Grand Admiral (Federation) guide and musings.

[Izlude-Tingel]

Part 1

This is an unsupported game and abandoned, it only had a few patches in the couple months after it launched before the developer folded up. There are clearly places where you can find things that feel very 1.0 or 2.0 to Stellaris players and you can smell the long term intent from the developers was to make a couple DLC's. There are even bugs and issues that you kind of have to work around occasionally.

Tricks and Treats
There's a chance of leader change every 10 years with the Federation. This can be a boon or a bane. They come with different passive bonuses to the civilization. The starting leader has a MASSIVE food reduction with colony ships. I would suggest queuing up a few colony ships when the election threatens to happen, the cost is paid upfront and as long as its in the queue you'll get it eventually at the cost of the original leader. If the same leader gets elected you can cancel them and reclaim the resources. This works on warships as well if you have a leader that has ship reduction cost. Just queue up a ton of what you will probably want in the future, you'll have to pay upkeep costs but you can get the ships at least for cheap, if you have those ships and fleet power the other factions won't be as hot to go to war against you because you're fleet attack dogs look too big to take on. Defense through military presence wins peace and peace lets you build big.

Memorial Monuments for Unity are good but I only build them on capital planets. Capital planets are good but generic, they make good sources for a little bit of everything but there's so many sources of unity that this is how I build them.

Research is EVERYTHING just like Stellaris, once you get settled and you feel you are rolling ahead get your research starting to roll forward.
If you see a research for a Ship, Ship Power Core, or +15/+35 fleet capacity you want to go for it, this also goes for building speed, building/district cost reduction, and research facility upgrades.

You -might- be able to swing a Defensive Pact with the Klingons if you turn the logs over to them and keep an ambassador improving relations but don't count on it. If you can swing a protection pact with them you'll probably be sitting pretty against eventual Cardasian aggression.

The default small patrol ships that the AI makes and gives you for free after integrating them can be useful for sacrifice scouting missions in enemy territory. You can sacrifice a single ship or delete it and get the people back. It might even pull an enemy fleet out of position while they go for the kill in their territory. This is useful for finding warp field jamming stations instead of getting your main fleet stuck.

Enterprise Missions
Save a level 1 research anomaly to get La Forges mission done instantly.
Look for black holes to survey with at least one in a hazard to get both Data and Crusher's mission completed at the same time.
This will leave Diana Troi's mission tree open which is just timing doing missions for minors for opinion and Worf's which ends up being the toughest due to how little combat there is between most of the game on the Federation side. If you can get the Enterprise-E early its an absolute war machine beast in your pocket against Nausican and Ferengi raiders.

Commercial Agreement - Good for resources and mutual benefit
Research Agreement - Bad on minors as they have nothing to share and worse with agreeing to the Cardassians, Romulans, or Klingons since you should outpace their science and they'll benefit much more than you.

Getting the Romulans as an ally by saving them is a possibility, it takes them awhile to spin up and become militarily strong compared to the Cardasians or Klingons. Cardasians are a little OP militarily compared to the other two.

Cycle your scientists to take advantage of their bonuses but do it while paused, remember to replace the scientist in the ship you stole them from.

Culture Districts are the Federations friend, you'll need 10 of them for the mission tree but they are a great source of small research and ameneties for your planets. Really there's no reason why any reasonable sized 14+ sized planet shouldn't have a couple of these and everyone will be happy and you'll get some more science on the side, its almost broken how good it is. Happy workers are productive workers.

There are a lot of Agriculture planets and thats ok, look for Agriculture bonuses such as extra energy or minerals and have at it. A little extra mineral and energy is always good. You will need this food for building colony ships.

When you have enough food in store, build a colony ship in Betazed and keep it there until you use it, better to have it early than wait most of a year to get it built and sent on its way.

You'll probably never have to build a Science or Construction ship, you'll get tons from integrating minor powers.

You will need 6 Trade Annex for one of the Federation left side missions, don't build any just keep on integrating and you'll get it for free.

You'll need to have done 3 research agreements for a mission as well, do it near the end of an integration process so you don't lose much influence. You'll basically never want to do it outside of 3 times to minor powers, don't give them a chance to catch up.

I'm a big fan of research bonuses from anomalies as it fuels your research so well. Also I like long term bonuses compared to one time rewards such as +3 minerals vs 500 minerals, the exception is if its a boarder territory and I don't have the influence, this normally doesn't last long as your influence greatly outpaces theirs as you keep colonizing with the 250 influence tradition.

I like to take Unity as the first option when meeting a minor power, the energy the second, and the unity 3rd when it finishes. This feels like the better options by far to me.

Energy can be a problem early mid to mid game. Ethics will eat away at your energy easily but there's a lot of passive research bonus to take advantage of. Remember to take the Anomaly discovery chance before you start surveying.

Look for planets with bonus alloys or research, these always fuel your two growth areas.

Governors are actually very powerful, I'm very much a fan of governors with a bonus to worker or specialist production. You can get more raw resources in the short term and as you spin up an alloy/science planet get more output with specialist production. Free bonus.

Resource Silos on homeworlds, make space for all those future resources.

Traditions

This is my personal setup for Unity/Traditions, you can go with what you wish.

Open up the Star Fleet Tradition on the left, just open it don't purchase any others for quite some time.

Next Go to the Middle Right to Development. I like Development due to influence gain and colonization, that makes economic power. The Science Path just doesn't feel nearly as strong to me. Development is where you'll start to spread and expand faster than the other 3 powers combined due to influence cost reduction, and colonization rare perks on planets. Galactic Marvels -> Scientific Vanguard -> Graphene Cities -> Settlement Initiatives -> Frontiers.

Go back to the Star Fleet tradition after Development is done and I would recommend picking up Material Abundance for the Admin Spread, you could do the other side and take Pioneers but a passive Admin spread bonus will let you focus on other buildings in your empire. If you need more Admin capacity you can use a small world and specialize it into admin offices later on.

Your first and most important Ascension Perk : The Greatest Inheritance
This will give you a subtle -15% ship build cost on top of other ship build costs including Frontiers -10% so you'll be making combat ships at 75% cost (less if you get a different leader of the federation).

The bigger side of this perk is the 33% bonus weapon damage. A 750 damage stack of Miranda class ships at this stage of the game suddenly goes to 1000. The more damage you do the less of your ships get hit as theirs go down and you loose less resources.

The other perk that immediately looks good is Ours for the Taking but by the time you get the clear blockers researched for it your resources are probably huge. I think others are better personally but outside The Greatest Inheritance you can do what you want. Spirit of the Times or Efficient Consumption come to mind but Functioning Beureaucracy or Pursuit of Happiness don't feel like they have impact compared to what you can do other ways in the game or in the Federation unity treat with Material Abundance Admin Capacity and other research bonuses.

[Izlude-Tingel]

Part 2

Early setup

So there's an obvious 80% habitability planet to your galactic north next to the Romulan boarder. You should be able to wait until you have the -25% influence claim cost to pick this up as the AI is slow to expand south but don't wait too long or they will grab it. Consider sending your construction ship north to a few months before you pickup the -25% tradition. Otherwise you want to be snaking along the left and right of the Cardasian and Klingon boarders to cut them off from your territory and it will eventually be all your territory as you will probably expand to 50-60 colonized planets in about 50-60 years, thats a lot of research and resources. Remember to take the Exploration Protocols before you start surveying for the extra Anomaly Discovery chance.

First off inspect your planets

Specialize your energy and agriculture planets so that you get more resources. Go ahead and stock up most of the energy for now, you'll want to buy 2-3 Admirals in the next few years so before you get your first free Admiral (Alynna Nechayev). She's not a great admiral due to only 1 trait but she's level 3 and free. The level 1 Admirals with two traits will normally do better even many of the ones with a single negative trait.

If you have a Metallurgist +2 Alloys and 1-2 Tetryons you will be in the money for a successful run. If not you can make do but they do help. Alloy stacking early game will help a LOT in both building a defensive fleet and building the Enterprise. Your goal is to get to 20-30 alloys a month in the next few years which means you'll get the Enterprise in 9.75 years from that point aside from expanding territory which is 100 alloys each. Personally I'd shoot for 40-50 which is easier done with the Metallurgist bonus. I would suggest Industrial zones over Forges for the simple reason that Industrial zones give additional resources that offset the specialty of Forges, free forges like from the Betazoids and other homeworlds I'll take but I'll never build them. To get there you want to identify where your mines need to be, if its not on one of your three starting planets build them on Earth and in fact I would build at least one on Earth anyway and make it a priority for pops. You'll need those minerals for building space stations, improvements and converting to alloys.

You should get a near 100% occurring scripted event about some kind of trees on one of the planets, go with the harmonious route since there's no reason to go the aggressive route with penalties, this will become one of your main research planets later on hence the Tetryons since thats the level 2 building upkeep.

When you absorb Betazed you can keep the small default ships if you wish and assign an admiral to them, they still work a little bit if you have Greatest Inheritance and Admiral bonuses, if anything you can add 300-350 attack power on top of your Mirandas early game but expect to be deleting these flying police cars going forward as even a Miranda is better but does cost Alloys.

You will probably want to build a Military base on both Vulcan and Cygnus for defense and more importantly Starfleet officer generation. The sooner you do this the better your officer reserves will be and you'll need them for purchasing Admirals. You might be tempted to wait for Graphene Cities but you should be good enough on Minerals that you can purchase two of these and it won't hurt so much. You'll be getting Graphene cities soon enough and that'll help cut the cost down on buildings in the future. Just suck it up to officer generation investment that you'll need, keep your eyes on the goal not the mineral efficiency here.

Around 2351 to 2352 the Cardasians will start a war of Humiliation like the bullies they are, this is going to be hard.

You have 3 options

1) Throw resources at it and try to win but the advantage will be in their court and you'll have to not play defensive, maybe hit them where they are weak to the far west or north and hold it but we careful because you can get your fleet stuck if they have a space station that prevents warping out. Here's another use for those small ships where you can send a single small patrol ship in and delete or sacrifice it if needed, sometimes the AI will send their fleet after it and give you an opportunity to pounce somewhere else. If you can get your fleet to 900-1100 attack power. Also consider upgrading your space stations along the boarder to level 2 in Cygnus, Denobula, Cordan, and maybe Vulcan. The reason for this is that they should go from 67 attack power to slightly above 200 which gives them some survivability. Added to your fleet that gives you the ability to tank a Cardasian fleet's damage a little and then fly into them with your fleet and the alpha strike of plasma charge bombs should hit it hard. If you can keep them hurting you can buy time, do a quick repair and let the officer count replenish and try to take some territory for war score. Go with Andorian Special Tactical Officers, these guys are incredibly strong in planetary landings, you'll need 2-3 of them at 300 minerals each but they are a quality unit.

2) Fight a defensive war that you'll probably eventually lose because they'll slowly get war score on you.

3) (My personal favorite) Take your lumps and roll over legs up as soon as you can so you can get back to expansion/research and outpace these fools, there's really nothing gained by winning this other than lost resources that you can move forward to bigger better fleets.

Around 2365 Cardasia will start looking to potentially integrate Bajor and if you are doing the middle left side of the tree you'll want to get Bajor liberated, this can happen a little earlier or even later but this is a soft goal mark for getting your fleets up. If you are lucky you'll be getting Intrepid class ships around this time but also at this time your research should have some delicious upgrades for your Miranda fleet survivability. Your goal is going to be jumping into Bajor asap when you declare the Liberation war and I would suggest staging the fleet near Bajor and not around Earth for this, that way you get their quicker and have a little more time to take out the starbase. Take out the starbase with your 1k fleet or multiple fleets and have your ground troops already enroute from Sol. Your goal is to take out the starbase and land on the planet asap. If you do that the liberation war is over and might not even have to deal with the Cardasian fleet if they are slow to move. The enterprises ability to tank and dish out damage is handy here and if you got your alloy production started off to a good start you can have a strong fleet plus the Enterprise and having both will probably ensure success.

If Bajor becomes Liberated quickly you'll be good, if you fail the first time and get repelled you might want to just restart, chances are they will be wise to your moves and repairing and rearming you'll be on the backfoot. If it is liberated immediately do the Liberate the Oppressed mission tree and get 400 opinion and start integrating them, consider keeping an ambassador or the Ceritos to make sure they stay happy while integrating.

At this point the only hangups you'll probably have early-mid game will be Nausican and Ferrengi raiders at 1.8k fleet power, so do a fleet buildup and have 2-3 fleets ready as reaction forces. The enterprises ability to tank and dish out damage is also handy here but the enterprise likes to roam a bit so it can take awhile to get where it needs to be to do defensive actions. These DO count to Worfs mission achievement, if you didn't get it when Liberating Bajor you can get it fighting Nausicans and Ferengi and its the only hard one of the 5 missions to unlock the Enterprise-E. Just proceed to take advantage of 250 influence every time you colonize and keep expanding, make sure you prioritize habitable planets if anything to prevent one of the other 3 powers scooping it up but watch the terrain blockers, don't colonize anything with more than 2 blockers or you'll have planetary issues. When you start to spike your research especially with Tetryons (claim these mining station points as well as colonize planets that have Tetryon wells, this is where you will outpace your competition in both economy and research. Keep passively increasing your fleets so that you have 2-4 decent fleets. When you get the Enterprise-E this will be an absolute perfect opportunity to split up your Miranda Ships to 3-4 per Admiral and put 5-10 Defiant Class ships in each fleet, your combat power will skyrocket. The Defiant is a better Miranda. What I like to do with Miranda ships is make them into point defense anti-torpedo ships for defense and leave the damage to the Defiant and Intrepid classes until about 50-60 years in the game when you unlock the Excelsior class cruisers. I personally like 3 Intrepid, 4 Miranda, and 10 Defiant per fleet but find what works for you. If anything Alynna Nechayev makes a good Intrepid specialist since she has only one Admiral trait and its a long distance trait, you could possibly take shields off your Intrepids and turn them into armored glass cannons and use that shield energy for better weapons at long range.

Final Thoughts

This game isn't bad but its oddly paced. Admiral Alynna Nechayev will probably die of old age at the end of the century which is when the borg stuff just kinda starts. The combat is short and fast with left side Federation, have not tried Section 31 Federation myself yet and there are long periods of nothing except for Nausicans or Ferengi before the Borg and the early pieces of that are fairly dull as well.

This game could have been a lot better with a few patches and a few DLCs that fixed timelines and added color. The Intrepid class is an odd choice to have so early in the game but still be waiting another 50 years for the Excelsior class to become available for research, should have probably put in the constitution class after 5 years instead which just tells you have odd the timeline is even for ship research. Critical scripted event wise things are kind of slow but I think they did that in case you go on the offense or defense with the other powers. In my opinion even on Grand Admiral they are not aggressive enough and other than the occasional minor quick war with a minor power they don't do much too often, rarely do they fight each other. Later on the 3 powers will start getting really political and you'll see treaties and agreements constantly. I know there have been some canonized maps that make the game map better but they also feel like they slow the game down a lot and not in great ways. Someone could do a real good makeover to the game at this stage since the code and events are basically locked in, otherwise the Stellaris New Horizons mod supposedly does a very good job but is also a little odd to get started.

[bratacsga]

Personally I always go the Science path instead of the Development path, especially if I plan to go the Section 31 route - better spies mean more Influence from doing Smear Campaigns on the enemy capitals, and (hopefully) keeping the other major powers fighting amongst themselves and ignoring me.

I find the Romulans pretty much ignore me in the early game, so I set my starting envoys Improving Relations with the Klingons and the Cardassians - because I like the Klingons and to slow down the inevitable Cardassian aggression. I also don't support Bajoran Independence or ask the Cardassians to release them until the last possible moment (the better to keep the spoonheaded bullies away for longer, as they consider both to be grave insults).
That last possible moment being when they declare war on me.
Rather than accept right away, I hit pause, select 'Support Bajoran Independence', select 'Request Subject Release', and unpause.
As soon as the Cardassians say no, which unlocks the Liberation War option, I pause again and use that to accept the war... I then immediately surrender unless the Enterprise is ready and I have something resembling decent firepower. Why? Because the Cardassian fleet hasn't reached any or my planets yet - no battles taking place means the war technically didn't happen, so the Humiliation penalty doesn't kick in.
After all, there's no point getting any of my stuff wrecked when the outcome is inevitable and they aren't actually stealing any or my systems.



Big piece of advice for anyone else reading this. Do not under any circumstances send a Science Ship to explore a Black Hole because, if that Black Hole is a Highway Node, it triggers the Borg chain.
If the Black Hole in question is right on your border, get a Construction Ship to check it - if it's a Node, leave it alone until you have the Enterprise. If it's a named Black Hole then it's safe to send a Science Ship.