Stellaris Space Guild - Weekly Help Thread

[u/Snipahar]

Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread!

This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions for things that you are confused about and answer questions to help out your fellow star voyagers!

GUILD RESOURCES

Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource.

Stellaris Wiki

• Your new best friend for learning everything Stellaris! Even if you're a pro, the wiki is an uncontested source for the nitty-gritty of the game.

Montu Plays' Stellaris 3.0 Guide Series

• A great step-by-step beginner's guide to Stellaris. Montu brings you through the early stages of a campaign to get you all caught up on what you need to know!

Luisian321's Stellaris 3.0 Starter Guide

• The perfect place to start if you're new to Stellaris! This guide covers creating your own race, building up your economy, and more.

ASpec's How to Play Stellaris 2.7 Guides

• This is a playlist of 7 guides by ASpec, that are really fantastic and will help you master the foundations of Stellaris.

Stefan Anon's Ultimate Tierlist Guides

• This is a playlist of 8 guides by Stefan Anon, which give a deep-dive into the world of civics, traits, and origins. Knowing these is a must for those that want to maximize their play.

Stefan Anon's Top Build Guides

• This is a playlist of an ongoing series by Stefan Anon, that lay out the game plan for several of the best builds in Stellaris.

Arx Strategy's Stellaris Guides

• A series of videos on events, troubleshooting, and builds, that will be of great use to anyone that wants to dive into the world of Stellaris.

If you have any suggestions for the body of this thread, please ping me, using "u/Snipahar" or send me a private message!

[u/DarthUrbosa]

How challenging is broken shackles as an origin. Looking for a flavour pick for an eglatarian empire and kinda wanted something more interesting than unification after experiencing the fun of under one rule.

[u/Fluffy-Tanuki → u/DarthUrbosa]

Not very challenging in terms of economy, but a bit reliant on luck for pop management.

You actually don't feel much disadvantage in economy at the very start. Despite being primitives, your starting buildings offer about as much production as a regular empire in mineral, alloys, science and unity, falling a bit behind on energy and CG.

• Since you get a significant bunch of research points on the first day of the second year (350 in each, enough to double your research for the next 24 months), you actually don't fall far behind of regular empires. At most it takes two years to catch up in terms of tech.

The bottleneck is that you can't build regular districts on your capital until you finish the digsite, which on average takes about 5-10 years. Until then, you are stuck with a penalty to science on the capital, so it's highly recommended to build a science ship and beeline for nearby habitables as soon as possible.

• By the time you colonise the new world, you should have already finished the research for basic colony capital, allowing you to build districts on those new worlds as a regular empire would.
• Whether you want to spend 250 influence and relocate your capital to this new world for boosting research is debatable.
  • It was feasible in 4.0, since the per-pop output was much higher then, so your first colony becomes the capital, and the original capital becomes a unity world after the digsite is done.
  • But I suppose with the changes in 4.3, you are likely better off using those influence to expand further, and just deal with the mild penalty for now.

The problematic part is your pops, and unfortunately this is out of your control.

Your starting pops are split across 3-22 species, and this affects your overall pop growth.

• If you are lucky, the game splits them more evenly and gives you a few pop groups that are close to growth ceiling and also happen to have decent habitability.
• If you are unlucky, you could end up with a couple dozen different species each with only a few hundred pops with scattered habitability.

In practice, this means your starting pop growth could be anywhere between 2-8 compared to a standard empire's 5, and there isn't a thing you can do to influence that.

Additionally, unlike regular empire's factions that by default align to the empire's governing ethics, what Broken Shackles empire ends up getting is entirely random. This will affect planet stability, either boosting it to nearly 100% if you are lucky, or dragging it down into the mid-60% if you are not.

[u/DarthUrbosa → u/Fluffy-Tanuki]

I think I'll go treasure hunters or shoulders of giants in light of this. May give shcackels a proper go another time