Building an Empire - in space!

Stellaris 2.2 Le Guin

The publisher (HBS) of Battletech that was released last year moved under the wings of Paradox Entertainment at some point in H2/2018 and to celebrate the kickstarters got a surprise copy of Stellaris. My former colleague Kimmo had for years praised strategy games like Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron and such, all of which were set on our poor Terra, but only Stellaris actually lit the fire of interest in my heart. Still it wasn't strong enough to get me to buy anything, as my backlog has been notorious for many years now.

I took Stellaris under test as soon as I was done with playing through games from the (also bought many a year ago) Humble Double Fine Bundle that I had definitely wanted to play (IIRC the order was Stacking, Brütal Legend and Costume Quest) as I wanted to do something else. If a 4X space empire game wasn't different enough from those, what was?

The BuckaZoid Empire

Because I wasn't confident enough to start with a proper AI opponent I fiddled with the settings and went for a sandbox-y "no other empires" universe with the unexplained "crises" pushed as far in the future as I thought it was safe (whatever they were, I didn't want to face them anytime soon while learning the ropes). Of course, despite the space being empty, I started a militaristic-authoritarian-materialistic Empire and as my usual nickname ISD didn't really work as an Empire name, I went even further into the past (this I used when we played Stars! on adidas network in the nineties), using BuckaZoid Empire. And yes, you there in the corner, it was indeed a Space Quest reference.

Early game

Pretty early on I colonized a semi-nearby planet and being stupid I kept building space stations into every single system I encountered (later I realized that a system with a couple of silly energy resources might not be worth it at that point) without any other limit than time. Quickly I found myself in a situation where my civilian fleet had four construction ships and four science ships surveying the space, investigating loads of anomalies everywhere, all the time, checking out wormholes and whatever else they encountered for their Empress. Mostly the science boats just flew around and ran back howling whenever they saw a shadow of someone else, such as aeons-old forgotten automated mining ships, space amoebas or raiders (no space pirates yet, avast!).

A few systems away I found a planet that had sentient but not yet spacefaring life. Of course I built a research station on the orbit and after tolerating the passive observation for a (too long) while I turned the knobs to eleven and let loose my aggressive cow abductors. Of course that caused some havoc and bothersome events, like the badly functioning implants and eloping and Empire-blackmailing attempts by scientists who fell in love with the sav... erm, natives.

At some point in life the people of Iieystara reached the next stage of life and technology, partially by themselves but mostly thanks to the benevolent Empire. Yay me! After a very long processing time they got enlightened and suddendly my Empire didn't consist of humanoids anymore... luckily to the newcomers the BuckaZoids were not xenophobic.

Random eventage

A Dimension of Suffering... I had kind of assumed that the makers were more than well enough aware of all the Chthulhu and WH40 stuff in the world, so anything that referred to anything about portals to other dimensions my immediate paranoid reaction was "close it now!" or "Liberate tuteme ex inferis". Maybe there was a chance for that event to go wrong and the entity (or entities) on the other side getting mad and to spill out to my universe.. Maybe I could've taken the risk, had I got more of a navy than the tutorial-demanded six tiny corvettes, all of which were completely ignored at their docks, totally unupdated.

After almost a hundred game-years the first Empress of my Empire kicked the royal bucket. I had expected that to cause more internal strife but that didn't seem to hamper my pretty clear line of succession. Maybe a different governing style would've been burdened with a leader with wrong opinions, a whiny space parliament or a bickering political elite?

In the name of Science!

Being myself I put my full resources into researching science at full blast. I took ages for me to get to research the first rare tech to begin with even with the resources spent. With time I got to update certain traits following my own priorities, after fully researching a complete set (the main block plus five subcomponents) I could get more traits. As I was steadily developing my people's attributes and unlocking Ascension Perks I had chosen poorly and could not build any other Megastructures than Gateways (space bridges). I really would've loved to build my own Dyson Sphere (the Ring Worlds were only available after buying certain DLC), but my own lack of research meant it was not to be, not in this universe at least.

In the screenshot below you could see my survey results so far, it was pretty clearly visible what was known and what settled. The southern ring was pretty decently opened up, the northwest that I reached via a lucky wormhole discovery was also getting decentish progress. Some of the routes were completely unavailable for me, thanks to the engine technology being still too weak, my ships just couldn't make FTL jumps that long. But slowly and unnoticed, that problem eventually disappeared over time.

The science ships had an automatic mode that I hadn't used, because I wanted to choose which routes they'd use. Not that I knew any better what and where they were doing their sciencyness, anyway. One reason was that as my ships were on the default rule of "in case you encounter unfriendlies, escape", the automapping mode was uncompatible. I also didn't want to lose my precious, pretty well leveled-up scientists in vain, as I lost more than I needed to lose in random events and by time itself.

Curiously the galaxy was stock full of half-broken space portals (there were 2x, 3x more of those than wormholes) that I could have repaired at a mind-numbing resource cost. Activating those was a gamble, for you couldn't know where the endpoint was before you tested it. That also applied to the Gateway I built myself, it just took my brave first travelers "somewhere".

I was really paranoid and careful with those gates, because if my puny and not-at-all-worth-their-title of the Imperial Fleet with still the same six corvettes was able to fly around the universe through them, the same way anyone hostile could enter the unprotected beating heart of my Empire, just as easily. Where was the option of laying space mines around the portals, or to bombard them into pieces?

One of the first fights I actually searched for

A microfleet heading to sneak behind some angry space whales

Surveying the galaxy

System by system my science ships, of which I had at best six roaming around (I found a few more via some random events) opened up the wonders of the galaxy and gathered experience by investigating anomalies in the systems they visited. Every now and then they found something hostile which left some red alarming signs on my map, as the civilians always fled at first sight, but had they ended up being closer to the entities there were some details like the count of things sighted, their types and firepower estimates. As time went by the info got out of date, which meant that the signs only meant that "there was something, some decades ago" and with luck that contained the firepower guesstimate. Maybe that also disappeared in time, if the system wasn't within anyone's sensor range, but I wasn't actually sure of how it worked. Apparently most of the space amoebas and other deviants hit with about 500-600 points, while some entities got up to a few thousand points.

My fleets were, as I mentioned before, puny and heavily ignored and they were not up to the task of cleaning the galaxy from evil or from bad thoughts for that matter. I chose to let the red warning signs be and guided my scientists to just detour around however possible. Sadly a part of the spacelanes were so choked that at worst in certain parts a good bunch of systems were blocked from be by a single unhappy space amoeba and I was forced to take multi-year detours to get to the systems behind it.

Greased Lightnin', go Greased Lightnin'

My not-yet-oppressed citizens

When I had more or less found out how the map was laid out I decided to start working on it. After a very, very long period of "those can wait, I've no enemies here" I lifted my fleet's techs up to date and added a bunch of new (of new classes, even!) ships to bolster up their firepower over 10k. It looked like a good number for me to be carefree about the random enemies I had encountered so far.

Ah, the feeling of strength and power when I could finally give the assault orders to my fleet to dispatch of the vile deviants who had scared my important scientists, with a confidence of getting almost all of them back to the home port. This has, by the way, always been my Achilles' heel in 4x games (or RTS'): I have concentrated on science, research and mapping and pretty much everything and anything else but building my interstellar navies. That could be blamed on my sandbox-player's nature. At least Stellaris had a convenient checkbox for "auto-best" that kept my researched ship, space station and outpost designs at the most powerful configurations as my train-like research divisions kept churning out technological advancements. Without that feature my corvettes and whatnots would've still been running on tin plate armour, steam engines, shieldless and armed with flashlights and actual slingshots... and there'd be maybe three of them. In the whole galaxy.

An excuse for a tiny war

Over the centuries of my empire I had surveyed all the systems in the galaxy. During this time I had uplifted a species from deviancy to become a space-farers and productive members of the Empire. From the North-Eastern corner mentioned before I found a second candidate race for reeducation, but I decided to check out the other option I had ignored with the first alien race. I enlightened them with somewhat more direct and culturally intrusive way to become my vassals.

Of course I had absolutely no need for a vassal, so I wanted to see what happened if I started rattling sabers. All in the name of science, of course! Well, maybe that also included testing out some new weapons technology, if I was being honest.

When I lifted the Lyrites to the community of spacefarers to enjoy the passing benevolence of the Empire, they got gifted the system I had built chock-full of factories and resource mines. Not that it mattered much, as the map showed that they only got something like 4 energy units and a decent amount of trade. Their neighbouring systems were 75% up for grabs, too.

Feeling benevolent as I was ever going to pretend to be, so I allowed them to get independent and completely coincidentally started researching completely unrelated things like slavery and slave armies. The day they had been released from the warm embrace of the Empire the deviant lizards launched their constructor ships to conquer the three available systems.
This was not going to be allowed, the Empire needed their borders to be secure! I sent my construction ships to each of the immediate next systems to block their potential expansion routes. My goodwill had limits and those limits had indeed been crossed.

Either because of certain ideological differences or my own expansion activities the critter's prime minister closed their borders. As if that had been a problem to the life in the Empire or her expansion, for the clowns were blocked into a galactic cul-de-sac. The screenshot below showed somehow how I had parked one of my tolerably-sized fleets to the Geagawa system sometime earlier. One just couldn't leave their borderlands unsafe.

After I had gifted my former vassals their independence we had an automatic ten-year truce, during which I did my utmost to ruin our relationship in the diplomacy screen, even resorting to calling the ambassador names constantly or just insulting everything they stood for. While the years whittled slowly down I casually sent all my fleets to the nearest system and kept updating their offensive capabilities at the shipyards constantly, as my scientists worked heavily on warfare-related research.

As soon as it was doable I declared war on the non-humanoids and set my war goal to conquer their home system. The Lyrite ambassador's reaction was somehow understandably "butbutbutbutbutbutbut whyyyyyy?", my Empire's blunt response was "because we can!"

We also simply wanted to, but that was not to be said out loud.

A single world in flames

I immediately sent all the fleets I had assigned to this operation to wreck the space boats of the whining lizard creatures, starting with the unarmed ones. Within mere days in game time I had reconquered four out of their five systems and had parked my fleets on the orbit of Honnam Ter III.

Now I had gotten to the part of the game I had been pretty curious about: orbital bombardment. The default policy was "ordinary" bombardment, which I naturally turned immediately to the harsher "unlimited" bombardment. This option of course wrecked the ground armies they were heavily building but it also caused immeasurable suffering on the civilian population at a rapid pace, destroyed infrastructure and land, as one could expect by the description.

At this point I started wondering how do I do the groundfall, drop my mobile infantry on planet H, invade the deviants? I really had no idea and could not find a menu, a button, anything at all. The Lyrites had had some troop transports at the space dock, which I had never seen as an option on my spaceports at all.

Only later on ddg told me that I should've gone on a planet, choose an army from there and on its view press a "get going!" button. Bleh. Well, there's always the next time.

After several years of massive orbital bombardment on their only planet and enjoying some mass murder of civilians innocent of the crime of being different I thought that as I hadn't figured out how to make an insanely oversized invasion of the only inhabited enemy planet (that was also my war goal) in the galaxy. I just didn't have the faintest clue of how to fulfil my goal and as time kept passing my people were getting tired of this war, which was always bad for business. This hadn't been quite as amusing as I had hoped, so I started going for peace.

Naturally I demanded for their unconditional surrender for a few years, but as I had not met my goals my demands were always automatically denied. My next option was to call it a draw instead, which was ridiculous, considering how things had gone, but I also wasn't looking forward to my Empire's population starting riots over a decades-long war. The first simple suggestions they laughed at, as one does, but with a few silly empty promises they accepted my Empire's peace offering. Of course I could've just surrendered, but that I didn't find even ridiculous.

After the war had ended I started working on improving the international relations with shamefully one-sided trade and other deals. What could I do if they accepted my proposals for economy-crippling amounts of resources over very, very long contract periods in exchange for something as worthless (in this case here) as access to my sensor data?

Setting up a federation just to see what that was, was my idea, but for one or more reasons they never accepted it and I wasn't quite sure, why not. The relationship between the deviants and the Empire improved constantly, mostly thanks to the cooperation, immigration and trade deals we had going. Meanwhile I uplifted a couple more species I had found while looking more carefully into the systems that had been just checked out but nothing more. A couple of these I took in as vassals. My plan with this was just to see if they did anything interesting if I just let them be.

All the same I kept running my scientific research at the highest priority. After I discovered telepahty I researched something as curious as psionic armies and a warp engine that worked on PSI energy. I hadn't taken any of those in use so far, but I had the time.

My test war ended I sent my fleets back to protect the solidified borders of the Empire. One fleet stayed next to Lyrite's system, just in case the sneaky lizards got cocky with their tiny fleet. A couple of my fleets I sent to some isolated systems in the non-developed sectors of the galaxy so that the weakest of my fleets were protecting the smallest outpost systems. The last ones, the strongest ones, I set to patrol my main sectors in the southern end.

The occasional space pirate attacks on my unprotected outposts had started to become a nuisance, so I built one or two gun platforms to protect each of my outposts. Need I mention that 99% of my outposts and platforms were totally unarmed? Especially Omicron Persei (which didn't have eight planets... what a disappointment) was under constant harrasment and of course that happened whenever my patrolling fleet was somewhere else. Bucka Prime's space station was the only decently defended port with eight gun platforms, just because it was the Imperial Capital.

There were much more pirates now, I guessed mostly beacuse of the massive unemployment rates in the Empire that had caused crime rates to rise and even organize in some places. My planets were built full but I just could not get work for each population unit on every colonized planet, no matter how I tinkered with the buildings. Or maybe I just didn't know how this actually worked.

Crisis: uninvited visitors from beyond

Without anyone asking, as a complate surprise, someone or something tore open the time-space continuum somewhere in the northern end of the galaxy, on stardate 2551.06.22. This was clearly not a good thing. My first response was to send all my inconveniently located fleets to run at full blast to the Higashik-Afa system. My vassals were as useless as one might expect, I didn't know how to tell them to attack with their silly fleets (the diplomatic screen had labeled each of them as "pathetic"), I could only hape they would at least defend themselves if things went really wrong.

I gathered all my naval forces to a couple of stacks and sent them at the same time into the system the interdimensional  beasts were flowing into. I got the system cleared of them with massive losses. Each of the Unbidden fleets had the firepower of ~20k and they had gotten a number of those into my universe, they were spreading like a bad smell. I thought to myself "well, that was pretty easy  as I got this done so quickly", but boy, was I wrong. Their portal could not be destroyed while they had something called Anchors and according to the situation log they had a number of those.

Unable to shut down the interdimensional tear or to stem the tide of incoming enemies my badly crippled fleets were chopped up and eaten. For reference, see screenshot below.

The bastards spread around the northern area and ate a good number of sectors from my area of influence, just like that. My science ships were eaten and before I could actually do anything I was left with a couple of silly construction ships and the remains of my mistreated, underpowered two fleets. That was all that survived.

Luckily I had started my capital's spaceport to churn out new ships as soon as the event triggered and they were making good progress there. I wasn't under any sort of illusion of their work queue to be completed before the violet cancer got to destroy my whole Empire, but at least I would fall with my space boots on.

Awfully quickly the beasts found my colonized planets in the north. After a quick and brutal orbital bombardment the citizens were eaten and my planets were ruined beyond recolonization (perhaps they could be terraformed, but I didn't think I'd ever get to try it out).

The Empire Strikes Back, for real

Things were looking bleak and I feared I would be defeated quickly, but what was actually happening? I did get the Empress' Right Fist fully built and its firepower was actually a beautiful sight to behold compared to my old fleets: 178k+ and you'd ruin the day of a good bunch of those 20k fools before it was all over.

It was actually exhilarating to watch how the megabaddies who had done as the pleased with my boats before were now getting snuffed out of existence at the blink of an eye. Overpower was, as usual, really fun, when it was you being the strong one.

To support the magnificent ERF fleet I kept my spaceyards pretty busy with work, both at Bucka Prime and now at Honnam Ter as well. The enemy count was so insane that even though they were now relatively small, 20k-30k fleets, they just whittled down my own ships bit by bit and at some point three of those enemy fleets would end up being uncomfortably close to being equal to my mighty fleet, constantly reducing my odds of success. There were also more and more enemy fleets pouring in, so at some point one megafleet would not be enough for me to be overpoweing - or even equal - againts a swarm of smaller fleets.

After a couple of larger battles I pulled the Empress' Right Fist to the nearest spacedock for repairs and massive updates, as I had kept my scientists busy as well (at this point my options in the military tree were left to things like "faster fire rates for this type / stronger shields / more durable armour / higher fleet capacity". Still, the numbers kept getting better for me, constantly, and the Empire's Last Hope fleet got finished not that long after the Empress' Left Fist, with firepower at 190k+.

This allowed me to get the ethnic cleansing running for real. I jumped to the backyard of the uninvited guests via a wormhole and started bunnyhopping systems, cleaning them up one by one. Occasionally I encountered some enemy fleets that had started lumping together into fleet stacks, those mean beasts. After a quick swipe through the northern hyperspace lanes the Unbidden territory had decreased noticeably and their fleets weren't quite that eager to attack mine everywhere, so I took my fleets for a quick repair, rearm and systems update on the multiple docks in the northeast. After this expensive R&R break I continued torching the Unbidden outposts one by one, not really caring about their fleets at this point anymore.

Ever so slowly I had reached the point of the baddies controlling only four systems direcly, annoyingly they were not even in the same cluster of hyperspace routes (I had this feeling that one constructor had escaped after all, even though I was hunting them down at the cost of everything else). I had lost two full colonized planets and over 200 ships but I had also destroyed over 40 000 of their ships. The numbers were astonishing and still the space was packed with the Unbidden ships chasing my fleets.

After the tide of war had turned I had sent my construction ships out again and started collecting more resources that had gotten a bit low with my mind-boggling mobilization. I now had four massive fleets poised for the final strike at the heart of my enemy. They consisted mostly of Battleships and Cruisers, as I had mostly ignored the Destroyers and Corvettes pretty much completely. There were two enemy-controlled systems left, first of which only had a bare-minimum outpost and the other one had the outpost, the Rift in the fabric of time-space continuum and in case they had time to do so, maybe a fleet or two of a couple of decahits at beast. Nothing was going to make my Empire to break a sweat anymore.

Wahey! The portal was bombed shut on stardate 2622.09.06 and I told me fleets to bugger off towards the nearest spaceports for repairs and further system updates. The heroes of the Empire had taken some very light damage, but comparing to the first days of this conflict it was absolutely nothing.

That had been exciting! I really had not thought I could defeat them, as they came in with such a force to begin with and being true to my habits, I hadn't prepared for anything at all in an "empty" galaxy... After the gate collapsed the remaining Unbidden gathered into one system as a huge ball of death and just sat there.

A couple of times I sent my fleets to nibble at the swarm of fleets, but as I was looking at several hundreds of thousands of distributed damage points my few in number but strong armadas ended being the underdogs, so I just let them be and left one of my fleets parked into the next system.

Post-crisis

While I was stemming the tide of the interdimensional invasion I had completely and totally ignored everything else in the Empire, such as rising unemployment and unhappiness here and there, suboptimal production/consumpion levels for certain resources and even deaths of key personell. For example all my experienced research leaders had died away, which meant that I also hadn't really taken care of the research. I decided to start growing my Empire by colonizing all the colonizeable planets, as long as my resources allowed.

With this in mind my Empire Sprawl value was still below my administrative capacity, I still hired a junior scientist to run my Society Research. Whenever I could I chose to increase my Admin Cap to keep my goal more feasible.

Unhinged expansion

The space was pretty much mine alone. I kept running my construction ships around the map, building lonely outposts into each system with signs of colonizeable planets. To each colonizeable planet I sent a colony ship.

Of course this increased my clickings beyond reasonable, as each colonized planet had to be checked constantly for new things to be built, updated or adjusted. As I kept building more colony ships and conquering new systems the planet count kept creeping upwards. At some point I was just looping through the planets, for as soon as I was done with the last one on the list I had to start with the first one again.

My population growth was insane, which then caused the fully-built planets to have either too few habitation slots, work or both and that made the criminals happy. Distributing some luxury goods helped a bit, but just a bit.

At some point I took a better look at what my population counters told me, and some space cockroaches overnumbered Buckazoids or my robots by hundreds to one. This forced me to toggle the race policies on my non-Buckazoidian citizens so that they were under severe population control rules and that they could not travel/emigrate freely anymore. Fiddling with these may later take me down the path of allowing genocide and end up in a disgusting but rapid population control method.

The end of the Unbidden

While I was waiting for my influence points to creep up for yet another outpost I decided to spend that waiting time with something more interesting. The situation log still kept the Unbidden as a current threat and that had gotten on my nerves. Again I sent my fleets to the docks for updates and reinforcing - I built Battleships and Cruisers until all four fleets were at full capacity. After that I had four fleets at almost 200k each, I sent them all to this universe's Sullust and made them jump to the final hostile system left.

Please allow me to quote Emperor Palpatine from the TIE Fighter's intro: "The Empire is on the verge of success. Soon, Peace and Order will be restored throughout the Galaxy."

I did not manage to clean up the system with one attack wave, but after a quick repairing visit to the docks I sent them for the second strike, without bothering building new ships to cover the losses or upgrading the weapons anymore. This time they were victorious and cleaned the space from the deviants from the other dimension. My calendar said it was 2826.01.02, meaning that the mopping up took about 200 years, accidentally.

Influence issue

Again, I didn't know what I had done, but full in the middle of colonizing systems I suddendly noticed how my Empire's Influence had gotten a base value of -1,5 per space month and of course that reduced my total Influence to zero pretty damn quickly. My different political entities were supposedly producing some little influence, but still, none were negative. The worst faction was some robot-hater group that I absolutely refused to even talk to. Robots and AI were good things, so shut up you space luddites!

Because of this stupid issue I didn't know how to fix I left the game untouched for a couple of months, until the negative base value somehow popped into my mind again (I think we were talking about Stellaris in the workplace's Gaming flow) and I asked for comments. The most likely culprit was the promote/suppress option on factions that I may have used a bit too eagerly.

The quick solution

On a May evening I started the game and removed all my active actions on the factions. After the spacemonth changed the base value jumped to +4 and I could only wonder how such a masssively effective thing wasn't shown clearly anywhere, while many of the other things that affected Influence were visibly listed. Pah.

I continued conquering space at full speed and soon I had racked up 200 systems in my Empire. Colonizing the planets was obviously much slower, as the majority of the free and hospitable planets were far from my borders, so either I had to slowly grind forward, system by system (~50 Influence per outpost) or just capture isolated systems by building isolated outposts, building Imperial Islands (~150 Influence). Yeah, you go and calculate which made more sense.

This first test game of mine had, at the end of May, clocked in 44 hours. And I still had no idea how to "win" the game with this setup. Oops.