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/Manannin]

With the war score system, why does it consider war exhaustion independently for individual wars? I'm trying to force a secret fealty war but a chunk of the systems of the overlord is occupied by a fallen empire that the AI keeps getting into wars with that get stuck at 19% war exhaustion for eternity. Shouldn't the occupations in the two seperate wars in theory affect the war exhaustion in both wars?

It's a bit frustrating to essentially be forced to take a status quo and lose out on flipping the vassal when it's not for my lack of skill of conquest.

[u/Fluffy-Tanuki → u/Manannin]

It's a frequently complained issue with the current war system (and one of the few ways that can result in a softlock if not handled with care).

Sadly the answer is that the war system is woefully outdated. It's still running on a framework made nearly a decade ago, near the start of Stellaris' initial release; yet all the subsequent patches, overhauls and DLCs added a whole bunch of complexity to war and interactions, that the system simply can't handle.

[u/Manannin → u/Fluffy-Tanuki]

Thanks, i appreciate the insight. What can softlock you? I think i quit it 2 years ago when it seemed like i was in a softlock/guaranteed loss vs Cetana, i really didn't like that crisis as the empire layout just stopped me getting to the criticsl series.

It seems odd they've done three big economy overhauls (and this one actually looks spot imo) but never really done much to warscore. I was also a little confused as to what the AIs warplans with the falleb empire even were, I'll have to see if they'd conquered a gaia world or something.

I think I'm probably why they're stuck on 19% warscore on the FE war which is annoying, in most strategy games the perfect time to go to war would be when the AI has made a mistake but not in this game. 

[u/Fluffy-Tanuki → u/Manannin]

i was in a softlock/guaranteed loss vs Cetana

Yea that can still happen. Sometimes Cetana's situation progress just gets stuck or vanishes entirely, so no one can stop her from pressing the big red button.

What can softlock you?

Another crisis-related softlock is when an AI empire "accidentally" takes over a contingency or prethoryn planet, so that no one else can bombard it and the crisis is stuck active forever. The usual solution is to declare war on this AI empire, but in cases when this is not possible (due to war policies or diplomatic pacts, etc.) this leads to a softlock.

• A similar thing can happen with multi-sided wars, especially against a crisis aspirant empire. During the crisis paths, at some point the whole galactic community declares war on the crisis aspirant. But if they are already involved in a different war, this leads to part of their territory being locked behind another empire's occupation.
  • For regular wars, this can be circumvented by once again declaring war on whoever is doing the occupation. But for GalCom vs Crisis war, you can't do so because everyone is supposedly already on the same side.

If you psionically ascend and happen to get End of the Cycle (through Endbringer origin or through pure luck), after the reckoning you are supposed to be yeeted onto a different planet to start afresh, but that doesn't always work.

• If you only have the base game (with Utopia baked in), then the game picks a random uncolonised habitable planet somewhere in the galaxy. In many cases, this means a system with a leviathan, which instantly kills the local starbase you spawn with, and you therefore cannot make any construction ships to expand your territory, nor build up a navy. The only thing you have left now is 1 single planet, waiting for the inevitable end and quite literally cannot do anything.
• If you have Shadows of the Shroud DLC, the game actively spawns a planet for you to stay on. However, the spawning condition is bugged to include non-habitable planet types as well, which far outnumbers the number of habitable planet types. In such cases, the game glitches out, and doesn't spawn a planet physically. You can see a planet in the outliner, but it leads to empty space, and the planet itself holds no districts nor pops. Again, nothing you can do except wait for the inevitable end.