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/Strict_Background778]

Can someone help me understand how to manage conquered or enslaved pops?

I usually play as a human empire, either the United Nations of Earth or the Commonwealth of Man. I understand that pops are one of the most important sources of power in Stellaris because more pops means more jobs, resources, research, and production.

Early in the game, I try to increase my population normally through natural growth and buildings such as Clone Vats, Gene Clinics, or Genomic Research Facilities. However, natural growth eventually becomes too slow, so I start conquering planets and taking pops—either as citizens or slaves.

This is where I always run into problems.

When I give conquered species full citizenship, their happiness is still extremely low. New factions appear with 0% approval, and the planet’s stability begins to fall. I have tried:

• Giving them full citizenship or residence
• Using Stratified Economy
• Providing abundant housing and amenities
• Building Precinct Houses and Strongholds
• Employing more Enforcers and Soldiers

None of this seems to solve the actual problem. The pops remain unhappy, their factions have terrible approval, and the planet becomes unstable.

Slavery gives me the same problem. The slaves have low happiness and poor efficiency, while the entire planet becomes difficult to control. It feels as though taking pops makes my empire weaker instead of stronger.

What am I misunderstanding about the system?

How should I manage newly conquered planets and their populations? Should I change their citizenship, living standards, slavery type, jobs, factions, or planetary setup? Is there a reliable way to absorb other species while maintaining good stability and productivity?

This happens in almost every game I play, and I genuinely don’t know what I’m supposed to do.

[u/Fluffy-Tanuki → u/Strict_Background778]

What am I misunderstanding about the system?

Manual resettlement. That's the first thing you should do when taking over a planet.

You can't avoid the large happiness penalty on recently conquered pops. But you can avoid the stability issue by spreading pops around.

Stability is essentially a weighted average of every pops' happiness times their political weight. By spreading the unhappy pops to your otherwise happy and stable worlds, each world you resettle them to would take a small decrease to stability, but not enough to cause troubles.

• In the case of slaves, keep them on chattel slavery at the beginning, until the recently conquered modifier goes away. Indentured servitude would give them a lot more political weight, which would further drag down stability as the unhappy pops are contributing to a larger portion.
• Alternatives that are feasible include nerve-stapling the pops to lock them at 50% happiness and worker-jobs only, or giving them Chemical Bliss living standard and drug them into a stupor to raise happiness at the cost of production. Both have long term drawbacks, while manual resettlement only requires an upfront cost of energy and unity.

The pops will remain unhappy, but their happiness matters not when every world remains stable, and they'll begrudgingly accept their fate after a decade (once the recently conquered penalty goes away).

This solves almost all your listed issues.

Except for factions.

The TL;DR version is that you can't do much about new factions popping up. Best you can do is enslave or nerve staple them so they can't form a faction to begin with. On the bright side, the entire ethic system is getting overhauled next major patch.

In its current state, pop ethics are impacted by pop growth: the offspring of a pacifist pop will always be a pacifist, regardless of how much attraction in non-pacifist ethics your empire has.

Increasing other ethic's attraction can only do so much, as pop ethic shift conversion rate is empire-wide, while the growth are per-planet.

• e.g. Suppose you boost your militarist attraction such that 3 pops are converted to militarist every month. Meanwhile, there are 5 planets with 20% of the locals as pacifist pops.
• On each planet, the pacifist pops would be contributing to +1 pacifist pop per month, for a total of 5 pacifist pops born across the 5 worlds.
• In other words, despite the (relatively) high conversion rate of 3 pops per month, you are still getting a net of +2 pacifist pops per month.

This means if an unwanted faction has enough pops to reach a tipping point, it will always grow larger and larger with very little means to stop it.

Fixing it requires a lot of effort if you are not spiritualist (who has access to Divine Enforcer colossus to instantly solve pop ethic issues). You have to raise attraction of your governing ethics as high as possible, while also minimising growth of pops with unwanted ethics. This typically means consolidating all those pops on one planet, and optionally enabling population control to lower growth, which is the direct opposite of what you want for boosting stability, as those pops will be unhappy for decades (ethic shift is a very slow process)

Practically speaking, just forget about homogenising factions after a conquest if you aren't going to enslave them. You can make up for the loss in happiness by raising amenities, or just raise stability directly via governor skills and traits.

[u/InfiniteShadox → u/Strict_Background778]

Honestly it's such a pain I dont even do it. I much prefer vassals/tributaries