Stellaris 2.2.7 Survival guide – Steam Solo (2024)

Overview

New player to Stellaris? Confused? Bewildered? Overwhelmed by the complexity of 2.2.7?Played before but having trouble adapting to all the changes?This guide is designed to help you survive this new hostile galaxy where everything is a roadblock to survival.I wrote a guide for Old Stellaris before but had to re-learn to play.This guide is based on my notes and many hours of research and sifting through walls of text and soporific youtube videos.Nobody teaches you how to play the game.I hope to give you a fighting chance.Good luck O Great Leader

Introduction

FYI I Have 744 hours in Old Stellaris and 134 hours in new Stellaris at the time of writing this guide.

I also wasted many hours researching New Stellaris and hope to spare you some of this pain.

The Stellaris community is currently divided in 2 factions depending on which version they prefer.

I personally had fun with both versions and found problems with both. The new version seems like a work in progress and maybe this guide will be obsolete before the end of 2019, so i”ll keep it as simple as possible.

I have no wish to write a scholarly PhD thesis on all the arcana of the game.

I write from the perspective of a new player discovering basic game mechanics. A new player without all the DLC (I currently only have Leviathans and Horizon signal)

A new player who bought the game based on all the positive reviews but is overwhelmed by it all.

I kept my own review positive. The developers seem to be actively working to improve the game.

If all fails you can revert to Old Stellaris
Just google: “reverting to Stellaris 1.9” or reverting to “old Stellaris” for instructions.

Before you start the game or read this guide

Make sure you do not waste time watching videos or reading web pages or text dating before 2019
Everything in the game changed after that

This is the best Youtube video I ever found on the new Stellaris. (Republic of Play) It really helped me get started.

You see it’s all about the economy. My experience has been that mineral production remains the key to everything.

Buildings create jobs.

Pops work jobs.

Food is rarely a problem as long as you build 3-4 farms per planet. It is essential for pop growth.

Minerals. seriously, build all the mining districts available on each planet. Minerals get converted to alloys by metallurgists working in forges.
Alloys are essential for building ships and starbases.

Energy is the lifeblood of the economy to purchase missing resources, maintain fleets and starbases, hire leaders. Build energy districts to keep a reasonable surplus.

Districts can be built on planets to create clerk jobs which produce housing and amenities and trade value. Lack of housing causes instability which decreases worker productivity.

Trade is sent to your capital where it is converted to energy and either more alloys or more consumer goods depending on your economic choices.

If you overbuild a certain type of district or building you click it and you have the option to instantly demolish it or replace it (the construction remains productive while the replacement is being built)

DLC

While researching topics for this guide I came to realize that a lot of the popular player tips and strategies rely on content only available in the various DLC. There seems to be a consensus that they add a lot of player options and valuable content such as special ascension perks, or buildings:

Leviathans: space monsters, traders, artisans, research enclaves, war in heaven

Utopia: megastructures, ascension perks (biological/synthetic/psionic), utopian living standard, hive mind, fanatic purifiers

Synthetic dawn: Machine empires, AI uprising, voice packs

Apocalypse: Colossus, titan, marauders, mercenaries, Great Khan horde, pop abduction when sieging, life seeded Gaia world, tomb world habitability, slaving barbarians

Distant stars: Anomalies X2, more leviathans, new events, L-gates, voice packs

Megacorp: Ecumenopolis (city world) corporate civics, galactic slave market, caravans (lootboxes! but no microtransactions) More megastructures ( matter decompressor, mega art, strategic coordination), voidborne unity perk

For new players I would advise caution about apocalypse because they will be facing a very tough opponent (the great space Genghis Khan) . You have been warned.

If this is your first game, it is quite playable without the DLC and it may be more simple to learn the basic game mechanics. You can always add more complexity later. The first DLC to buy would be Utopia.

If Paradox does not reward me with the DLC for writing this guide I plan to buy them all anyway. From what I read they they really do add to the gaming experience.

Interface

Most useful commands:

E button to zoom in and out of systems

From the galaxy map, the player may queue science ship orders by holding down “Shift” key and right clicking on a system and selecting the “Survey System” (or explore system) option one by one.
Hold SHIFT key to queue patrol orders to suppress piracy

Hold ALT Button to see the hidden resources of surveyed planetary systems
Find view trade routes button on top of row of empire view filter buttons lower right screen
Lower right screen: empire view, diplomatic view, opinion view etc. Find out who hates you. Just under the trade view button, beware of empires with the red colour.
SPACE = pause button (you will need a lot of time to think…)
ESC to save game, adjust game settings, quit etc

The outliner is on the right side of the screen, you can click on every planet, starbase, fleet. Just click on the first tab with the small animal paw logo and the word “Sectors” and collapse it. Do this every time you start the game or it will make you sick. (Just found a better trick! On the outliner panel there is a small circle that looks like a small green gear logo. Click it for outliner options and disable sectors. They will never bother you again. Good riddance)

The rest, well you can figure it out by clicking and mousing everything. I could make a detailed guide for that but Paradox would need to pay me a princely stipend to compensate for the mind numbing tedium. I wouldn’t have the patience to read all that garbage myself.

Start a new empire

A great guide has been written for traits ethics and civics if you want to dig into this:

[link]

Here is my build if you want to get started quickly without too much reading. I do not claim it is the best possible build but it seemed better than the premade builds which I think were balanced for Old stellaris gameplay.

Government: Democratic Theocratic Republic (every few years a leader is elected with a mandate such as build 4 science stations in space and you are rewarded with unity if you fulfil that mandate) this becomes harder to achieve once you have filled up most available space and want to slow your expansion to keep the expansion penalties manageable.

Ethics:

– Xenophile: gives +10% trade value (gets more powerful as your economy grows) and reduces diplomatic influence cost -25% (Don’t think it made a big difference for me) Also makes relations with other empires less strained.

-Militarist: Ship fire rate +10% (more DPS is always welcome) Claim influence cost -10% (claims must be made on enemy systems before declaring a war of conquest, more on that later. Influence is slow to build and very limited throughout the game and is also used for trade pacts, edicts, building outposts to include unclaimed systems into your territory. Use it wisely and sparingly.

-Spiritualist: Monthly unity +10% (unity gives you unity perks and ascension perks that greatly improve the performance of your empire) Edict cost -5% (some early game edicts you may want are increased food production, energy production, pop growth) they help a lot

Traits:

-Mining guilds: +1 minerals from miners (I think that is powerful)

-Environmentalists: consumer goods upkeep cost for pops -10% (consumer goods only keep your pops happy which indirectly improves their productivity, you want happy pops at lower cost)

Early game

First you need 2 or 3 science ships to explore your surroundings quickly and find chokepoints.

Construction ships can only build an outpost to claim a system after it has been completely surveyed by a science ship.

In this case my empire has a chokepoint on Estreaeus for the upper border and a natural chokepoint with a leviathan in Eam (red exclamation mark within red parentheses lower right border) The AI is not about to come through there anytime soon.

Grab as much territory as you can and close borders (in the diplomacy screen) so rivals can’t colonize within your empire. Explore chokepoints fast and claim them with outposts and explore the rest of your empire at your leisure and claim the other systems at your leisure.

Claim the best systems first, those with planets and those with the most minerals/ energy/ science/ alloys/ strategic resources. Also notice some systems have a diamond ring grey symbol. This is trade value and is important for your economy. You can leave a few systems unclaimed within your empire if they have minimal resources like 2 energy.

From the galaxy map, the player may queue survey mission by holding down “Shift” key and right clicking on a system and selecting the “Survey System” option one by one. But surveying takes time and some players prefer to use the explore system first to find planets and chokepoints and other empires that could be a problem and adjust their strategy accordingly.

Build a colony ship as soon a you see a planet.

Encourage pop growth on planets with planetary decision.

When you have enough alloys build a few ships using the ship designer (left side of screen) and also use that to design your starbase defense platforms. Funny story about defense platform design : I realized near the endgame that they also had heavy weapon sections but had never noticed I had to scroll down the menu. Ha. Facepalm moment.

The starbase on Estreaceus with weapons slots and defense modules will keep our hostile neighbor in its place for now.

Once economy and research are up and running and your fleet fleet has about 2.5K power it is time to go to the communication screen and make claims on their systems from Nostea to Gargantua.

Having claims on rival systems gives you “Casus belli” which is latin for “cause for war” and you can declare a war of conquest.

Making claims requires influence.

Do you have any influence left after claiming your own systems and building outposts? You may have noticed that the construction ship needs 67 influence + alloys to build that outpost and my current influence (top screen bar) is 109! The answer is no obviously.

Well you can claim only Cevant their home world and build up influence during the 10 year truce and do another war after that. Conquest wars require a lot of influence which is needed for a lot of other important things. We will talk about other types of war a bit later.

One n00B trap is research and commercial pacts with xenos: they siphon monthly influence for marginal benefits.

If you find habitable planets within your borders colonize them ASAP with a colony ship (needs alloys and consumer goods to build). Remember that colony ships cannot enter unsurveyed and unclaimed systems.

Research ships will find anomalies, but they take time to research so I often find it better to survey first and do the anomalies later but they are definitely worth researching. I got extremely lucky in my first game exploring such an anomaly and finding a type of fungus that became sentient and a fast growing pop in my empire with full citizenship and amazing +50 habitability which made them able to colonize everywhere.

Gateways: Two systems have disabled gateways. Those are really amazing as they allow instant travel across vast distances. Repair them as soon as possible and build new ones in strategic locations. This really helps securing large sprawling empires and threatens enemy empires with swift retaliation if they dare attack you. The enemy cannot warp through your gateways unless they have captured the system and occupied it for about a month of game time and own another gateway. So protect them well with fleets and upgraded starbases. They also help keep trade routes shorter thereby reducing piracy issues as trade warps through them too.

Wormholes Those are quite another story. Anything and anyone can warp through them regardless of ownership. (I think that if you are at peace and have closed borders vs an empire they cannot use it but war cancels that) If you have one sitting in your territory guard it with a fully upgraded starbase and a fleet if the other side is in unfriendly territory.

Take advantage of enclaves: curators sell science for energy, artisans sell unity for energy, traders sell rare strategic resources for energy. They appear in the exploration phase and are incredibly useful in many aspects.

To summarize, early game is all about pop growth, economic growth, expansion, research, colonization and getting ready for war.

Planet Management

You will be staring at this screen a lot. This is where your planets are managed, I will teach you how to avoid 2 n00b traps. ( they got me)

On the left side you see 4 sets of coloured district blocks.

-Blue represents clerk jobs (clerks produce trade value and amenities and housing)
-Yellow = technician jobs (produce energy)
-Red = miner jobs (minerals)
-Green = farm jobs (food, Duh)

Go ahead, click on a green square, in the upper right panel when you see the farm icon click build, do this right away.

As you colonize different planets you will notice that some have lots of food tiles, some lots of minerals etc. You can specialize planets that way. You can make a planet specializing in energy by building a lot of energy districts if it has few farm slots. It is not necessary for each planet to be self-sufficient, there is commerce and planets with an overabundance of food send what is needed and get minerals and energy from other planets and so on. Housing and amenities must be produced locally by clerk jobs, entertainer specialist buildings, luxury housing.

On the right hand side are buildings and squares with red padlocks within squares lined with black and red striped borders. OOH BUT ONE HAS A GREEN CROSS IN THE CENTRE. It would be so tempting to build something there right away. N00B trap 1. When you build those you create specialist jobs that immediately attract your regular pops away from their basic resource jobs and you really need those to get the basic economy started. It is tempting to immediately produce science or alloys. Restrain yourself. Focus. Pop growth is power. You need to really get food production going first.

Then click on the upper right on the “decisions” button and check if you have enough food (1000) to get the encourage growth decision activated. This is not an empire decision but needs to be activated on each planet you colonize. (You get no warning when that decision expires but you can easily check if the decision is still active by looking for the decision icon that looks like a stack of orange-ish blocks in the planet surface image, bottom left of the planet surface illustration) (It would be nice if you could have an automatic renewal check box In the late game especially. For now just keep checking and renewing manually)

You notice the number of available jobs is 0. (grey icon with orange hair) This will be 2 once a farm district is built. You will get a notification when the building is finished. N00B trap #2 alert. You will be tempted to hit the notice button and jump to planet view and admire your 2 new available jobs and immediately queue minerals, energy and clerks. HA It will take quite a while for the 2 jobs you just created to be filled and during that time 6 more jobs will be available but those buildings will be empty for a significant amount of time costing you energy for no production. This kind of waste will hurt you in the early game. This is not like other games where you queue up buildings on planets and forget about them. This is micromanagement bliss for an elite class of player and you will learn to enjoy it too! Trust me you will! It grows on you just give it a bit of time!

Other important icons are:
-stability ( scale icon) 58% (keep it over 50)
-Crime (black figure icon) 0%
-Housing 4 I found housing to be problematic in the endgame as even a generous amount of clerk districts and 3 fully upgraded luxury housing districts were insufficient for all the workers and specialists. Really frustrating in the vanilla game but I read a DLC allows you to build off planet habitats where you can move some jobs off planet.
-Amenities 0 not enough, gotta keep those pops happy!
-Unemployment 0 (grey bag icon within red slashed circle) When you have unployment of 1 or more you get a red icon in the outliner on right screen.

Colonize planets as soon as possible, it takes a really long time to get them to be productive.

Take a look at the edicts in the left hand side panel. They are incredibly beneficial and you may want to run as many as your resources allow to improve your empire’s overall performance.

Trade

This is a complex topic but it is worth spending a bit of time watching these 3 videos and reading the viewer comments for useful tips.

Access the market by clicking on a resource in the upper left bar. You can buy or sell resources at outrageous prices but it keeps your empire going when you have a deficit or a surplus. Simplify your life by scheduling monthly trades:

Sprawl/ Research/ Unity/ Ascension

When a planet starts producing serious research it will benefit from a science ship assisting research in orbit. I found the assist research button on the science ship does not work and you need to select the science ship manually then R-click on the target planet and click the assist research button from there.

This is really important to check when you switch scientists from ship to planet research and vice-versa because if the game is not paused the ship-assisted research will not resume.

Research is sped up when scientist specialty matches the field of research. In this case notice that the scientist is well matched to field theory. This is hard to achieve because of the number of scientists that would be required to match all fields. But it can be worth it to check the leader tab for a possible match when you get a new research project.

CRITICAL RESEARCH:
Your fleets will have to hunt for void clouds so your science ships can analyse the space battle debris for the wonderful cloud lightning weapon research and hunt for crystals for access to crystal plating research as stated in the ship video.

In previous games I found ring worlds with ruined sections but I never could do anything with them. Then I had this:
They cost a HUGE AMOUNT OF ALLOYS TO BUILD but they are like 4 big planets with all the regular districts except mining districts. During my playthrough I could only afford to build 2 of the 4 sections.

Empire sprawl is annoying and really slows you down but you will need a big empire and many planets and pops to win the game. I pointed out in the war section that the current consensus among players is expansion done at a proper pace compensates and outpaces the sprawl penalties. Remember it is not a hard cap. There is an ascension perk that increases administration capability (admin cap can give the wrong impression there is a cap) but i feel now that the increase is too small to waste an ascension slot and you will get research options to increase your AC, Grab those ASAP.

Unity is another important resource in Stellaris. It is produced by jobs and buildings and once you reach a threshold you pick perks within tradition trees. You get an adoption bonus, a completion bonus and an ascension perk choice when you complete a tradition. My first tradition was expansion and it seems to be a popular choice among players. Supremacy would be a good choice for more aggressive playstyles.

For Ascension this is what I chose: (keep in mind my choices were limited by the lack of Utopia DLC)
-Tech ascendancy +10% research
-Executive vigor: edict duration +10% (very popular choice)
-Galactic force: naval cap +80 fleet cap +20 (not very powerful for ascension in retrospect and considering research and anchorages will increase those values)
-One vision: Monthly unity +10%, pop amenity usage -10%, governing ethics attraction +50% (very disappointed with this one, my pops had wild ethics divergence despite this perk and all the temples I built I seriously think it doesn’t work as advertised, could even be a bug)
-Galactic contender: damage to fallen empires and gate builders +33% (essential)
-Defender of the galaxy: +50% damage to crisis fleets (essential)
-World shaper: terraform to Gaia planets (with the recent change to megastructures could be a decent alternative)
-Eternal vigilance: increased starbase damage, HP, platforms (seems weak for endgame)
-Grasp the void: increased starbase limit +5 ( you can also increase it with research so a bit of a waste I think)

In my research I came across other perks that seem very helpful (only with DLC): bio ascension , arcology, nihilistic acquisition)

War

You are not paranoid. They are really out to get you. You have no friends. Trust no one.
Federations: ROFLMAO
Endgame crisis: you are the galaxy’s only hope.

In old Stellaris you could be a pacifist.
Yes you could declare wars of liberation vs evil giant empires, liberate chunks of systems, wait a few years and assimilate them into your empire or just split them into colourful weak jigsaw puzzles pieces. Glorious days.

Welcome to the real world. The weak are exploited by the rich and powerful. Might makes right. You can be the sheep or you can be the wolf.

The only pacifist build I came across was a weird thing by Aspec combining pacifist with authoritarian or xenophobe using a DLC ascension perk called nihilistic acquisition. The key is to use ideology war casus belli and to stretch it out because with this perk bombing causes pop abduction to funnel slaves to his planets and increase basic resource production. Once the war is over the borders have not changed but the rival has almost no pop or buildings left and there is unrest due to ethics change. They are unlikely to recover.

“Si vis pacem, para bellum”

Now watch this video:

As you have seen, conquest wars are for territory and they cost influence but there are other types of war.

-The aforementioned ideology war

–Subjugation war: in the com screen you demand a rival empire becomes your vassal or your tributary. They always refuse. This gives you casus belli. Declare war and chose wargoal of vassal or tributary. Vassals become your allies and have no colonization or diplomatic interaction and you can eventually fully integrate them into your empire at a cost of 5 influence a month (Yikes!) but from what I read they are quite lame militarily and will not significantly help your war effort. Tributaries give you 25% of their energy and mineral production but can conduct their own diplomacy. They can declare a war for independence against you if they feel you are weakened. If subjugated empires are attacked you become one of the defenders in the war automatically.

–Threat control: I had 2 such wars in my playthrough. The first was with fanatic xenophobe spiritualists. I only wanted to get another tributary. But I had to capture every…single…planet…and…system. Because wargoal for this war is over 1000 points! Nice thing though is I kept all those systems and planets. Bad part though was I was now way over my administrative cap. This really slowed research and unity production. If I had been more experienced I would have colonized all their uncolonized planets and built them up with lots of research labs and unity building and surged ahead but I was a bit like the little fellow up here and concerned about defensibility and overextending. But the consensus among experienced players is “grab everything” because you negate the admin cap penalties through growth and increased production.

-Some players will build a colossus because they get this type of casus belli from it and wars will only end with forced peace 1 year after both sides reach 100% war exhaustion or total defeat of 1 empire whichever comes first.

My second threat control war was when the awakened spiritualist fallen empire decided to attack one of my tributaries while I was fighting the unbidden crisis fleet. I took quite a risk sending all my fleets to their home worlds and wiped out their fleets and captured the middle third of their empire before war exhaustion reached 100% for me and I kept the conquered territory despite what the tooltip says. Check out the following images:

I claimed Tampere which I reconquered and kept after the war, Enkef was too far out to reconquer and was kept by the zealots after the war, Nunki was destroyed by the crisis fleets (not shown) and Siccon which was their homeworld of 2 Gaia planets. Notice my claim on Siccon is weaker than that of another empire currently not involved in this war. I feared all my efforts would be in vain and despite my invasion of their homeworld and military success, another empire would end up owning that prize. The tooltip info was really not reassuring (next 2 images) but the last image (after I kept refusing status quo white peace and had forced peace imposed after I also reached 100% war exhaustion) shows I actually kept what I had conquered.

I guess the take home message here is: don’t waste influence in a threat control war whether you are the attacker or defender you keep what you take.

War exhaustion:
There are a few subtleties here which are not well explained anywhere and lots of angry posts about it by frustrated players. But really it is really quite reasonable when you understand it. First there is attrition which affects both sides at about the same rate so wars don’t drag out forever
Losing space battles and losing ships really affect WE and as the game progresses you will be building more battleships and less corvettes to keep WE to a minimum because corvettes are destroyed a lot.

Failed ground invasion battles and troop loss also cause lots of war exhaustion (for the invader, not for the target). To prevent this, use unlimited bombing fleet stance (kills buildings and defenders) and check relative troop strength before sending the ground troops (you build those on planets, not starbases) I usually wait until I have at least 50% more troop strength and/or there are less than 5 defenders to invade a planet to keep my troop casualties to a minimum.

Successful ground invasion increases enemy war exhaustion.

Capturing enemy systems increases enemy war exhaustion.

Destroying enemy ships increases enemy war exhaustion.

Suppose your war exhaustion is 50% and the enemy has 75% and all his starbases have been captured and fleets destroyed you will see the achieve wargoal difficulty number get lower and lower until you get the green checkmark and you win just by clicking it. (get to that screen by clicking the war circle bottom right corner). Your attrition will progress at the same rate but the enemy will reach 100% faster than you and you win automatically in that case.

If you accept status quo or white peace before you reach wargoals, borders remain unchanged and you just wasted all that influence spent on claims. ( I am not absolutely sure what happens if you peace out in a threat control war but my best guess is that each side keeps what it conquered)

One important thing I read about is that fallen empires cannot replenish their fleets during a war. This is a great thing because if you have a good economy you may have time to produce enough ships to stop them in their tracks especially if you engage them where you have a fully upgraded starbase and/or lay an ambush in a system where an anomaly nullifies shields. They have lots of shields and armor but not such a high number of hull hit points.

Forcing them to split their forces to fight on 2 fronts will also make them more manageable using a smaller disposable fleet that can hide in an empire that has closed borders with the enemy such as a rival FE and/or capturing lots of poorly defended outposts. If your fleet is cornered it is better to recall the fleet admiral and disband that small fleet immediately rather than lose those ships in battle and increasing your own war exhaustion.

Ships

This video by Stefan Annon taught me everything:

Make sure you check out the ship designer on the left screen side as soon as you have a few weapon and other research upgrades and design your own ships.

Make sure you give each new design a distinct name such as KL for kinetic laser class etc and check auto upgrade and hit the save button to save it. If a design becomes obsolete you can delete it without losing the ships in your fleet but they will no longer be upgradable. When scientists discover ship upgrades you will see a yellow arrow to the right side of your ships and they will be upgraded at a starbase if you click it as alloys become available but this takes time, more so with bigger fleets and bigger ships.

Don’t forget to scroll down the defense platform build screen when you get heavy weapons because the heavy weapon module is at the bottom. I only found that out at the end of my game. Yep.

Make sure you uncheck that auto-design button in the lower left of the ship design panel. Otherwise you will be unable to create new ship designs! Yep. Happened to me too.

Fleets

This your fleet panel, with the description of each symbol row by row from top to bottom, left to right.

Row 1: Merge fleets/ Stop/ Return to home base/ Move/ Jump (with jump drives, dangerous penalties)/Patrol

Row 2: Take point (toggle to encourage or discourage allied fleets from following to battle) (HA that will be the day)/ Open fleet manager (very cool option, I just realized this just now, saves you the trouble to click the FM manager on the left panel, I just learned this by making a guide ! ) / Disband (careful not to hit that one) / Deselect (very useful when you have a bunch of fleets and transports in a system but they need different orders, you drag a box with the mouse to select all and deselect one group)

Row 3: HP/ Armour/ Shields/ Piracy suppression/ Fleet size/ Military power ( note that fleet size has a hard cap but naval capacity is much higher as it is composed of several fleets and you can go over it with increased cost for ship maintenance)

Row 4: Attack target/ Planet bombardment stance (light or indiscriminate or special pop abduction) / Fleet stance (passive or aggressive)

Row 5: Reinforce fleet (best use the fleet manager only for this command because if you use both you may end up with overbuilding and confused fleets in the middle of nowhere unable to merge with main fleet and confused and unable to decide where to go) / Split fleet in half/ Transfer selected ships to create a new fleet/ Upgrade fleet (at starbase when new tech is discovered) / Repair fleet (battle damage, restore HP)

Fleet manager

The first time I saw this panel i found it hideous. But my playthrough completely changed my perspective and now I see it as an absolutely amazing design. I would now loathe having to play another game without it. Once I understood how it worked I wondered how the heck I managed to play most of the game without it.

In the early game you only have a pitiful fleet of pitiful ships. As the game progresses fleets become larger and you cannot easily keep track of how many of which ships you lost in battle let alone queue all the build orders and give orders to each new ship to merge with the main fleet deep in enemy territory.

This does all the work for you.

First you notice the big n00b trap button “reinforce all” do I really need to say more about that?

Now that we had a good chuckle select the first one of your main fleets involved in the war. (Galathor’s armada)

Corvette picket is 6/9
Destroyer DKLP is 4/7
Frigate F79 is 0/1
Cruiser is 9/10
Battleship is 3/3

Now as the game progresses you notice certain ships types die a lot (increasing your war exhaustion) and the bigger battleships deal more damage with their wonderful X slot weapons in the spinal mount section and are much more resistant.

Click the green minus button to the left of the ships described above to get corvette 6/6, Destro 4/4, Frig 0/0, cruis 9/9 Then click the + sign to the right of the battleship to get 3/5 Since each battleship costs 8 fleet points and you decided not to rebuild the obsolete ships you freed up more than 16 fleet points to build 2 new battleships. There are a few points available before you reach the fleet cap of 110.

Now click the bottom button “add ship design to fleet” and select your new Torpedo class corvette you just designed which is pretty good at this stage of the game. You will then see it available in the list of buildable ships with a + sign to the right. Click it until you get to the fleet limit of 119.

Now click the reinforce fleet button (not reinforce all).

Voila.

The list of starbases building those ships you just ordered will appear in the right panel and when they are finished they will travel and merge with Galathor’s armada without any further micromanagement on your part.

I know it sounds very complicated explaining it with words but once you start to play with it you will never go back to your old ways. You have my word.

Starbases and other useful war info

If you have fleets travelling in enemy territory during a truce with an empire and the truce expires and the enemy closes their borders your fleets go missing in action for about 6 months! I almost failed vs an awakened fallen empire because of this! Be patient, wait outside the borders until the truce expires.

Never hit the upgrade all (captured) starbase defenses button of a fallen empire, it will downgrade all those wonderful defense modules to garbage. Don’t ask me how I know.

If you capture an enemy system with a starbase that has a shipyard module, you can actually use that starbase to repair your own fleet and even build ships of your own empire design. You can even build defense modules of your own design. Those actions require ownership and in my experience it takes about one month of game time. (your fleets must be in the system during all that time)

You cannot build new starbase modules nor downgrade the starbase nor change its configuration during the war. You may go over the starbase cap during the war and suffer maintenance penalties for that.

Starbases should be specialized:

Defensive: with maxed defense modules on chokepoints

Economy: placed strategically among a cluster of systems generating trade with plenty of trade modules (each trade module increased trade distance by 1 starlane) and the offworld trading company.

Anti-Pirate: Full of hangar defense which gives the best anti-piracy defense and strategically located near important trade starbases.

Naval capacity: with lots of anchorage modules with increase naval capacity and the naval admiralty module for bonus naval cap.

Shipyard: Their main role is building ships but you can add whatever module seems most useful depending on their strategic location. Or fully militarize them to make them tough to capture because once you lose your ship production you lose the war.

System restriction:

You will come across systems with hostile aliens that will kill your ships. It’s very frustrating during a war to have your expensive and slow building battleships get picked off one… by… one… by a fleet of space trolls. this will save your life. Look at the bottom of the system screen where danger lurks and toggle the very inconspicuous button with the ship icon to restrict the system. Your ships will avoid this system and use another path. When you are ready to send a strong fleet to clean out that system just toggle it off.

Victory

Personal comments

It had been a long time since I played Stellaris. It was very hard to get into it at first because of the insane complexity of the new version.

But the more I played the more I had fun especially at the end when the awakened fallen empire declared war on me and my tributaries while a crisis fleet was making a huge blob in the left side of the galaxy just above my empire and both seemed quite overpowering. But I used strategy and I won against overwhelming odds and overpowered enemies because they just were not very bright. If they had grouped their power into a massive death stack and headed directly for my core worlds my empire would have been annihilated.

Researching the game online was incredibly time consuming. But it made me discover new interesting strategies that other players use. It made me want to get the DLC to fully appreciate what the game has to offer.

Obviously the game has issues:

Sectors are loathsome. Fortunately I found the little wheel in the upper outliner that allows you to make them disappear.

Resources are very limited especially strategic ones.

Game start is painfully slow

Housing is sorely lacking in a game where expansion is so hard is it reasonable to build 3 domes on my homeworld and not have housing upgrades through research when everything else upgrades? and still have a housing shortage? I guess with megastructures you can transfer some of your jobs off planet and replace job producing buildings with housing and transfer the unemployed but this is not possible for the vanilla game.

Tutorial is a joke.

The victory screen after a war (especially a war between other empires) is a bloody mess that no one can understand.

Ethics divergence is all over the place despite choosing One vision (I felt that perk was totally useless) and building all the temples I could as spiritualist my pops joined all kinds of crazy factions and spiritualists became a minority which made them unhappy. Using influence to suppress the nazi faction was unsuccessful and drained my influence for nothing. I get it that their role is to allow a player to change ethics midgame and reform government but really? In old Stellaris I ignored the factions because it was impossible to keep them happy while using sound empire management decisions.

Persistent battle after image of crisis fleet anchor as a giant mushroom in the middle of the galaxy (bug)

Ugly fleet battles Stellaris has great promotional videos with epic looking fleet battles as well as some youtube videos. Why do I see those messy clusters of coloured exhaust lines going around in circles? It would be nice to see slower battles and zooming in to see ships firing and ships taking damage and generally looking more epic and glorious. Endless Space 2 and Sins of a solar empire have much better looking combat where you have indicators for damage taken to shields, armour, hull instead of having 2 hovering masses with declining numbers underneath.

Mouse wheel sensitivity control When admiring a planetary system or leviathan or space battle the mouse wheel overzooms and makes it hard to focus on specific structures. It would be nice to have that in the game control options. Same problem with galaxy view zoom, it is not smooth and gradual.

Those are some of the goofy things I found in my playthrough.

Anyway I made this this guide for new players with the vanilla game and players who missed the whole 2.2 drama because the elite players probably know all that stuff and all the best buids and strategies but some things really stumped me and I hope this will help them.

The game is hard and complex but the best things in life are not easy and simple and the rewards of overcoming impossible odds make it all worth it.

Let me know in the comment section if you have great builds and strategies to share for the vanilla game or even for the full game and all the DLC or if I made some terrible errors.

May the force be with you.

ObsidianShadow

PS: I just purchased all the DLC on sale and started writing an intermediate guide for the new content.
Megacorp did not have a significant price drop so I will wait until it gets lower. Or maybe Paradox will gift it to me for writing this amazing guide… LOL wouldn’t that be nice!