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Hey guys! Thanks for coming to check out this Stellaris Beginners Guide! So if you’re here, you’re probably pretty new to Stellaris and wondering where to begin in this difficult and sometimes frustrating game. Stellaris is a grand strategy, real-time game, where your goal is to expand and become a powerful empire in the galaxy.
You have multiple playstyles in Stellaris, such as full militarist, such as a devouring swarm where you want to feed on the entire galaxy consuming everything to grow your empire. Or you can be the full opposite by creating a large federation of different species to assemble peace throughout the galaxy.
Stellaris has a lot of different ways to play, so it’s such a fun and interesting game that has so much replayability, and part of the reason I’m making this beginners guide. Alright, so let’s get into it.
Stellaris Beginners Guide – Creating your own Empire
In Stellaris, you can create your own empire in which you pick traits for the species, the type of government, and the civics of the species. (there are also some default races to pick if you would like to do that)
This is where you will determine what playstyle you will be going for in this playthrough. You will want to have all of the different traits and ethics complement each other and not just pick whatever looks good. As an example, I put a picture above of my species, and it’s a machine intelligence-based around research and tech-rushing.
The positive traits I picked for the species are:
- Superconductive – gives +15% more energy credits
- Mass-Produced – +15% Pop Assembly Speed
- Logic Engines – Gives +10% extra research speed in Society, Engineering, and Physics
The negative traits I picked for the species are:
- Luxurious – Pop Assembly cost +20% more
- High Bandwidth – Empire Sprawl from pops +10% more
The reason for these traits I picked is because this empire will want to be played as more of a tall empire which means it will have fewer systems and fewer planets, but the planets and systems will be a lot more focused with high population and max districts.
Superconductive will help maintain the cost of research jobs and the population maintenance cost, which since were a machine intelligence, it takes energy for our pops to maintain.
Mass-Produced is important because you will want to have pops growing as fast as possible so you can have more researchers leading to faster tech growth.
Logic engines are just a large initial boost to tech growth as well.
Picking Ethics civics and origin for stellaris
Alright, the next step for setting up your empire is to pick out the civics for your government.
Since I’m doing machine intelligence, I need to pick a gestalt consciousness for my ethics.
The civics I’m choosing are Rapid Replicator and Zero Waste Protocols. Rapid Replicator is a +20% additional pop growth, and Zero Waste Protocol is -10% robot upkeep which will help keep energy costs down for the empire.
Alright, and now to pick your origin story. I picked the shattered ring for this empire because it’s one of the most powerful origins in the game at this moment in time. It has all building slots unlocked along with compelling districts with a lot of output. This also gives the capability to repair the broken segments of the ringworld later on in the game once you get mega-engineering.
Everything you pick for species traits, ethics, government, and origin should complement each other well, as I did above. This is just one example of a great empire to start a game with.
Stellaris Beginners guide – First 50 Years
When you load into your game, the first thing you will want to do is start researching your first techs. You will want to do this before you even unpause the game. Also, on a different note, use the pause all the time during your micromanagement to make sure you don’t fall behind.
After you start your tech research, a big part of Stellaris is, of course, controlling different systems. To claim new systems, you need to create science vessels to explore and survey other star systems. Your gonna wanna start by creating another science vessel with your starting alloys and energy to hire a scientist and repeat until you have at least 4-5 scientists. This will allow you to discover most of the systems around your homeworld.
Once you fully survey a system, you will send a construction ship into the said system to construct a starbase to claim the system and its resources.
Also, Science vessels will have a chance to find an anomaly while surveying planets, stars, and asteroids. It would help if you always did these anomalies unless they take years to complete. You can always come back to the anomalies later when the scientist is at a higher level.
Stellaris policies and edicts for government
Stellaris has policies and edicts that you choose and activate at different points in your game to switch around what will benefit you most.
For policies in the early for rapid expansion, you can go for the expansionist diplomatic stance, which gives you less outpost build cost and faster colony development. Each stance and policy has its downside; however, with the expansionist stance, you have a 100% increase in border friction with other empires, which may make them angry with you.
You will only be able to change a policy once every 10 years, so make sure you want to go with the option your choosing as you will have to deal with it for at least 10 years.
Once you hit the point where you think you may be done expanding, you can choose a new diplomacy stance to fit your playstyle. I’m going with the belligerent stance in my playthrough, which is geared for a waring empire with bonuses for less -10% war exhaustion gain, 10% less claim influence cost, and 10% naval capacity.
Stellaris Edicts
In Stellaris, Edicts are strong bonuses that can cost influence, energy, or exotic materials that can give bonuses to various things such as Capacity Subsidies, giving the technician output of +50%, which increases energy gain. Or Map The Stars gives a +25% Survey Speed, Anomaly Discovery Chance of +10%, and ship hyper lane detection range of +1.
Which is a pretty strong edict in the beginning if you can get it. Edicts also become available through research options.
Stelllaris choke points
In Stellaris, it’s crucial to have choke points in your controlled territory. Chokepoints in Stellaris are points in space where it funnels an enemy empire to a one-star system that can be easily defended. This allows you to dump a large number of resources into one starbase to create a bastion to deny them access to the rest of your territory.
Having a chokepoint is very important as it will slow down the enemy or even prevent them from attacking you at all.
In the above picture, I gave an example of a good choke point. This chokepoint is in the Bunda system and even better than most for the fact that it contains a colonized planet. This can allow you to create a fortress world with the FTL inhibitors tech. I gain the ability to make it so planets can block FTL travel as long as I occupy them, which means that enemy fleets can only leave the system on the hyper lane they arrived in. This can significantly turn the tide of a war with some empires.
A fortress world takes less damage from orbital bombardment and produces natural defense armies to protect the planet from invading forces. This will help you either rebuild lost fleets of ships or regroup to take care of the threat and go on the aggression.
Stellaris Archelogical Sites
As your scientists explore new systems and surveying, they will come across Archelogy sites. Some of these sites are better than others but always worth it somehow, either from gaining minor artifacts, raw resources, and tech research.
It would be best to try to complete as many of these as possible as it can give some nice advantages in the early and even late games. These archaeological sites and even contain relics such as the rubricator found in the Kleptomaniac Rats site. Although this contains another surprise, I wouldn’t want to spoil anything for you new players out there. Haha. If you don’t know, relics are powerful ancient artifacts with passive and active effects that are quite strong and beneficial. Some are retrieved from these archaeological sites, and others are achieved by killing leviathans.
If you would like to read about all the relics included in the game, you should check out this article.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I tried to give a lot of helpful insight for the beginning of your Stellaris journey, and I Will add on to this beginners guide as time goes, or I will come out with a part 2 at a later date.
Thanks for reading, guys. I appreciate it greatly, and if you have any questions you would like answered, feel free to ask below, and I will answer as soon as possible! Have a great day!! feel free to check out other articles I’ve written at http://thegamersmind.com
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