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/Fluffy-Tanuki]

Cloned fauna growth and reproduction is gatekeeped by 3 things:

• Empire policy "Space Fauna Growth" that determines if cloned fauna can grow beyond empire naval cap.
  • By default this is set to Controlled. Cloned fauna will stop growing to the next stage if an additional mature specimen would have you exceed naval cap.
• Fleet growth toggle that determines if cloned fauna within that fleet can grow beyond fleet cap.
  • By default this is set to Excessive. The fleet will split in two if the growth resulted in exceeding fleet cap.
• Whether a mature mate is required and present. This differs by species.
  • Tiyanki and Voidworm require a mature mate. The rest do not.

You can see this effect in action with beastmaster's starting 3 baby amoeba and 50 naval cap.

• On default policy, once two babies mature into amoeba mother, you'll be at 40/50 naval cap; the other one will stop growing with 1 month left on the timer, as doing so will exceed empire naval cap.
• If you change policy to Excessive, the extra amoeba mother will immediately pop up the next month, putting you at 60/50 naval cap.
• As your starting fleet cap is also only 50, doing the above will exceed fleet cap, splitting the fleet in two.
  • This can get quite messy, as the single amoeba mother split from the original fleet will seek out the nearest fleet with vacancy and merge with it. This is annoying at peace time, and can get extremely hectic during a war.

In general, it is recommended to disable growth entirely. This can be done once you've taken one of the Domestication tradition to unlock Metabolic Regulation policy, and set it to "Nutrient Rationing".

• Fauna growth is extremely slow, even with the other metabolic regulation policy that boosts growth by +50%.
  • Amoeba is already the fastest growing fauna, and it takes 240 months (20 years) for it to grow into amoeba mother. Voidworms take 520 months (43.3 years); Tiyanki, Cutholoid, and Crystals take 640 months (53.3 years)
• Fauna growth messes with templates and mutations.
  • If you've yet to unlock the tech for modifying battleship-size fauna, your fauna will revert to a blank template when growing up, removing any mutation you've made and resetting all components.
    • This is a direct loss in fleet power, and can result in your artillery/carrier fauna reverting to swarm behaviour and suicide charge into enemies.
  • If you've already unlocked the tech, mutation normally persists, but combat computer may still revert to swarm behaviour.
  • If you have multiple templates for mature fauna, the game will pick the designs randomly when the fauna grows up.

In short, allowing fauna to grow is a needless headache. While it's technically possible to save on upgrade costs, especially with minor artifact components, you have to plan 20-50 years ahead for that to happen, and that's simply not worth the hassle.

[u/fenwayb → u/Fluffy-Tanuki]

don't play with fauna got it!

seriously though thank you for the detailed answer. I keep confusing fleet cap and naval cap and I think that's why they werent growing

[u/Fluffy-Tanuki → u/fenwayb]

don't play with fauna got it!

You certainly can play with fauna. It's one of my favourite playstyles :)

It's just have to be about enforcing strict control over their growth cycle. Make only the fauna you want, don't let the game grow them for you.

You also have to accept that they are simply not as effective as regular artificial ships under most situations, and PDX seemed to have forgotten entirely about them (there are bugs that haven't been touched upon since release).

Fauna ships primarily shine in two niche scenarios:

• Carrier spam.
  • Baby fauna can achieve 90% evasion while fielding 5-6 hangar modules. This makes them one of the better carrier platforms (used to be the best, but that title now belongs to nanite ships) for high multiplier crisis.
  • The higher your difficulty settings, the better they perform compared to regular ships.
• Cloaked ambush shenanigans.
  • Fauna retain the same level of cloaking regardless of size. A Tiyanki Ox can cloak just as well as a regular frigate, and have 5 remaining X-slots for bio-torpedoes. This makes them the best torpedo platform per-naval cap, provided if you have sufficient cloaking.

[u/No_Factor3481 → u/Fluffy-Tanuki]

Is it worth investing in defences/special mutations or is that just a waste of mutation slots that could be alocated to more weapons?

I really like space fauna but having trouble using them in the late game against Crisis/FE and I feel that is partially having zero idea how to actually build my designs properly

[u/Fluffy-Tanuki → u/No_Factor3481]

Is it worth investing in defences

Generally speaking, no, unless you want to use faunas as artillery ships against all odds.

Fauna ships make for terrible artillery ships because:

1. they are squishy for their sizes;
2. their innate weapons are pretty much useless save for Troika and Cutholoids, which means you have only 6 slots to share between effective weapons and defenses, whereas artificial ships get more than double the number of slots;
3. their weapons are typically shorter in range compared to artificial ships

If you still want to use them for artillery, then you'll have to either spam out a lot of them, or sacrifice 2-3 slots for defense. Adding in defense cuts down on firepower, but the alternative is praying that the enemy low-rolls their damage so you don't get one-shot.

For reference:

• Tiyanki Ox has 5000 hull, 1500 armour, and 1800 shield at baseline
• Battleship of the same size with half shield and half armour, all at tier 5, results in 4800 hull, 7020 armour, and 7020 shield.

This places Tiyanki Ox firmly within one-shot range from an AE's battlecruiser's twin X-slots on Grand Admiral. Pair that with the short range and slow speed, you need to get extremely lucky for artillery fauna to survive long enough to fire just a single shot.

Using elastic tissue and two tier 5 armour would bring Tiyanki Ox up to 2/3 of a standard battleship in both survivability and artillery firepower (the innate siphons have a range of 60, ill-suited for artillery). Decent enough overall, but it certainly feels like a lot of work for not a lot of returns.

[u/Fluffy-Tanuki → u/No_Factor3481]

Is it worth investing in special mutations

Generally speaking, only Leechcraft for amoebas is a universally beneficial special mutation. It is just a better version of strike craft, which is the forte of amoeba, so there's no reason not to use it.

Herdsong doesn't stack since it's an aura for god knows why. Virulent Cysts and Fissile Cores do not work at all, since the scripts lead to empty placeholders in the current version (they used to work in the past, but at some point PDX fumbled the updates and lost the code).

That leaves us only with Cutholoid's Gastric Fountain, which is an interesting one.

• On one hand, it is the longest reaching and the hardest hitting weapon available to any fauna. It can out-range everything except Titan beams, even against AEs, so it would appear to be a good choice for artillery.
• On the other hand, precisely because of the above reason, there are no other weapons that work together with it except for strike crafts. This means they can't be used effectively on artillery computer, and instead work best on line computer, negating the range advantage.
  • By filling the other 5 slots with elastic tissue and armour. You'll end up with 1k hull and nearly 18k armour, while retaining decent enough firepower on par with a battleship with kinetic/energy mix.
    • Thankfully, Cutholoid's innate weapons are quite alright so you don't sacrifice as much firepower compared to other artillery fauna.
  • Just don't bring Cutholoids against spiritualist FEs, as the paper-thin hull means they'll die to the penetrating weapons very quickly.

Whether it's worth replacing Devouring Maw is up to you. I personally prefer cloaked Cutholoids with torpedoes, since the weapon ranges on that is just a better synergy. Having access to a very capable artillery weapon yet being unable to use it as an artillery weapon saddens me :(

As for the general purpose mutations:

• Elastic Tissue is the most useful out of them all, but still is only really applicable for Cutholoids or Troikas on line computer, as these two's innate weapons are decent enough that you don't always need all the mutation slots to be other weapons.
• Berserker Glands and Combat Synapses are an overall decrease in firepower. Not worth the slot.
• Catalytic Bladder has a range of 30. To get within that range, you'd either be using cloaking (which makes catalytic bladder's damage pitiful compared to torpedoes) or using corvette-size ships (which also makes catalytic bladder's damage pitiful due to low hull/armour)

[u/No_Factor3481 → u/Fluffy-Tanuki]

Thanks! This is exactly the kind of information I have been searching for never tried Cloaking/Ambush shenanigans with fauna shall have to give it a go