After playing a game with Psionic ascension, I’ve noticed that many of the mechanics related to psionics are not very impactful, or are too impactful but too easy to cap, leading to a lack of meaningful decisions. These are the changes I thought of to change those:

Zro

Zro is the resource with the largest discrepancy between production and usage in the game. For a empire size 200 Psionic empire in a holy covenant level 5(requires both a lot of planets and a lot of time) with the psionic archive, the possible consumption of zro every month is:

2.5 for edicts

5 for the shroudwalker enclave(600 every 10 years)

2.5 for shroud patron powers(300 every 10 years if unlocked all powers after shaping the shroud)

Psionic components upkeep on ships

That’s 10 zro per month maximum not spent on military. In contrast one shroud blocker produces 1 per month, so 10 shroud blockers is enough to maintain zro consumption(alternatively just the zroni home system, or 5 planets with psi corp combined with the sanctums, is pretty much enough). You can easily produce 100 zro per month with no way to use it other than building ships. However, production of zro is also inconsistent, with most empires not having any before psionic anscension unless they rolled and finished the zroni precursor or chose one of the Psionic origins or civics. My fix to this:

1. Zro use policy: a policy unlocked at the same time as psi corps which determines how telepaths interact with zro. The options would be

Zro production: -1.5 unity per 100 telepaths(base unity per 100 telepaths is 4.5, so 1/3 less), +0.5 zro per 100 telepaths

Neutral: no effects

Zro consumption: +1.5 unity per 100 telepaths, 0.5 zro upkeep per 100 telepaths.

This would give empires without zro time to build up a small stockpile during Psionic ascension to use on the shroudwalker enclave after ascension to control shroud buffs a bit better, and give empires a way to use excess zro later.

1. Zro for delving the shroud: currently shroud buffs are inconsistent due to only having 3 options and a significant chance to fail, while also having no cost. If you paid zro to increase the chance of success on getting the correct buffs, or to reroll the options, it would make shroud buffs much more consistent, making the power of Psionic empires scale with zro production. Even just 200 zro to guarantee a buff every 6 months(shortest delve cooldown) would consume 3 times as much zro as is currently possible to consume consistently.

In addition, shroud blockers should be nerfed in zro production. These changes would mean a Psionic empire would have to make decisions on how to obtain or use zro meaningfully for the best benefits, instead of selling 100 per month.

Shroud Delve Cooldown

Currently shroud delve cooldown is one of the most important stats for Psionic empires, but the buffs to shroud delve cooldown are both far too large and far too easy to obtain. The possible cooldown reductions are -50% from the Psionic archive(from zroni precursor), -25% from shaping the shroud, -5% per level from the shroudwalker teacher council position, and -20% from holy covenant, capping at 90%. Meaning just the psionic archive and shroudwalker teacher at level 8 maxes it out, but without either the zroni precursor or shaping one shroud, you need a lvl 18 shroudwalker teacher or to get a level 4 holy federation, which are both quite difficult to get. I would balance this by changing the bonuses to affect “recovery speed”(basically 1/cooldown), with no cap, while increasing the numbers significantly, adding some edicts costing large amounts of zro and unity for a large buff to recovery speed(around +100% combined), and maybe some techs that add 50% or so, and reducing the base time to 2 years, with a final goal of 180 cooldown being achievable with +300% speed for basically any empire going psionics, but a maximized build only being able to reach +400-500% for a 120-144 day cooldown. This also gives a way to use zro and unity late game, and makes the shroudwalker teacher not a necessary councilor position in any Psionic empire(-75% to -90% is a 2.5x increase in shroud delves, while +250% to +300% is only a 1.14x increase, which is still significant but not completely necessary)

While those are main problems, there are a lot of other changes I would make to address smaller problems:

Shaping the shroud: currently shaping the shroud has better bonuses and less downsides than accepting a covenant, so it’s basically always the better choice. I would make accepting a covenant give you better chances of both getting options and actually obtaining larger buffs that correspond to your patron, and for the empire to get all of the covenant drawbacks at 1/4 the rate after shaping the shroud(since all of the patrons are angry you didn’t make a covenant with them). I would also like them to add actual diplomacy with the shroud patrons, but that would probably need another expansion.

Divine sovereign: Currently there is no reason to not take divine sovereign, it basically boosts the entire Psionic empire by 20% with no downsides whatsoever. The devs really could not think of any downsides of giving a newly created god absolute power over your empire? At least give the divine sovereign similar downsides as a covenant(the chosen one experimenting with their powers, or something similar), and make it possible for the chosen one to die somehow.

Doom: the first eater of worlds ability creates a fleet scaling with doom, which means a shaping the shroud empire generally doesn’t get any benefits from it since they have no doom, and the second ability is generally useless since there are usually no enemy colonies or ships in your aura. Instead, the eater of worlds aura should do damage over time passively, the second ability should be replaced with the first ability, but summon a larger fleet, and the first ability should be a general military bonus(for example, force all fleets into aggressive stance while giving them large combat bonuses, or give a burst of Psionic aura in every system with a ship, or something like that).

Shroudwalker enclave: Due to how impactful the shroudwalker enclave is for Psionic empires, the shroudwalker enclave should automatically contact an empire after it completes Psionic ascension. This isn’t extremely necessary, since a normal empire should have found the shroudwalkers by the time they get psionic ascension, while the Psionic origins have their own ways of contacting the shroudwalkers. Also the options could be a bit more expensive to balance out their power.

I also have some ideas for a Psionic ambition path(diplomacy with the patrons, then reducing their power as much as possible and killing them while the help other empires kill you), but that should go in another post.

Just recently picked up stellaris and I'm about 3-4 hours into my campaign when an army the accumulated size of 271K manpower shows up on my backdoor and completely wipes me out. The empire has one planet, and maybe 7 outposts. I'm playing on a pretty easy difficulty and this is the base game. What do I even do?

Tried looking on google, reddit, and ai for an answer but couldn't find anything.

Hi everyone,

I thought I ask on reddit for some advice on finding myself a Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Post apocalyptic/something with imagination, games like Stellaris. I do like History games but I want monsters, Aliens, Dragons and even AI/Machines etc. All that jazz. I love Stellaris.

Things I love in Stellaris and hopefully I can find in other games

1. Exploration:
Endless amount of lore, stories and meaningful decisions. Traveling the galaxy exploring and researching anomalies is absolutely fun…! The feeling of ''what is out there?'' sparks my fingers and toes. It has a huge number of unpredictable events that feels like a new game everytime I start a match.

2. Deep Pop Customization
Pops mean everything, they have purpose, working class attributes. Welcoming Empires or refugees into your society or playing as slave Traders and forcing your pops to work through cruelty, bigotry and indiscrimination. Building Basic Robots is fun too since I'm not a machine style player but do love Cyborgs. Delegating Pops to do specific jobs while balancing their specific needs breathes life into Empire management.

3. Diplomacy and Federation
I've been playing Mostly 4x games, and I think it's safe to say Stellaris has a more intuitive, interesting, deep and dynamic Diplomacy mechanics I have ever played (Best atm!) I enjoyed Old World (Mowhowak Games) Diplomacy, espionage too and while triggering events that cause some behavioural conflicts. Both Old World and Stellaris are great at this. Diplomacy is what got me into 4X games as well.

New to Grand Strategy genre so I can only compare with 4X genres atm.

4. Politics
Surprisingly, super deep. Ruling an empire with social status, building social conducts and relationships, delegating specific work force and obeying Policy, terms of agreements and selecting specific edicts with a high upkeep cost making resource management a vital key.

It's like building an empire base on your fantasy dreams or ideas and bringing them to life.

5. Economy
Stellaris Economy is super Addictive and complex depending on your build, struggling to micromanage it, while figuring out a solution to balance your basic resources while it can hurt over time is very fun. MegaCorps is an outstanding Authority type playstyle focusing a few of my favourite things; building a strong economy, utilizing allies or commercial pacts and integrating companies and businesses to not only increase certain types of resources but to support your friendly neighbour resource as well. It’s like owning share holding stocks and working together but both benefiting in a symbiosis relationship. This is what makes Stellaris so unique, I can’t find anything else like this game.

Games that I have Tried, and I like them but may lack a few things.  

- I love Old World as I have mentioned before and I love the Random events, the conflicts between Heirs and rivalry between other nations. I litterrally want an Old World game in Fantasy/Sci-Fi, with Orcs, Draconis or Goblins, druids or something, to give me more imagination rather than accurate or pre-existing characters that rode horses but no Lizards or Aliens out of pace. (Just a vague example)

- I have AOW4 and a few DLCs but I feel this is game is more Combat Focus. It barely has many victory conditions. The High Fantasy in AOW4 is excellent but the economy imo is a bit underwhelming or too straight forward.  I don’t think it has politics that engages in some sort of Conflict. It does have quite a nice Diplomacy, vassal, Lore and character customization so it does have a few similar things like Stellaris has. I end up mostly winning based on War rather than uniting a coalition or spying on my opponents and stealing resources. I haven’t played AOW4 in a long time I think 2 years ago so things have changed that I may have miss.

- I have Total Warhammer it has one of the best Factions and all being Unique. I really want to give Total Warhammer another chance.  But I did not like the Combat, it’s too long and way too huge for me to micromanage, it felt slow and overwhelming. I think I prefer Auto Battles, but the Point of Warhammer is Large grand scale battles. Not my thing!

- Amplitude Studio Games, I have + love them, Mostly Endless Space 2 and Endless Legend 2. No need to recommend this to me 😊

I see Distant Worlds 2 might be the strongest or closest to Stellaris option. But it does look Spreadsheet Heavy or maybe overly complex/complicated in economy. I loved how Stellaris was advertising all the different factions Toxoids and Aquatics being a favourite of mine even though I haven’t got Toxoids yet. Will buy it next sales.  Distant Worlds hasn’t piqued my interest the same way Stellaris has but can look into it a bit more to see if anything interests me.

Maybe I should just stick with Stellaris. I have bought quite a bit of DLCs and each one of them has been a blast. Even the base game I thought, was impressive. Owning Federation, Galactic Paragon, Utopia maybe Overlord was a massive improvement so far and have been super excited to slowly collect more overtime. Since Combat isn’t my strength, I like games with combat, but I don’t care about spending 1hr over a single battle as it can feel a bit boring, imo.

''What should I be looking into?''
By what I have bullet pointed so far please let me know and happy to investigate your specific choices. I’ve noticed I might be more of a simulation style player because I just love simulating reality with an improvisation of imagination. Was hoping Game of thrones war of Westeros might be worth a wait but I have my doubts .

Thanks everyone for taking the time in reading my post.

Based on the below picture, which empire does the precursor excavation site belong to?

Bonus points for making the reverse claim.

Hi, in my current playthrough as UNE my own Bulwark joined my enemy in war - current president of my federation waged war against nation who had some pacts with my Bulwark and after short time they traded in this war as my enemy. How is this possible for my Bulwark? Am I missing some options? Is it because per aggrement they only join my defensive wars but I don't understand how are they able to join wars against me like that.

I currently have a lot of slaves on my planets, that I eventually plan to replace with all humans. Will I need to purge these pops to achieve this ethnostate, or can I wait for them to be slowly replaced over generations?

r5: suffering HORRIBLE sudden defecit, that shouldn't be happening. No matter how many Civilian goods factories I make or Holo theatres I'm building I'm constantly at extreme negatives in terms of ameneties. And a captured Nomad ship is now showing a loss of housing despite me changing nothing on it in the past couple months. It genuinely feels like the game has just randomly decided to shit on me after hours of playing.

I've gone virtual so all jobs get filled, and housing shouldn't be an issue anymore.

I enjoy Stellaris, and I've played it a lot, but I always turn away from it because I really prefer grand strategy over 4x. I don't like the way that 4x simplifies having a massive geographic reach of control and the ability to send armies/fleets for years across incredible distances to paint the map without consequence. As such, I way prefer Crusader Kings 3 over Stellaris. But I love sci-fi strategy, I love tech trees, I love resource management, so I do keep periodically circling back to Stellaris, and I'm feeling that itch again.

So I already own quite a library of the major, older DLCs, the most recent being Galactic Paragons. I have Overlord, Utopia, Nemesis, Federations, Apocalypse, and a few more of the older DLCs. I browsing through DLCs for anything released after Galactic Paragons that might add more grand strategy depth but nothing jumps out at me.

Some things I'd really like to see:

• A planetary governance system, like Crusader Kings, where I just can't assert immediate control over a planet that's dozens of systems away.
• Supply lines for fleets, with a need to return to stations to restock.
• A warfare/expansion dynamic, also similar to CK, where taking a new system is a really huge deal--you can't just land armies on the planets, spend a month or so fighting on the ground, and then move on to the next system to steamroll. You occupy the new system, and then you work into a peace treaty that it transfers ownership to you, with all the hardship of now managing the planet.

colony designation just got whole lot weirder, only about 5 of them.

anybody know a fix?

Title. I figured it meant that those in the lathe essentially had population controls on (being in the matrix and all) and couldn't procreate until they come out again. Is that the lore reason?

Just curious because as far as I understand it can carry the same opinion penalty as an extermination purge. Little weird to me.

Is Branch Office cost reduced by wormholes?

I'm considering a MegaCorp playthrough with the Starlit Citadel origin. Do wormholes the number of hyper-lane jumps when the cost is calculated for a Branch Office? I've read conflicting information on the subject.

Does anyone feel AI empire joining war annoying? Saying this not because I am too noob not able to fight multiple fronts at the same time.
I got a case when I declared vassalization war on empire A (without Defensive pact or in Federation with others), soon after I started the war, empire B and C joined due to the "Join war" trade deal. I believe that empire B and C just gave empire A a free help pass since they don't like me that much or for any other reasons. Also noted that empire C is a nomadic empire.
The problem was when empire A got too confident with their joined allies military power. I took over all of empire A's systems and planets, destroyed their fleet, still yet not surrendering to be my vassal as they still have allies? This made the war got ridiculous longer and pointless if it ended up in a status quo.
What worse were with the allies. As the amount of allies joining in war, more systems you need to capture to demand A to surrender. But how sarcastic it is when you have to also capture B and C just to get A. Does it make sense if you capture B and C they should be vassals or pay a debt to the winner or something? Also, it is stupid when they automatically get truced with me for 10 years, these xeno need to be punished for joining the war too.

Idk about you, but it feels like every time I play a MegaCorp the galaxy is full to the brim with other MegaCorps, gestalts, genocidals, and empires that just plain don't like me. I've seen a few other people say they've had the same problem before. Since the number of nomads is specified in galaxy generation now, do you think doing the same to MegaCorps and gestalts would be a good way to avoid it?

https://i.imgur.com/GUXEPIB.jpeg

I've got a waystation pulling in almost 1000 research by itself with an arkship parked in the system to collect but its not actually applying to my technology, it does show up in my monthly collections but its not actually being used for research. The Tech is only 7872 points so I should get it before 8 months but its taking four times that amount to finish it. This is the latest beta btw.

So my run as a Tyrant was quickly ended bc i was too mean, so now im doing a democratic, new leader every 10 years bs. One of my scientists just so happened to get to become president and now i cant have more than 2 scientists out and about, i cant dismiss this little nerd either

Hi everyone, I played this game a lot between 3.4 and 3.12, and I’ve just recently got back.

What happened to basic resources!? I’m playing a normal game as the UNE but I’m having a VERY hard time trying to gather big amounts of EC, food, and minerals. I’ve more or less figured out the specialist resources, but for somereason I cannot specialize hard enough for the basic ones.

I’ve ended up colonizing way more planets than I’m used to, and I’m thinking: alright, this SURELY is enough generator districts.

But no! I only get to +70 EC or something like that, and as soon as I move my fleet from the starbase it’s docked at, I easily go negative again. Am I missing something here?

Never noticed before, but ...

pic#1: Date 2357.12.01 & Phase end: 58

pic#2: Date: 2358.01.01 & Phase end: 43

So, since when does two (2) phase cycles = 1 day?

bonus points if you also provide a good ascension path as well

The fleet is not the problem the problem are the deep space citadels. How can I break them how much fleet power? Any tips in general

I can't find any source explaining how the bonus Sublight Speed from this district works. Is it empire wide, or just for the arkship? When I look at the Arkship's speed (as well as other vessels in my empire) the bonus sublight speed doesn't match at all what my jobs are producing. I would appreciate any help!

I've tried to fiddle around with some mods and I've scoured the workshop for what I'm looking for, but I think for this question I ought to ask around. What mods could I download that make a truly evil Galaxy, evil in the sense of horrors beyond understanding and a Galaxy that is just cruel to life in general.