Toribash
Original Post
Stellaris
Does anyone here play Stellaris or is interested in it and wants to learn/play with other people from toribash? Feel free to add me on steam or discord (Chirs#6105) and hit me up.

What is Stellaris?

Stellaris is a grand strategy game made by paradox (the same guys that make Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron if you're familliar with any of those), but unlike EU or HoI, Stellaris is not a historical game, it's a science fiction based 4X set in space.

The game starts in 2200 and can potentially continue forever, however most campaigns last for about 200 ingame years.

The player takes control of an entire Space Empire just after leaving their homeworld. You must expand into neighbouring systems, manage at first a planetary economy and later an interstellar one, research technologies and construct a fleet.

About Empires:

Stellaris offers a wide variety in empires to play as. Specifically, you can create infinite custom empires and play with (almost) any combination. Your customization options range from what your founding species looks like (theres humanoids, insectoids, avians, mammalians, fungoids, reptillians, molluscoids plantoids* and even machines* all with animated portraits), what defining genetic traits your species has (positive and negative), what sort of planet they evolved on and what it's called, what their goverment looks like aswell as their ethics (democratic, authoritarian, corporation, xenophilic or xenophobic, pacifist or militarist etc) and even how their ships and cities look like.

There is 3 categories an empire might fall into:
  • Normal empires: consist of individuals that are ruled/lead by a government. These can range from democracies to monarchies to megacorparations* and most things inbetween.
  • Genocidal empires: as the name implies, these empires are genocidal in nature and are unable to engage in diplomacy with other empires (with a few specific exceptions).
  • Gestalt Consciousness (Swarm intelligence): These empires consist of one central intelligence controlling millions of biological/mechanical drones. Specifically there is two types of Gestalt Consciousness:
    -Hive Minds are biological in nature and any biological species can be a hive mind. Think Borg without the cyborg.
    -Machine Intelligences* are the only way to play as machines from the start and (surprisingly) can only be played if you pick a machine species portrait. Thin Skynet.

    Gestalt Consciousness can also be genocidal.

Each of these 3 types features unique gameplay mechanics (factions, happiness or lack thereof, special resource needs etc) but this exceeds the scope of this post.

About the Galaxy:

Each campaign takes place in a randomly generated Galaxy somewhere between 200-1000 systems in size. You can customize your galaxy how you see fit, changing the amount of habitable planets or the rarity of certain galactic features such as wormholes or gateways, aswell as controlling how many AI empires will be placed in the galaxy alongside yours. There is also different shapes of galaxies to choose from: epilliptical, spiral or ring.

Each Galaxy will be full of anomalies to discover and even archeological dig sites* that will reward you with artifacts or kill your scientists over and over (I'm traumatized).

About the Gameplay:

Each campaign of Stellaris starts in a similar fashion, at first you explore your surrounding systems with science ships and then expand into them by building outposts. You will have to manage your planetary economy and provide housing and jobs for your people and produce alloys and other resources to build ships and outposts and to keep your people happy. Sooner or later you will come across your first alien empire, and depending on your goverment and how you chose to customize the ethics of your empire they will either like or dislike you at first. If you're playing as a genocidal empire however this first contact will have a different meaning as the empire you just found will definitely be hostile to you and you must prepare to be at war a lot earlier than most other empires. Each choice you make in creating your empire and managing your empire will have effects on your campaign.

Later on in the game you will be able to unlock Ascension perks that range from strong buffs to special projects like turning your entire population into robots or becoming jedi, building ring worlds and dyson spheres or building giant space weapons to crack planets open like Icky's skull during fencing.

There is alot more to say about Stellaris but this post is already too long so yeah please play with me because Icky is constantly asleep and I'm afraid to bother Erth to play with me.

If you already own/play Stellaris post your favorite ways to play aswell and I will tell you how much inferior they are.

* anything marked with a * is DLC content
Every time I take a break from this game, it gets an overhaul making it harder for me to learn the new mechanics. Not complaining though, I think it's more balanced now, I just wish I had the patience to re-learn this game again. I've logged in like 200 hours and I feel like I'm still a beginner haha
yeah ok