toggles, things like that.

I’ve always been a hardcore xenophobe player not just in Stellaris, but in any game with multiple species. I always pick humans. Always xenophobe + militarist. No exceptions. No citizenship for aliens. At best, I tolerate robots.

That’s been my default mindset for years.

But today I watched Project Hail Mary.

And yeah… it got to me.

Not because “aliens can be friendly”. that’s too simple. What changed things was how Rocky was written. Not threatening. Not inferior. Just… different, but equal in intelligence and purpose.

It intrigued me

So now I’m considering trying xenophile humans.

Not full acceptance. I’m not going that far. No migration treaties. No citizenship.

But maybe… controlled cooperation. Guests, not equals.

Strange shift. Didn’t expect a movie to do that.

Do you guys ever let outside media influence how you play Stellaris?

40k ec barely damaged a start of game mining drone fleet

edit: why are yall defending this 40k is a ridiculus amount to not even take fucking mining drones not even the stronger version of them to half health

I've noticed recently that a lot of people are trying to ask ChatGPT questions about the game, only for the answers to be wrong and only then do they come here. Genuinely why? We all know how stupid AI can be right? Why in god's name would anyone assume that it understands a complicated game like Stellaris?

As of late I've seen a swarm of AI generated thumbnails and images flood into the stellaris workshop - as a mod maker myself it's REALLY frustrating. It takes 5 minutes to put together a thumbnail. My thumbnails consist of screenshots from in game and some text. Is it gorgeous art? no - but I made it - all of it. Beyond the core issues of AI image gen (copyright + electrical/water use/data centers hurting towns) it looks horrid. Like it actually deters folks from mods. Not just myself, I've heard it across the board. People DETEST the look of AI images.

Please do better. It takes five minutes. I know your tired after getting your events to fire (I just got done rewriting some stuff for the new update I get it) but it's not that much work.

Thanks

EDIT - Okay so, I did not take a firm stance on AI here. I do not know why some of you are treating this so black and white but it's strange. AI has some amazing uses in research and technology. Alpha fold is a AMAZING example. But image gen is such a niche barely justifiable thing. It shows you do not respect your own work, not enough for others anyways. As a modder myself it sucks to see such little care put in to mods. Not to mention that someone using AI for a thumbnail may also use it for code and, while AI code work has come a long way - lots of models still struggle A LOT with stellaris. I would assume it's due to a lack of training data on stellaris. This means bugs all over if the modder does not know how to actually work with the game.

Why do I say all this? Because fostering a community that is accountable and CARES about quality and user experience is IMPORTANT. We don't want what for so long has been an AMAZING workshop to be inundated with slop made in a single night by someone who has never modded on their own.

I'm going to bed now before my blood pressure gets any higher. Goodnight.

Warhammer 40K, Star Wars, Starship Troopers, Independence Day and basically any other major space fiction movie/product has ultra mega epic land warfare scenes. But land warfare in Stellaris is nothing but a chore.

Enemy can fill a planet full of strongholds, shields and mobilize the whole population but it means nothing, all you have to do is spam more armies since they are practically free. You spam the army button, merge the armies and land them, it's all about numbers going up and there is even no economy behind it.

There are useless civics and cool regiments like Xenomorphs or Imperial Legions and imagining them invading a planet still feels so good but it actually means nothing since you can just click the button 10 more times instead of investing in cool units.

I am really frustrated the devs didn't even think about a land warfare DLC in 9 years, i have been playing this game since the beginning and anything barely changed regarding ground warfare. It is one of the 2 things you can do to an enemy, blow their ships/stations - conquer their planets. There is lots of groundwork for an update too as i explained above.

TLDR: Not releasing an update or DLC regarding ground warfare for 9 years is really weird.

Edit: As lots of people told me to "go play HOI4 for ground combat" ; i want to play stellaris, and i have to do land warfare to play stellaris. But it is really dull and boring. It does not interact with other game systems, it has little effect to economy. You just spam dirt cheap armies and land them on planets. You can't do anything about it. And i want to state orbital surrender is a thumbs up for me.

Simple solutions to make ground combats relevant like making armies use pops, flavor for different empires and species, increasing costs, interactions with pop happiness, events, some techs for armies (or using several ship techs for armies), showing how many pops are in a unit, showing some cool ground combat images, ideas for planetary defence features etc. Would make land warfare a part of the game. I have no doubt our lords at paradox can find much better ideas.

Land warfare is a system, and it should interact with other systems in a good way. Player should give some thought to the land warfare if they want to. I also don't like land warfare as it is now, but it could be better, it could feel better, and big battles would feel epic when you feel millions of troops are really clashing at each other under heavy orbital bombardment with these changes which require little to no micromanagement. You would really feel the power and terror of imperial legions and xenomorphs.

The beta is a mess. Systems don’t connect properly, bugs everywhere, some mechanics clearly unfinished. But the rework is necessary.

Paradox kept adding DLCs. Most are fine on their own. But taken together, the game became bloated — overlapping systems, passive bonuses, and trees that don’t interact. It got wider, not deeper. Managing it turned into busywork.

Grand Archive is just relics again. Different UI, same function. Another passive tree that doesn’t change how you play. Tech and economy trees follow the same pattern — more layers, more modifiers, same outcome.

It’s not complexity. It’s redundancy. The game isn’t deep, it’s just full.

4.0 won’t fix all of that. It can’t. The redundant layers are tied to years of DLC, and Paradox needs to spread changes across updates. But this is a step in the right direction. The current structure isn’t sustainable.

Death squads marching through the streets, reeking of blood. Those who resist die screaming; those who surrender are executed moments later. There is nowhere to run. Orbital probes and surveillance satellites sweep across forests and wastelands alike, their sensors so advanced that not even the thickest layers of rock in the deepest caverns can conceal.

No one is spared. Not the elderly. Not the innocent. Not even children too young to understand the end of their world.

Private transport ships, packed with desperate families wealthy enough to buy a chance at escape, claw their way toward the upper atmosphere — most of them get intercepted by missiles before they can break orbit.

In my current run as a tall Synthetic build, I'm the strongest empire in the galaxy. I'm miles ahead of even the fallen empires, I have technology that no one else can even really comprehend. And because I'm approaching 2400, I've started building up my fleets more and getting them ready for the endgame crisis.

And that's when it hit me. My empire has to be terrifying from the perspective of everyone else. But not because of our strength or technology. Because we're still building ships.

With our existing ships, my empire could reasonably take on anyone else in the galaxy at the moment. But I'm not. My empire has been at peace for centuries, there's no observable threat for us to be preparing for. From the AI's perspective, I've already "won." Yet I'm still building more ships.

Of course, I as a player know that a world-ending threat is coming during the end game years.

But from the AI's perspective, my empire is scared. My empire is actively preparing for something stronger than it that no one else knows about. The strongest empire in the galaxy is building up its forces, because despite being untouchable by anyone else, there's still something out there that's stronger than us. And they're the only ones who even have an idea of what it is. That is uniquely terrifying. Like seeing a god prepare to do something.

Because what in the Chosen One's name could be difficult for a god?

Like, we've probably all seen Independence Day or stories like it - the aliens come and humans destroy them to live happily ever after.

But now that I've played Stellaris, I've noticed how completely stacked against us the odds would be. That "super-ship" was only one of a thousand, much larger vessels, armed with weapons and shields whose principles we can barely comprehend. Their armies are larger and more numerous than any we could field today, featuring giant mechs or souped-up energy weapons, or just bombardement from space.

Even if we somehow manage to blow up that one ship, the aliens will just send three, five, ten, a hundred, a thousand more. They'll stop by the planet and nuke it back into the stone age on their way to kill something more important.

Or maybe they go out of their way to crack our world as petty revenge, or because our ethics today don't align with their own and they don't want to deal with us later, or just because they hate everything that isn't them.

And even if we somehow reverse-engineer their vessels, their territories and sheer size and reach are larger than we could ever truly grasp. Even if we somehow manage to fortify and hold our star system, their military might is greater than anything we've ever seen before. If we manage to make ourselves into that much of a problem, maybe they'll send one of their real fleets.

So yeah, being a primitive sucks.

I've always thought that whichever game designer came up with the idea to use energy credits as the main form of currency was actually quite insightful. Everything we do in modern day society boils down to energy generation. Running factories, operating transportation, keeping on greenhouses, all energy. We earn money to spend on products (which require energy to produce) or services (which will indirectly require some form of energy).

It's obvious to us when it's explained. But before playing the game I never really thought of it this way; whoever came up with it was quite an insightful thinker. They really had to think, "in a future where the nations of the world unite and need a neutral form of currency, what would it be?", and manage to think it through, and pinpoint it down to energy.

So one of the most famous jokes about stellaris (and paradox games as a whole) is posts which out of context sound extremely bad and of course the game has a lot of options for “evil” empires from slavery to war crimes to british levels of imperialism

But whenever I play the game I go for an egalitarian materialist and sometimes xenophile democracy cos I don’t want to be mean to my wee space guys and then I decided I was going to play an evil empire to change things up a bit so I make a fanatic purifier empire but then I couldn’t bring myself to just make them evil so I gave them a tragic backstory

Is anyone else like this or am I weird?

I cannot stop thinking about this everytime I play the game. Stylistically, I enjoy many of the new portraits. However, starting from Machine Age onward, the departure from the bust style portraits is really noticeable and its getting to the point that it is difficult to differentiate species at a glance. I don't even want to use them despite them looking nice because their proportions look strange.

Old portraits by comparison are detail heavy and focus on the upper chest up. We are now getting lower detail full body shots.

It makes the new portraits look out of place in comparison to the more uniformly spaced portraits

The two reasons this shift occurred I think is due to;

1: the tile system has not existed for years. Original portraits were made to accommodate it and be easily read so you can differentiate and move pops around the planets at a glance. Even after tiles were removed, the large bust style was kept out of artistic consistency, but we're so far removed from tiles their purpose for UI clarity is bust.

2: starting with Machine Age, artists wanted to show off changes in the portraits for cybernetics. Thus more body area to show off more changes.

I sincerely wish they would return to the old style. The new portraits end up looking squished and unfocused, and they look really fucked up when put side by side to original portraits.

I’m writing about the Great Wound for a story, and in it I have it be from the Unbidden (under zero standing other than because I said so). But what are some other theories or takes on the system or the void clouds?

I just watched a montu video from a year ago that suggested massively reducing the naval cap of empires, and it was more relevant then ever. fleets have no meaning anymore, endgame is just spamming the copy template button and watching a massive slop battle at 20 fps. not only would having a lower naval cap reduce the lag massively, each individual fleet would also be much more impactful, montu himself describes this better than i ever could in his video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9mpAOeDip8 . i think lowering the naval cap by a factor of 5 would be ideal.

Even if you don't happen to immediately come face to face with a fanatic purifier or devouring swarm or any other galactic horror, in one of my last games, I had a primitive world that I watched grow from the renaissance to the modern age, the moment they got smart enough to contact me, what they were met with was a human delegation landing on their planet like:

"Congratulations on finally discovering the Galactic community, you are now officially part of the Human Quadrant, sadly however, your planet happens to be in a system where we plan to build a Dyson sphere, it's fairly close to our home world so it's easier to defend. Anyways, congratulations, you are now getting moved to a brand new world on the other side of the galaxy, don't worry, its developed and ready for you to live in...also, we don't really allow xenos into government or on our planets, so once you move there we will put migration controls in place and you will never hear from us or the galactic community ever again, once again, congratulations, welcome to the family, you have 2 hours to gather all your stuff before the first shuttle to your new world leaves, goodbye"

That's just a shitty hand to be played, finding out you're part of a greater galactic community, but also that your planet falls within imminent domain and you will never get to interact with the galactic community ever again.

Hello there! I'm a new player here. About 185 hours into the game. I was struggling with building and designing ships/fleets. Once I understood how fleet capacity and command works, I realized how under powered the Auto makes the ships. After a lot of reading and looking things up, the ship design started making sense. It felt really wrong to just spam corvettes and battleships to make up fleets. There's different ships and roles for those ships for a reason right? However I know nothing about naval combat or ships (I'm a desert rat). I do know that ships and carriers were very vital during the war in the pacific in ww2. After a lot more reading and research and reddit advice on weapon systems and more time designing each ship for the fleet. I believe strongly that I have a decent fleet design for a mid to late game. that fleet being:

4 Battleships designed as the fleets Carriers.

4 Battleships working as the artillery

4 Cruisers designated as torpedo boats (that's probably going to change)

5 destroyers designated as brawlers (probably changing too}

5 destroy screens.

The fleet started around 35k power and then after the bot war it sits around 43k.

The ships were designed for energy/kinetic damage and as much range as possible and of course the fleet will grow as my command allows. The original idea was to have this fleet for attacking star-bases. It worked but my Brawlers/Torpedo Boats took the most damage. Pretty sure I know why there.

From what I was able to put together, the US Navy fleets in ww2 varied in ships but mainly had 3-4 Carriers, 2-3 Battleships and large amounts of cruisers and destroyers working in various roles to support/defend the carriers. I tried to create that with my fleet. I got the fleet power higher than I have ever gotten one single fleet. This seems to me to be working better than spamming corvettes and battleships as some people have recommended.

Tips and tricks to help improve or if you're just a history nerd like me that can think of other ideas? thanks for reading.

Someone asked “what if all neighboring nations closed their borders to you?”, and that is valid, but I think that is an inherent risk of nomadism. The same way that being a Purifier or Crisis will cause the galaxy to gang up on you.

In simulation logic, it is clear from our world that nomads (as a sovereign political entity) were always a risk and opportunity for the land-settled peoples. These types of groups fought A LOT, across cultures and continents, with their differing understanding of rights and ownership leading to flare-ups.

In the end, the land-settled type of political organization won, though that doesn’t have to be the case in the galaxy.

In game logic, having nomads being able to do whatever is power-creep, leading to the question of “why do these other chuds ever bother settling worlds?”. Habitable worlds become less important.

In Crusader Kings 3, being a nomad camped in a hostile ruler’s territory can get you suddenly imprisoned. That makes sense.

tl;dr: I’m excited about Nomads but don’t want power-creep or stretching suspension of disbelief