Stellaris 2.2 Intermediate player guide

This is a guide for players who are interested in more advanced concepts of Stellaris 2.2 including DLC content ( Megacorp not included) I will discuss builds, strategy and other concepts not included in my basic survival guide.

Introduction

This is a sequel to my basic Stellaris 2.2 survival guide. Congratulations if you read it all. One reader asked if I could make a guide including DLC material. A few days ago All DLC were on sale except megacorp so I pounced. I am currently having a blast. I would have waited and probably would never have taken the time if I had not happened to catch an amazing video by Stefan Anon which just blew me away! EVERYBODY HAS TO KNOW ABOUT THIS! Now go to the next section.

Essential civics knowledge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3qhKsSiNU4

This amazing video by Stefan Anon is in a class by itself. There are also very interesting comments and discussions on that Youtube page.

Please give Stefan a thumbs up (like and sub) on his Youtube page for helping us have a lot more fun with Stellaris.
Watching this video was like a blinding explosion of light in my brain.

I took the liberty of stealing a screenshot from the video for quick reference but Stefan deserves all the credit for this.


https://imgur.com/a/fawik0h

Voice packs

When you purchase DLC you get new advisor voice packs. They are chosen automatically during empire creation. I think you have the option to override the default choice. I thought: "Cool" and went with the materialist advisor. AAARGH! So annoying! I did not want to trash my new game and start over and I planned to grit my teeth and suffer through it all the way. I did not see any option in the audio control to change it. Then I stumbled unto this screen:

(Left corner, Empire logo, third panel)
Problem solved I reverted to default Vir and felt instant relief.
Further research revealed a series of Youtube videos containing all the game voice packs. Some of the good ones are: Machine, Technocrat, Slick corp, Diplomat. Others such as Evil corp are even more annoying.

Habitats

Voidborne ascension perk is no longer prerequisite. They are unlocked in the research tree.

Habitats are made in planetary systems by construction ships using the megastructure button.

Once built you click on the green planet logo to open the colonize panel and send a colony ship.

They produce energy or minerals or science depending if you build them on a planet with this resource. Not sure yet about unity and alloys. Maximum 6 districts.
Some players use them to build lots of forts and soldier jobs to increase naval capacity. (actually this was the only good use I found for them because forts have their own housing to match the available soldier jobs)

One thing they might be used for is blocking chokepoints with only fort buildings on their surface because the enemy fleet is blocked from advancing further in your territory by FTL unhibitors that are automatically included in forts (once the tech is researched) and forts produce lots of soldiers which can be very hard to defeat without a considerable trooper invasion fleet and in my experience only fallen empires have this kind of invasion fleet. However once you reach the endgame you should probably have big powerful fleets and gateways for fast travel instead of static defenses.

They cannot produce food.
The last update increased the choice of buildings available. Not sure yet if the housing problem has been resolved.

My Robot Experience

I started out with basic robots able to farm and mine.

Research discovered droids.

At first I thought I had a bug.
When I was prompted to mod my robots I had the option to create 2 other types of robots on top of the default type. I also got a crash to desktop during the process which sent an automatic crash report to Paradox.

So I had 3 types of robots:

• The basic bot
  
• The farming bot
  
• The mining bot

Then I got more confused when I got Synths which are sentient robots able to do any job even specialist jobs. But when I looked at the planetary pop screen all those bots look just look the same. (but when you hold the cursor over each bot, you can see their traits)

It turns out that the game AI correctly places the mining and farming bots into those specific jobs. And the specialist jobs are filled with bots that are not modded for mining or farming. So as far as I can see they seem to be working properly and correctly placed into appropriate jobs. They are a good way to increase your pops.

In the early game I found the robot manufacturing buildings were draining my energy economy So I had to temporarily replace them with more appropriate buildings. When the economy improved I rebuilt robot factories.


One warning though: some players chose synthetic ascension path (uploading the content of their organic brains into synthetic bodies) before granting their synths full citizen rights. It seems those ascended pops suddenly become classified as undesirables and the whole economy collapses or something like that.

But if you do not want to use that ascension path giving full citizenship rights to your robots could displease your xenophobe faction reducing influence and happiness. Also I believe that full citizenship can increase their maintenance cost. I know I will be first on the hit list when Skynet takes over the world for writing this, but I want my robots to stay in servitude for now.

In old Stellaris Robots could colonize planets due to their high habitability trait. I originally thought droids and synths could not colonize anymore but I learned their ability to colonize is disabled by default in their species rights and you only need to re-enable it. It remains to be seen how well this works because they can only be built with robot factories in contrast to organic reproduction. In theory those colonies would not grow in population...

AI uprising

According to the Stellaris Wiki (very well made by the way) you will get an AI rebellion if you research positronic AI (dangerous red tech) but this can be prevented by taking "the flesh is weak" ascension perk or simply giving citizen rights to your robot sapients. There is also a special event choice that can prevent this.

If it happens, well it can be described as shocking, devastating, exhilarating, challenging, dreadful, depending on your experience level and your state of mind. I am currently experiencing one and whether or not I survive it, I am excited by the whole experience. I will not spoil the fun for new players and I don't recommend reading the forum comments because they may discourage you from an experience you will remember for the rest of your life.

2.3.0 How does it change your game?

-Sectors have allegedly been improved. I remain very skeptical. I found it necessary to micromanage every single planet to get the best out of each. For example planets with few clerk city districts have little housing meaning that some buildings that create lots of jobs will cause a housing shortage and instability but buildings that produce few jobs such as plants for motes, gas, crystals are ideal. On the other hand, planets with lots of city districts have lots of housing and can support incredible trade planets with lots of commercial centers and galactic stock exchanges.
Can the game AI build planets intelligently? Time will tell. I will ignore them for now.

-Manual planet designation is now available (agriculture, science, mining, energy etc.)

-Habitats may specialized depending on the type of celestial body they are built on and may be slightly better according to Aspec the youtuber but the comment (on yt) below by David Friday concerning the impact on empire spread, resources invested and lack of housing seems more realistic. So no.

-Ring worlds have been buffed as the number of districts has been reduced but they have much more jobs to compensate and they do not cause as much empire spread.

-Terraforming colonized planets now respects districts, blockers, unique resources instead of messing up your planets

-Ecumenopolis have been severely nerfed as their districts now require strategic resources to build

-Dyson sphere has been buffed with 4X energy output

-Matter decompressor has been buffed with 2X mineral output

-Galactic wonders gives megastructure research options (not instant ability to build megastructures)

-Life seeded nerfed to worthless

-Habitability penalty changes now favor machine empires and hinder organic empires. It is recommended not to colonize below 60% habitability.

-Gaia world terraforming buffed (time and cost reduced)

-it is now possible to build 2 megastructures at the same time.

Work in progress

more to come later

[StarWarlordGR]

I agree, robot uprising was a shock for me as well, my empire torn in half! But since AI did mediocre fleet designs and had poor quality land troops compared to my xenomorphs, I crushed them in a short campaign. Then extradimensional crisis happened, but it was even easier to beat, just by rushing all my 6 fleets to dimension gate system. All this in my 1st playthrough as militant Human civ with Utopia, Apocalypse, Leviathan, Synthetic Dawn DLCs... I even built a colossus planet killer, but never used it!