Stellaris - 2300-2310 victory!

The first 100 years, once we encountered each other, had a lot of back-and-forth war between me and the neighbouring militaristic fungusoid empire. The first war, I didn't know what I was doing and barely got out without worse losses. The second war, they declared on me and stomped over my home planets, but I managed to gain several key systems at the back of their empire, and issue diplomatic claims on their homeworld.

This time I wanted to do it right. I copied the save file so I could experiment before committing myself (may only work with non-cloud saves, not sure). I chose ironman with no saves because I didn't want the temptation to ALWAYS replay until I got a perfect result, and I think that helped because I do have that weakness. But with the war I felt like it wasn't so much that I wanted to save-scum the situation, as that I didn't really understand the mechanics of war.

Which, ok, is realistic, but I didn't want to lose several wars to just learn the mechanics, so I had a few goes at it.

First I made sure I COULD declare war, but apparently my federation allies agreed with my opinion of the fungusoids even though they weren't on their border. I almost chose "claims" war goal to try to claim the planets I'd already laid claims on, but that still leaves the funguses with their most-recently-colonised-planet, so I chose liberation, where if I get my claims leaves the rump of their empire politically converted to egalitarian pacifists, who I can then hopefully draw into federation membership or vassel-hood.

The first time I ignored winning and just bulled into their core systems even if I lost my fleet to check that their military strength was about what I expected. It turned out it was, they'd combined their two smaller fleets into one with 3k or 4k compbat power, and possibly had some small fleets too. And starbases about the same strength as mine, vulnerable to any serious fleet but enough to stand off a couple of isolated ships.

In fact, it seemed that 4k was about the fleet strength of my allies too, and also the federation fleet (currently controlled by my less-overwhelming ally).

I also discovered they tended to (understandably) start by attacking my systems I took from them last war. Or ones I'd already invaded this war, if there were. But because I was exploring a bit randomly, it took a few tries to understand exactly what they were prioritising, cos often they'd change their mind if I attacked from the other side at the same time.

But eventually I decided a simple strategy. Spend most of my minerals building up my fleet to exceed the biggest strength I'd seen from them. At the same time, slowly fill in other bits of empire construction and research I was overdue for if I had excess resources.

I actually hit my current max fleet size here, which I'd always struggled to do before as I had so many competing demands for resources. That's why I wasn't as militarily formidable as the AI empires, presumably :)

Then park myself on my starbase closest to them, where they would probably attack. First attack the system behind that to make sure to draw them out (and to hopefully cause my allies to start joining in). Ambush their fleet with my larger fleet and starbase.

Do I win? I tried this as one of my experiments and my fleet wasn't quite big enough, but I only did it "for real" once. I carefully saved the game every month during the war in case of disaster but didn't need any of them.

For real, I defeated their fleet, then flew into their core systems, taking each system as I passed through, with the aim of capturing their starbases and re-engaging their fleet before it could be repaired.

I forgot that I needed to attack their planets in order to progress further (if they have ftl inhibitor technology and build a stronghold on it). But fortunately, I was able to bombard the planet (using the "destroy military buildings, minimum damage to everything else" option) and destroy that fairly easily. My armies were too far behind -- I wanted to keep them out of ship combat but then I needed to wait too long before they took the planet, but fortunately bombardment worked ok.

Then I was able to roll through their core systems, and mustered some smaller fleets but none enough to challenge me.

I wasn't quite sure how the end of the war worked. I thought I needed to occupy all their planets in order to be able to keep them -- that's how it usually works in wars that end in armistice rather than surrender.

But when I conquered their last planetary system they straight-up surrendered, which makes sense, but I wasn't sure. I *think* they then automatically ceded all claims to me whether I occupied them or not, PLUS reformed their government to be fluffy rather than malicious.

Then I paused and saved the game and took a break. It also gave me some achievements, "win a war" and "conquer another empire's homeworld".

Next time I need to consolidate my gains -- see if I can vassalize the remnant of their empire, incorporate the conquered worlds into mine, make the populace happier, spin of a sector because that jumped me up by 50% more inhabited planets. Then conquer some of the interesting systems I see, and some of the empty space I've been saving.

Stellaris - 2300-2310 other thinga

Federation

Inconveniently the federation leadership rotated just before the war so I couldn't directly use the federation fleet in the war. I was worried my allies wouldn't help at all, but they did obligingly turn up, even if I haven't mastered the trick of cajoling them into the most useful places.

I wasn't sure where the federation ships I'd build had gone. I think what happened is that when the federation leadership rotated, the next president recalled the fleet to their homeworld (annoyingly with fungus war iii building, but understandable with the banthurian reavers on *their* frontier). But the direct route was blocked by the funguses, so the recall turned into the "disappear off the map, dead reckon navigate off the usual lanes until you reappear at home" mechanic used to make sure your ships never get stranded (even if you can't usually use this to send ships out somewhere).

Ah, good! The Ick-Ick-Ick Bug Block, one of the friendlier non-pacifist empires, has a reasonably good opinion of me, but is too far away to be tempted by my offer of federation associate status. But they *did* accept an offer from my larger ally. That's very positive. I'm not sure if I want them in the federation or not -- once you incorporate species with a wider range of politics, it's excellent defensively, but very hard to do anything proactive.

But having the equivalent of a defensive pact is great, because they like me, aren't offended if I build up to their borders, and if they get attacked gives me the opportunity to prosecute a defensive war (i.e. I can gain systems not only forcibly convert governments to pacifism.)

Apparently they *won't* join the federation anyway because they have a lingering beef with one of my allies. I guess, a rivalry or claims left over from previous border skirmishes? But for whatever reason that didn't stop my ally inviting them to associate status or their agreeing.

Right now I'm happy with the status quo, if the galaxy is 60% my people and 40% empires who are happy to peacefully coexist, I feel like things turned out pretty well! But in the future, I hope things will eventually resolve themselves more positively - either I'll one day get runaway science advantage and be able to vassilise friendly-ish empires when I get sufficiently superior to them, or ongoing peace and trade will increase empires' opinion of each other (or shift other empires towards pacifism) to the point where they're willing to cooperate.

Other 'diplomacy'

On the other side, I've had some back and forth with the Centipomulans and the Ferengeagles. The Centipomulans used to like me, but got all bent out of shape when they wanted to expand and I was in the way, declared me a rival, and then started to hate me more and more.

I declared them a rival back to get some advantage from the situation. My main hope was that they wouldn't attack me until I'd resolved the fungus situation, as they were stronger than me and I probably couldn't face them head on, only by sneaking around their fleets to attack other things.

Fortunately they didn't, in fact, they changed their mind and UN-rivalled me. I've no idea why, unless joining a federation put the wind up them, militaristic-bullies-wise. And I just had to hastily un-rival them myself before I made matters worse!

However, despite all my resentment and worry about the situation, it turned out amazingly well. In fact, SO well I wonder if there were some sort of time travel shenanigans that arranged it, on top of my save-scumming :)

They basically hated me for ten years, then went back to liking me. But when they rivalled me, the Ferengeagles (militaristic fanatic authoritarians) who'd been having the shit kicked out of them by the less-vile-but-pretty-fierce Centipomulans and another similar empire on the other side of them, suddenly decided that maybe they liked me after all, now they were desperate and I was being rivalled by their enemies.

That let me pump up their opinion of me, which will hopefully survive the un-rivalling of the Centipomulans. They dithered about associating with the federation -- first they asked to join, then they withdrew, then they came crawling back...

But eventually I ended up with open borders from both which FINALLY let me find the last of six dangerous wildlife species from different planets all over the galaxy, which my scientists had been clamouring for me to research for ages.

Pirates

I blocked off my one remaining empire hole just in time to stave off pirates spawning there. Instead they spawned way off where I had a system with a couple of dead ends off it. If they confine themselves to systems where I have planets and starbases but no mining stations I guess I can mostly ignore them :) But now the war is over, I can deal with them easily enough, now they're weaker than my main fleet and there's only one set spawned so far.

In fact, I wonder if I should arrange to have a pirate-friendly system somewhere near where my fleet can blockade it, so I can easily destroy them when they appear.

Stellaris - 2300-2310 more things

I don't know why I have the urge to write this up so thoroughly. How many people are still reading?

New colonies

I expanded a bit too quickly to start with, and took some time to catch up with myself. But about now I said, it would be worth having another world or two. It's a significant step, so I said to myself "...and go!" before I pushed the button :)

That builds a ship from one of your planets, which then drives to a new planet and establishes a colony there. In theory you have a choice of species, except that my morlocks won't leave their home world, so only my original Duckbills will go to a new world.

I do have one bonus from, um, one of my starting empire bonuses, that I can send out *private* colony ships that cost energy instead of minerals. And by now, I'm doing well on energy but still need minerals to expand... everything. So I'm not usually limited in building ships (even though by now the mineral cost wouldn't be a big hurdle anyway).

Exciting to have a whole new (big) world. And my various habitability perks make most worlds very attractive.

Also, a few of my pops migrated to the new world! They hadn't ever done that before even when I thought the new world was better than the other ones, I'm not sure if I'd forgotten a setting or got a perk more recently or something else. But now I'm pleased, because it builds up a new world faster and the old world was mostly full so the pop can be replaced by population growth quickly.

The migration is marked with an icon of the pop carrying a classic folded-bag-on-a-stick bindle over their shoulder!

No-one has yet migrated INTO my empire, despite me having some attractive worlds. Hopefully they will eventually.

Some pacifist pops emigrated away when the war happened, but hopefully now the war's over pacifism will take over again.

And after a long fallow period when my science was growing too slowly, I got a rush of "clear blocking terrain to open new tiles on planets for building" techs, which let me expand my existing planets better too.

Those two new planets brought me up to my new max core planets of seven. The base is three, but I got +2 for being pacifist, and +2 for something else, so I went quite a long time without having too many.

Like many things, it's a "soft" cap, but this soft cap is quite hard -- you lose 30% energy and 30% influence, which is quite a lot, so you can't usually bull through it.

After that, you need to delegate some planets to a sector, part of your empire, but under AI control.

Consolidation

As previously mentioned, I need to integrate the new fungus planets into my empire, probably by delegating them to a sector (or maybe delegating my already-developed worlds to a sector where there's not much to do, and hand-managing the newer larger worlds).

There's a few systems I want to make sure to absorb[1]. The one with the ringworld! One with a gateway and maybe another with a wormhole. Any pirate-friendly dead-ends. One or two off to the east side of the galactic spiral to treat with empires there more easily.

[1] I'm not sure what word to use for "add a new system to my empire by building an outpost station in it". "Claim", "conquer" etc all mean something else.

After the war, I got an isolationist faction. Ok, maybe I have too many factions :) I was quite happy with the first few, the pacifists, the faith, and the egalitarians. The military faction were understandable, what with three decade long wars in 100 years. But now it's getting out of hand :)

But I think I can just accept I won't get any benefit from some of them, I can still enjoy the diversity. Even though a more game-y tactic might be to have fewer factions I can actually please simultaneously :)

The game often has a mid-game crisis where, once the empires have mostly reached some sort of status quo in the second century, something big-ish happens to shake things up. But I think that's only in the expansions, not the base game? So I have a century to expand slowly and build my science and economy, before an end game crisis eats the entire galaxy :)

Misc

One of the fallen empire's fleet is called "punitive response flotilla" yes ok fallen empire I can take a hint ok I can't.

Save scumming the war a couple of times showed me which random events came up fairly repeatably and which didn't. I'm glad I didn't reload too often or the temptation to keep re-rolling the die would be a lot greater. (Also, it's useful for game design decide if random events should be predetermined so they always happen the same way in the same game as much as possible, or be as random as possible so if you play out a saved game twice you can't rely on the prior knowledge much.)

Prior to the big 2.0 rework, instead of the current system of hyperlanes connecting nearby systems (but not all of them) in the equivalent of a road network, each empire started with one of three different FTL techs: hyperlanes; jumps (jump to star proportional to straight-line distance regardless of layout of hyperlanes or anything else); or wormholes (each system connects to random systems all over the map).

That was really great flavour that each empire was *really different* and ended up colonising systems in a completely different pattern.

But it didn't really work for war, because geography made little sense when everyone travelled in a completely different way, so there was no notion of import systems, or of fortifying frontiers, etc, there was just "have one giant fleet, hit opposing fleet with it".

So they switched to hyperlanes by default, with the others as something that could come up sometimes but wasn't any empire's primary locomotion.

But I wonder if there'd be some compromise, maybe everyone uses hyperlanes, but some systems have wormholes available right from the start, connecting random different parts on the map, so the topology is more wacky and less flat. So you're more likely to encounter different empires in different ways, and not just "these ones are near me and these ones aren't".

Also, liv started playing stellaris (she has a lot of experience playing civ), and I'm really excited to see how her empire goes. We both really love the duckbill pacifists, but she chose quite a different race to experience a different sort of game and I'm really excited to see how it turns out. I realised how many little things with the interface had bothered me and how nice it was to be able to share that with someone else. And the excitement of finding unexpected space things!