Tips for a complete beginner?

[24601]

I have the full game except the apparently poor Nemesis DLC and I'm finally planning to start playing.

Given the scale and scope of the game, do you have any recommendations for a first game in terms of what race or politics to play as, and what to avoid as a novice?

[Stormwind]

My only recoomendation is to learn the game by some method other than the in-game tutorial which is pretty bad. Maybe a video series by stefan anon.

Or atleast, use the tutorial for only the very basic stuff like ship movememnt.

[24601]

My issue with watching Youtubers is that they tend to use really gamey meta strategies instead of just enjoying the ups and downs of a casual campaign, so I'm hesitant to do too much of that. I have seen enough Stellaris content to be aware that food = population and alloys = ships etc.

[Stormwind]

Well even a "gamey meta strategy" should have plenty of ups and downs when handled by a beginner for the first time! My runs never seem to go as smoothly.

[Scyobi_Empire]

Don't kill VIR, the tutorial robot

[Drax]

I'd suggest playing a custom race. It's one of the best parts of the game in my opinion. Sure, you might not know what the stats/effects actually do, but, just for 'role playing' reasons, it's fun to make a custom race of robotic exterminators, a hive mind of fish people, or a peaceful and spiritualist lizard race.

The game is fairly balanced? In that you don't necessarily need to min/max unless you're playing on high difficulty level. If you want to have a strong/easier starting situation, I suggest playing as either fanatic materialists or a machine empire. Materialists gain buffs to science, and research is always important in the game. While machine empire's start as robots and don't need food to survive. They're also a gestalt consciousness and don't rebel. Just don't pick exterminators... I know I mentioned that, but you'll just get the AI declaring war on you early, which isn't fun if you're new.

Stellaris is pretty accessible in terms of Paradox games. It's a bit hard to just list off everything you need to know but just by playing you should start picking up on things. The Stellaris tutorial bot should give some advice on how to get started. The game's mechanics aren't necessarily complex, however, through experience you'll understand how different techs work and how to play. Honestly, you don't want people telling you how to play Stellaris. It's much more a sci-fi adventure strategy that you want to experience yourself without being spoiled. Much of the fun comes from the cool stuff you find out yourself.

[SpectTheDobe]

well id say create your own faction or race and then just go from there, you'll learn fast in all honesty it just might take a few trys to figure out the mechanics and how the trade and resources work, also i went with just a dictatorship with authoritarian edicts and such but most other empires wont like you atleast not in my galaxy but that may be caused by the fact that i exterminate every other species we come across...

[Blackberry]

Although I don't know your other game experience, I can still suggest:
DON'T play your first game on "Ironman Mode".
If you feel like it, make your own empire, but feel free to choose one of the preset ones!
Don't try super hard to learn. If there's a specific thing you really want to know about, there's probably a tutorial for it somewhere, but learning by playing can often be best for some more complicated things the tutorial can't explain.

Although I can only speak for how I did things, I hope these help!
Enjoy Yourself!

[pipo.p]

Play a simple story, play base game, play vanilla game.

I'd suggest to first play as the United Nations of Earth, because, you won't be distracted by exotic game features (arcane empire civics, etc) and as you identify more easily with your empire, you can better understand what is just happening, I think. Let the tutorial guide you (VIR). Play as you want without any objective of victory, and let the game subjugate you. Those first times are quite precious.

Playing with all the DLC is not something I'd recommand, especially if you are ready to "sacrifice" your first games. Most of the DLC either introduce late game content, or some focus on specific game aspects you can just ignore or keep unfocused for now.

Of course, play without mods. Mods are useful when you already recognized that the game is lacking in some domains.

[Peter34]

What rational reason do you have to assume that the Nemesis DLC isn’t worth purchasing?

[Drax]

Originally posted by Peter34:

What rational reason do you have to assume that the Nemesis DLC isn’t worth purchasing?

I mean, it IS the worst expansion. That doesn't mean it's terrible, but spies are garbage, all it really adds are 'Become the crisis' and 'Galactic Custodian'. Both of which are fun, but pretty much a one off playthrough for each.

[Elhazzared]

Here are a few recomendations. First let's talk about mods because somethings will massively improve your experience.

First get the tiny mod which essencially improves the abillity for you to see more things in your sidebar which normally are huge and use way to much space.

Then a comple considerations on whether like these changes or not. I use a mod to make the AI research on habitats so expensive they never take it. This is because they start spamming it so hard that it's disgusting, they have entire systems with douzens of habitats which are absolutly terrible and you have no way to get rid of them. You will not want to have them but you need to take them in order to destroy the enemy so, consider removing them with a mod.

After that you may or may not care to have a mod that allows mechanicals to purge robots. Robots are really, really bab population that not only will grow but you have no way to get rid of as a mechanical. This is a great oversight that the devs never bothered to fix and it's very important to fix if you ever want to play as a sentient AI.

Other than that what would be a great start. Here's my sugestions and why.

Be a mechanical (hence why I sugested the mod to purge robots). The thing about being an AI is that you don't care about the problems that living have and it greatly boosts your game and simplifies it at the same time.

That means gestalt conscience as ethics and machine government form.

What this does for you mechanically is the following.

You don't eat food but use energy instead (this is fine because you lose the need for one resource, greatly simplifying the economy).

You don't need consumer goods since your drones care nothing for luxery. This means you don't produce or use another resource. Now you only need 3 resources, energy, minerals and metal. There is the special resources too but thos you'll just fill as needed, they aren't a big deal starting out.

You also don't care if it's cold or hot, if there is orxygen or deadly virus. In other words, all planets are colonisable having 200% habitation which is huge. Other empires have to ignore planets because they can't colonise them but you, everything goes.

You don't have to worry about piracy and as a result no need for fleets or stations in dumb spots just to deal with trade. Now the downside is that trade = more money but machines produce a higher output of energy which makes up for it.

You don't worry about factions either which cause unhappyness problems, in fact you don't have unhappyness at all since you are an AI and everyone is your little drone. Feelings are not a problem for you.

Your ruler is immortal. That means you don't have to worry about elections or things constantly changing.

Your leaders are immortal (there is a small chance of malfunction but you will have almost no leader losses during a whole game) which means you are going to be reseting to level 1 leaders because they die of old age. This can be very important and more than that, eliminates a lot of frustation with constantly replacing leaders.

So just by picking this you already eliminated so many problems that every other organic empire has. It's no joke, machine empires are truly good, especially to the new player.

Now how do we refine them? Let's go over civics since we are already on the right panel.

I recomend you take Rapid Replicator. Pop growth is very important and even more so for machines which have a very slow development speed due to the way amenities work for them. Anything that increases pop growth, in their case called assembly speed is a top priority.

Then pick Maintenance Protocals. unity is something that machines get in lower quantities and as you end up having a lot of maintenance drones to give you amenities, this shores up a weakness. One important thing to remember is that once you hit end game there is very little that matters since you produce thousands or resources and have unstoppable fleets. With that in mind, it's far more important to eliminate the weakeness in the early game which lead to making things very hard for you as opposed to try and capitalise on something you are already good at which means the weakness is going to ruin your atempts elsewhere.

Then you need to pick your traits. Start by picking the negative High Bandwidth. Empire sprawl is a joke for mechanics which makes this a given. Don't even bother making a planet just for coordinators, put a single network node per planet and that alone takes care of the issue.

Then pick Emotion Emulators. Amenities is your biggest problem as a mechanic, if you don't take this you will not have a good time. This is mandatory for all machine empires.

After that you want Mass Produced for that assembly speed. Remember what I said previously about how important this is? Yup, assembly speed is mandatory.

Then you have 1 point free. You can pick whatever positive you want for 1 point. In my experience, none is that great but the best you can chose is Double Jointed. Making better use of your housing helps a little bit more than everything else you may chose because you need less housing districts and also slightly increases your assembly speed.

For your origin you want to pick 1 out of 2. You have ring world or machine world. Both are very similar in terms of how strong they are. Ring world is slightly better (but never repair the ring since a lot of things will change and it will be hard to deal with) but machine world has better assembly speeds for you once you repair the extra replicator. I'd probably go with a machine world cause it's simpler.

Lastly for your homeworld pick any dry type of planet. It won't change your actual homeworld which will still be a machine world, but your 2 guaranteed habitable worlds (although for you everything is habbitable anyway) are going to be that dry world type. Why dry world? Because they produce the most energy and early on you want to have 1 or 2 energy planets since that's what pays a lot of your upkeeps.

There you go, that's it for a good starter. I'll also recomend that on the galaxy generation options you lower the number of lanes to the minimum, it makes it easier to have chokepoints and thus makes it easier to defend.

I could go over other things you might want to do early game but heh, it will be fun figuring it out yourself.

[Peter34]

No. That's exactly my point! Those are not features of the paid-for Nemesis DLC, but rather features of the free 3.0 update. And likewise, many of the reviews that appear to be complaining about the Nemesis DLC are in fact bitter rants against the changes made by the 3.0 update, expressed in a DLC review where they have no legitimate place!

[Scyobi_Empire]

Originally posted by Peter34:

No. That's exactly my point! Those are not features of the paid-for Nemesis DLC, but rather features of the free 3.0 update. And likewise, many of the reviews that appear to be complaining about the Nemesis DLC are in fact bitter rants against the changes made by the 3.0 update, expressed in a DLC review where they have no legitimate place!

3.0 came with Nemesis, 3.0 was advertised in the same DDs as Nemesis and there is no place to discuss general updates.
Justified location.

[Theutus]

You all are derailing op's thread.

[24601]

I think I'm just going to go vanilla humans in my first game and pick whatever policies seem good in the moment, without limiting myself to any sort of role-playing. I've also installed the UI Overhaul Dynamic mod because I have an ultrawide 4k monitor.