Stellaris builds on Paradox’s rich architecture of emergent gameplay, with a dozen pieces of mechanics whizzing by your head while you try to keep an eye on events and control the pulse of what’s going on. Building your first Habitat? Taking down your first Leviathan? Balancing the resource budget as you roll out to war? These are big deals, and space – as Douglas Adams wrote – is a big place. Here are our Stellaris tips to help you out.
This article is mainly aimed at newcomers, or at least past players returning after a long break, but hopefully even veteran players will be able to glean some insights that will help them in the wars to come.
All information is correct as of Version 2.8. We’ve just had some new changes drop, but these basics will still apply. Below, you’ll find tips for managing your economy, planets, your pops, trading and an introduction to diplomacy and ship design. There’s also specific tips for some of the unique empires, such as Hiveminds – everything you need to level-up your skills and conquer the galaxy.
Since the release of Ancient Relics, it’s become important to have more than two Science Ships at a time. If you’re able to, build a second ship as early as you can afford to with a Scientist with it.
This is both a positive and negative. On the positive side, you have more jobs available for a growing population (unless you’ve taken steps to reduce the growth of the population). On the negative side, each of those jobs when taken consumes more of whatever resource it’s converting. It’s very easy to lose track of where you are on the production curve and start converting entirely too much of something like civilian goods into research, because once you are out of one of those resources — everything that follows it in the production chain stops being produced.
You will often find yourself working at a deficit. This is not a failure on your part; quite the opposite. If you are growing, production will lag as jobs get taken by your population. Some of the jobs which consume resources will come online before those which produce them. This is the real reason that you want to be running a surplus most of the time. But when that’s not possible remember that you can always buy from the galactic market. That also means that you should always try to keep a positive energy generation up to your maximum storage. Energy buys alloys, alloys become ships. Energy buys food, food feeds a growing population.
Colonising a planet with the machines only takes 400 alloys. If you construct an alloy processor early along with the mining district to support it, you can be sitting on a comfortable store by the time you’re ready to colonise your first planet. Take advantage of that fact when you can.
Migration treaties with friendly neighbours can see great surges in your production. Migrant workers from neighbouring Empires can be put to work on agricultural districts, generator banks, and mining facilities. Even if they may not be a perfect environmental match, they’ll much prefer it to starving in the freezing rain on their home worlds.
Exploring during the early game is key. You always want to try and search out for all important resources. As soon as you can afford it, build a secondary science vessel to send out in the galaxy. Preferably going in the opposite direction to your first science ship, set them a course to survey each system that’s nearby. What this does is reveal potential resources, anomalies and habitable planets that are within a few jumps of your starting system. What this also does is make each system open for your other units to move into. See a system that has decent resources, or even a habitable planet? Once you’ve finished surveying it you can send your construction ship to begin building a starbase outpost in that system. Once done, those precious resources are now available for use.
Your primary concerns are minerals, power and food. On top of that are alloys and consumer goods. Both of these mid tier resources are manufactured using minerals in specialist buildings known as Alloy Foundries and Civilian Industries. Advanced strategic resources appear very rarely in space-borne areas like asteroids, gas planets, or locations created by special event chains. Like standard strategic resources, they require you to finish special research to make use of them. Living metal, dark matter, and nanites will be familiar to players from previous versions of the game but some of their uses have changed.
Pops are life. While they’re not a resource in a traditional sense, Pops are required to fill jobs in your buildings. They generate basic resources and can turn those resources you found into useful things for your Empire. Consequently, Pops should actually be counted as one of your most important resources. Not just used as a workforce, they also affect how big your fleet can be, your starbase capacity, among other things.
Without the necessities of food, housing, consumer goods/amenities for your population, you’ll begin to brew unhappiness. Unhappiness is a killer. It feeds directly into the calculation the game makes when deciding on a planet’s stability. Highly stable planets function efficiently, and will output resources at a normal rate. Low stability however will place a penalty on anything generated on the planet, as well as increasing random events such as riots and rebellions which will seriously harm your growing Empire.
It’s the Space United Nations. It’s a place where species can meet to vote on rules and resolutions that will change the way other species part of the Community have to behave. Failure to adhere to the rules will lead to embargos. Taking part in the Galactic Community, and throwing your political weight around, can have it’s advantages as you can choose to support or block resolutions that will favour you and hinder your enemies. Of course, if you haven’t the political influence available to you, you can call in favours from allies to vote in your favour, or if you don’t like what has passed into law you can choose to leave the Community all together, at a diplomatic penalty cost.
Warfare is broken into a few components. Making claims involves you spending your influence to claim an enemy’s territories. The further the claimed system is from your territory, the more influence it will cost. Before you can attack, you must declare war through the communications panel. Once war is declared, you’ll need to set a war goal, depending on what kind of war it’s going to be, the most common is conquest. You may encounter other options like vassalize, liberate, or even humiliate. Achieve your goals, you win the war.
In order to win the war, you’ll need ships to fight with. And you’ll need well designed ships at that.
Since the Le Guin update (which was released alongside MegaCorps), Stellaris has changed how planets are improved. Now we have Districts and Buildings. Districts provide resources to be harvested but simply building them doesn’t provide the resources. It’s the population taking up the jobs created that actually generates the resources. There are four types of districts:
Each planet supports a maximum number of total districts based on the size of the planet. Bigger planets mean more districts available. In addition, each district has its own maximum it can reach based on the features the planet spawned with. Blockers now occupy and block certain districts and are cleared in the same way you build new districts. This is labeled as ‘Clear Blocker’.
As mentioned earlier, territory is only expanded with the building of space outposts. It’s also worth mentioning that hyperlane travel has been the only form of travel available since the 2.0 Cherryh update. Inhabited planets and some systems create trade resources. To collect these, you’ll need a station that has a trade hub module built. Once complete, you can switch into the trade map mode and set the route which will connect that hub to your homeworld. Upon arrival at your capital, trade value gets converted into energy units.
Some race builds in Stellaris allow you to pick special traits that follow widely different rules to the other races. Here are some specific tips for those unique types.
Hiveminds are highly efficient, highly motivated workers. Planetary buildings that would normally use consumer goods use unprocessed minerals instead. The pops themselves only need housing and amenities — though for hiveminds, amenities are more like tools and general maintenance.
Machine empires, like hiveminds, are gestalt consciousnesses, so they don’t get to enjoy the benefits of the new trade system and don’t make use of consumer goods at all. Machines are sustained by consuming energy instead of food. As a result, unless you have taken it as your duty to eradicate all life, the galactic market can be the very definition of life-sustaining.
As of Patch 2.8 & the Necroids Species Pack, Death Cults have come to Stellaris giving you the ability to sacrifice your own Pops to get bonuses. Available in two varieties of Civic choices, Death Cult and Corporate Death Cult (because Death is a business). As you sacrifice, Edicts will open up to you. Edicts usually would cost a resource to use, such as influence or energy so the possibility of actually using (sacrificing) Pops to activate an Edict is something new and pretty cool.
