Starting Stellaris Guide in 2021 (Updated for Nemesis & Patch v3.0)

solaris nemesis and also patch version 3.0 have just landed for paradox interactive's grand space strategy game stellaris and they change up the landscape of a lot of mechanics within the game whether you're returning from a hiatus or you've never really got a chance to break into stellaris the game has got a lot to offer on just the surface level without even getting into all the many free patches that have changed the game then there's all the dlc to really worry about so in this video today i'm going to help break some of the mysticism behind starting your first or maybe your next campaign in stellaris this will be similar to my starting your first campaign video i did for crusader king 3 linked in the upper right corner the way i'm going to structure this video is by going over empire creation first and some recommendations there then we'll go over the ui and walk you through some concepts linked to the ui elements go over planetary management discuss diplomacy and then give you some recommendations on how to get your campaign rolling and we'll close this video out discussing which dlc you should focus on or at least the ones i think add the most value i've provided chapters in both the timeline and description if you would like to quickly jump ahead or use them as reference points i want to warn you though this is not necessarily a walk-through guide more aimed at giving you the information you need to help understand aspects of the game the tutorial does a poor job of connecting the dots on solaris very much is a game of exploration and playing at your own speed so please do not be afraid to fail and try new stuff it's the easiest and best way to learn before we get started you can pick up the entire stellaris collection on sale from 50 to 75 off on my nexus store right now up until april 19th nexus gives you a steam key directly from the developer that you then just simply place into steam and it's a great way to support the channel you can find a link to my store in the description and pin comment but let's get started on starting stellaris in 2021 to start out we're going to talk about empire creation and this can be a pretty sticky point of the game if you already have mastered it feel free to jump ahead but it also could be dependent upon your dlc that also is another thing you can jump ahead to if you want to find out more about which dlc to purchase now when it comes to your actual starting empire this is your very first time playing i find the military dictatorship is a pretty good one because it's very straightforward it's very similar to pretty much every other strategy game out there where you are a military dictatorship and you are trying to build up an army and then conquer the galaxy kind of think of it in that way but there are a ton of other varieties across the entire spectrum of how you can play this game and it gets very very detailed and again like i said a lot of this can be dependent upon which dlcs you have active so i'm going to choose military dictatorship and we're going to go through how to set up some of these things that you might not quite understand you can just press select and jump into the game if you want but we're going to press edit and from here we get to pretty much decide everything from appearance to the species name and how the adjectives work and the plurals work and everything to your name lists of how all of your ships planets fleets and leaders are named everything these first three options are entirely cosmetic and i'm just going to go ahead and just skip over them because it's entirely up to you now this is where things will start to get a little wonky for you so you've got your traits and you have got a total amount of traits and then a total amount of points so i'm gonna unselect everything here so the total amount of traits that you can pick is five and your base point value to choose from your pool is two now how you manipulate this is by choosing some negative traits right some penalties and we're going to go over some that are a little bit better to start with because they're less of a hamstring and they're more of a minor inconvenience especially at the start of the game and we're going to go over some of my prefer recommended traits that are positive bonuses so to start off here with our negative ones just to give us a pool of points we're going to talk about three big ones unruly deviance and wasteful so let's go look for unruly first so this one is going to give us a penalty of 10 empire sprawl from populations now if you've never played that probably doesn't make any sense but essentially it's talking about you have a limited amount of space that you can grow at one point and that amount increases as you increase certain districts on planets and you increase other values in the game and we'll talk about it more when we go into the ui but it's a very easy one to mitigate and also the penalty is just really not that intense so we're going to choose unruly now i'm only going to go with one negative trait but i want to talk about the other ones real fast let's go ahead and find deviance which i think i skipped where is it where is it there it is so governing ethics attraction is minus 15 so this one again it has to do with the ethics that you're using to govern your entire empire and it's very easy to mitigate with a lot of different other buildings or technologies it's just such a small amount and you know as this you're only going to get one point for it but it's a great way to get even one more point so that is a great one now the last one i want to talk about real quick is wasteful this was the default one for the commonwealth of man so population consumer goods upkeep is increased by 10 percent now this one can really depend upon the empire that you're using especially if using say a egalitarian empire with utopian abundance which will make it so that consumer goods are not really that important anymore but even so 10 is not a massive amount to really hurt you so feel free to use wasteful if you want to stick with the defaults of commonwealth of man and just kind of get going with the game i would definitely steer clear though of fleeting it is a very dangerous one because you're reducing the lifespan of your leader now this says leader lifespan but it's more encompassing than just that this includes your scientists your governors your admirals your generals so this is this is can be very damning because your leaders start from the age of 28 to 50 and they have around a life's an average lifespan of 80. so that's 30 to 52 years more or less and you're basically taking 10 years off of that just to get another perk so i don't i find it to be not worth it same thing with strong and resilient they're just not that good defense army damage plus 50 percent and then strong as the other one wherever the hell that is it's his whole chain it's just not worth that 20 army damage and a worker pop resource output 2.5 you can get a lot of different bonuses and resource output from technologies and the actual damage of your army is based upon the army type and its number so it's really not worth it to invest in this so those i would all steer clear of but now let's talk about the other ones that i would choose and that's three industrious intelligent and adaptive so i'm just going to click all of them onto here i don't think i can actually do it but yeah okay this they're all in one area so adaptive increases our habitability of our planets and we'll talk about that when we get to the it's the name it's the next area so we'll talk about that next um but then you've got industrious which will increase the mineral from your jobs by 15 i can't tell you how often minerals have been a huge gating force for me so having minerals increased by 15 is a very nice bonus and lastly intelligent is also very strong because you're increasing your research in all three of your research fields of engineering physics and society and why that's important is because in the early portions of the game if you don't tech up fast enough then you'll find that the ai is just so much stronger than you that they can completely smash out your armies or just completely roll over you so intelligent is a very strong one and adaptive i think is a must take um but i think it's really just up to you do you want intelligent and adaptive or industrious and adaptive and again feel free to choose something that's not what i've recommended because you want a different style of gameplay role play the character or the or the empire that you want the most i just i cannot emphasize that enough while these traits are strong they will not break the game for you if you do not choose them or if you're particularly trying to choose a challenging um campaign then go over that route so let's go ahead and just go with uh we'll go with intelligent we'll click next so remember adaptive gave us a habit of habitability of 10 that is important because we're now going to talk about that portion of the game now your homeworld is one of nine options here you've got the climates that are dry wet and frozen and they're all broken then into these kind of two these three spheres right so you get um ocean world continental world in a tropical world and you've got an arctic world an alpine world and a tundra world unfrozen and then dry you've got desert arid and savannah now why this is important is let's just choose continental world here this is our wet climate so we have a base habitability for continental planets of 80 percent that means when we look at ocean and tropical we have a base habitability of 60 because that is not the same as our homeworld but it's similar enough it's in the same climate if you want to choose anything in the dry or the frozen climate planets on the map you're going to be looking at a 20 percent habitability so it's very hard to choose any of these other planets so basically you're saying one third of the planets are easier to ha to are easier to colonize than the other two thirds so it's not a huge thing because essentially all nine of the planets planets spawn and roughly it's supposed to be an equal percentage across the entire map but the way the rng always works is you just get no no hospitable plans but don't worry about that that's just griping so what i will say though is because we have chosen again adaptive that increases by 10 so for looking at our homeworld which we would have a natural 100 at any other continental world we find we would have 80 at base plus adaptive brings us to 90 and any tropical or ocean world brings us from a base 60 to 70 and then dry our frozen brings us from a base 20 to 30. so it makes these other planets even the harder to harder to um colonize once just a little bit easier then here in the starting solar system you can choose a bunch of different selections the majority of these are all aesthetic for the most part you can even choose to live in the soul system making so this is earth which is kind of cool you can hear here we'll even type in earth star system soul so go ahead and press next here city appearances again entirely cosmetic and now origin can be kind of spicy you can choose pretty hard ones you can go with something like um doomsday or life seated so let's look at life seated or doomsday which is down here at the very bottom these are very hard origins and i would not recommend them life seeded seems like it's pretty cool because you start off with the gaia world which is a really strong planet but it makes your home world is a gaia world and it's a rare planet so remember we talked about with the uh habitability of those other planets it's going to make everything else i think it's like 60 at base so or 60 or 20 at base you have to find another gaia world it's it's a lot harder to deal with with life seated if you're not familiar with the game now if it's your first time going through there are some ones that i recommend here now shattered ring is really good because it gives you a ring world and ring worlds have a ton of stuff that you can kind of unearth and it makes for a very fun playthrough scion starts as a vassal of a fallen empire so you basically have a super strong empire above you insulating you from much damage so this is kind of an easy way to learn the game without having to worry about other empires eating you up those two are really good ones now another one here where is it lost colony is an advanced empire of this species is spawned somewhere in the galaxy this is just kind of a really interesting one that you can go with because you'll find a clone of you somewhere else out there that you can try to ally with or take over um and if you take them over all their planets are going to someone have a similar population to yours assuming they haven't interbred with a bunch of aliens now the other one that used to be quite strong but has now recently been limited is prosperous unification start the game with an additional four population and with an additional two districts this bonus disappears though after 10 years from what i've heard with patch 3.0 but i would choose this one prosperous unification or lost colony if you just want a very vanilla and easy start to the game if you want to play something more akin to warhammer 40 000 remnants gives you a relic world to start off with and you were once this big uh galaxy spanning super empire that has now been relegated to a single planet so there are a lot of really cool ways to start the game and everyone has a different approach to it but if you just starting for the first time go prosperous unification or even lost colony if you want a really strong early start shattered ring is another really good one and scion will give you a big fallen empire to be your um basically your your your big daddy that you that you can live off of on the shoulder of giants is also kind of an interesting one as well but i don't know much about it to recommend it 100 so let's just go ahead and go with prosperous unification now ethics authority and civics are some pretty interesting ones essentially the civics that you can choose are based upon your ethics and your authority and your authority is essentially how your government is run your ethics are the um underlying themes or underlying uh strictures of your of your government now to look at it to look at this easily we're going to unclick everything here each one of these is a line right you have just all consciousness in the very center but militarist has an antithesis and that would be a pacifist right you have authoritarianism which is going to be uh offset by egalitarian you've got xenophile which is offset by xenophobe and then obviously spiritualist with materialist so anything you choose in these locations um it's then going to choose the or open up certain civics so let's take for example um let's go with what's one i've looked imperial cult so the requirements for imperial cult are is some degree of authority authoritarian so let's go ahead and choose one of those [Music] is some degree of spiritualist okay some degree obviously being either fanatic or spiritualist and we'll go those in just a second and then lastly has imperial authority that'd be this one right here so that would unlock then [Music] it shoots up to the top if you can choose it imperial cult and we'll just choose uh we'll get rid of nationalistic zeal so that's how i would have imperial cult as a civic option you have to make sure you've got the ethic and the authority now when you're choosing your ethics and authorities let's take a look at some of them here you've got modifiers right so it increases your unity and it reduces your edit cost for spiritualist versus militarist reduces claim influence cost and increases ship fire rate same thing with xenophobe has got something different here too starbase influence cost minus 20 and pop growth speed is increased now those these are the empire modifiers i'm rooting off to you there are certain things that bar each ethic from allowing you to do certain things so jumping back here to xenophobe they can purge aliens they can enslave aliens but they cannot give aliens full citizenship citizenship they cannot allow aliens full military service cannot use refugees welcome refugees welcome species policy so as you're selecting these ethics you have to see what it's going to bar off for you i think spiritualists cannot use full ai rights so if you want to have a gigantic a a robot-led society spiritualist is just not going to be the one for you versus materialist allows academic academic privilege cannot use ai outlawed policy meaning that they need ai as a part of their um government at one point well not necessarily needed but they they can't outlaw it which some factions might say hey i want you to outlaw this so do keep those things in mind now just like with traits you are limited to three total ethics points the outside ones give you two the inside ones cost one i'm sorry the outside ones cost two the inside ones cost one this bad boy costs all three now i would definitely not recommend just all consciousness and i think that i think the game default has you to this for commonwealth of man um we'll just set this to these two so we can do imperial cult in fact i would actually xenophobe is nice but i'm going to go militarist because xenophobe can make it very hard if you're playing through the game and you don't want to deal with um getting into a war or having to deal with a faction that wants to bring you into war because there's a zenos you're talking to xenophobe is going to push you in that direction with some factions so that's why i would just say hey just go with these three militarist spiritualist and authoritarianism and that's only because i chose imperial called for this if you don't want to do that if you don't want to do military go with pacifist if you want to be a xenophile you can there's nothing that none of these are really the wrong way to play is what i'm trying to say and the same thing with authority just make sure it matches up with the civics you have in mind and then from there honestly the civics are just going to really depend upon these two so once you've selected these two you'll have all the ones that you can select towards the top of this list so if i go to the top here you can see got all the check marks and as i start to scroll down these check marks will disappear and i'll start to get little x's see that's our first one boom so we can't do this one but we can do this one so um i know that doesn't sound very helpful like well yeah guy what does that mean which one do i choose choose the ones that fit the ethics and the authority you have in mind first and then go with the civics i'm gonna go ahead and press next on that one choose a voice the these alien savages i mean this is this is the imperium of man easily xenophobe right there protocols we'll go ahead and press next name and adjective again our custom flag is whatever you want and then the ship's appearance is whatever you want or whatever dlcs you have that will allow you to do them like the new imperial ships i don't have the necroid ship here and then the ruler you're setting their title and their air title remember though set up for both male and female in case you have a male or female um character that steps up because they will take these title names but we're just going to keep everything as is press next and that is all set we are done with creating our empire all that's left is just to press done and jump into the game before we jump into the game it's important to take a quick look at the game details portion now some of this might depend upon your actual machine like if you have a strong enough machine can you push to a higher galaxy size go ahead and do it and i don't want to spend too much time on this you can go ahead and copy pretty much everything from this screen you see before you i've shut off advanced ai starts i've put ai empires at 10 i've put the galaxy shape to spiral i've kept it at medium if this is again one of your first time playing or trying to get your feet wet again pretty much everything though is default victory year was moved up to 2600 because again after this point the game ends then your mid game and end game start points are at 2300 and 2400 these are when a certain points in the game will trip off and stuff like the fallen empires will quote unquote activate stuff like that that you'll kind of learn to come into as you play more into the game in my opinion just doing the default medium setting is really not going to hurt you but one thing i do want to look at here is the difficulty so on the bottom end difficulty starts at cadet that you can look at this as very easy and set up to easy captain at normal hard very hard impossible and i'm just throwing out blanket statements here but pretty much captain is your is your normal is the standard difficulty of the game i think by default it puts you on ensign so i'd say ensign or captain is a really good place to start off for your first campaign or at least reacquainting yourself and then lastly what i would do is shut off xeno compatibility and this would make it so that um your races i guess for the most part from what i've on what i understand will stay at as the race that you choose they won't intermingle intermarry and create like crossbreeds or stuff of the sort but this is just kind of a quick crash on the game details you don't need to spend a ton of time on this i would just pretty much go to default and then get going so you can get your feet wet in the game and here we are on the campaign map so to start off we're just going to talk about the ui i'm going to talk about the elements up here we're going to talk about these over here on the left we'll talk about some other things over here and down here and so on so forth but it's pretty much just to get you acquainted and break down some of the barrier of entry with them and kind of help you understand them so let's go across the top so to start off here we have energy credits and by hovering over all of these it's going to give you a pretty good breakout of what's produced what's consumed and how to increase that resource now energy credits are really important obviously it's essentially think of it as your currency your gold currency even even says here angie credits is an energy-backed currency accepted by all space-faring races so this is something that you do want to keep an eye on because especially in the beginning portions of the game it's what's going to enable you to recruit more science officers that allow you to have more science ships so you can further expand both your borders and discover other races across the galaxy moving over we have minerals which is going to be another big bottleneck of yours you can have your produced and you're consumed and so on and so forth minerals is a collective term for the basic resources we needed to construct ships stations and planetary buildings and these are what you'll pretty much be using mining stations for to when you create outposts from star to star a very important resource food is probably of all the resources the least important and maybe one of the easiest ones to manipulate and we're going to go through some beginning game strategies after everything to show you how you can really capitalize on your food and energy in the very beginning portions of the game keep in mind we're paused here and we're going to stay paused almost for the entirety of this video just as a heads up moving on here we have our consumer goods there's an advanced resource that represents the various gadgets luxuries and goods necessary to give your populace a good life and perform intellectual jobs such as research so consumable goods or consumer goods are very important because this is what's going to allow your research rate to continue to grow as you build more research stations across the galaxy an example will be this one right here this research station requires uh researchers to obviously research your research and these science jobs which we'll jump into at the planetary level i'll break out more they'll they will use consumer goods as the part of their upkeep but we'll get into that more as we talk about other portions of planetary management moving into alloys we have got this is another huge portion you'll be using this to create your starships star bases this is a huge resource and you'll start to use it more and more as you expand your empire but really the front ones that you're going to use the most are these two and influence is the trickiest resource of them all because it's the hardest one to gain and it will really be your biggest bottleneck when it comes to expanding your star based production requires influence and alloys alloy you can see is increasing at plus 12 versus influences only plus three and depending upon certain diplomatic actions or maybe the level of support with some factions in your empire you'll start to lose influence pretty significantly so you have to be wary of it next up we have unity now unity is a hero is used to unlock new traditions and what you do with unity i'm going to left-click it brings up these trees and these trees are important because you can kind of think of them as almost like talent trees if you're thinking of a conventional mmorpg you'll specialize in a specific tradition and then you'll go through all of the individual um i guess additional traditions within these and then once you do that you can unlock an ascension perk slot is not available finish a tradition group by adopting all of its traditions or research the ascension theory technology to unlock an ascension perk and these ascension perks are basically like super talents you kind of think of it from a world of warcraft standpoint where back in the day okay you get x amount of talent points and then you can get an active ability this isn't necessarily an active ability but it is a way to kind of quote unquote break a rule or break the game in a certain way or give you a very large boon these ascension perks are huge the ascension perks can essentially change the way your empire works you've got a whole bunch of different ones that are accessible to you and i don't want to spoil them because some are very very cool but you can say um get sciotic and you get a whole entire race of uh space marines or or i guess about better way to put might be like librarians uh from warhammer 40 000. so there's a bunch of really cool ascension perks that really color your play through and they will completely take your empire on a different route depending on the ascension perk and where it's gotten from now closing this menu we're going to look at research now this is the cumulative research we've got here across all of our three research brands branches physics society and engineering if i click this it'll show me each one there we go 21 21 and 24 and i can see that i'm getting where i'm getting these from base the stations the jobs so on and so forth again each one the nice thing about this game is that there is if you can't find where something is coming from there is a menu hidden somewhere that will give you a very detailed break out of it so you kind of just have to scrub around until you find it you've got some particularly rare resources that will only spawn on specific planets or specific um uh stars systems supposed to start bases star systems that you'll gather throughout your play through and these are again dependent upon which dlcs you have active then you have empire sprawl so empire sprawl is pretty unique here so essentially the way that this works is that if i press m you can see that we have just a small amount of empire sprawl we're just one single location here and that is kind of 31 out of our total 50. so empire sprawl is lower than our administrative capacity which is 50. and how this works is it's dependent upon systems colonies and districts all of these things will increase your empire sprawl you can see right there we're getting 13 from our population five from our colony one from a system and then 11 one per district so as your sprawl increases you pretty much it's kind of think of it as a soft cap on your expansion if you go over it it's not that big of a deal in the initial stages going to 55 of 50 is not going to kill you but going to 100 of 50 will really start to hamstring you because every point over the cap you will have an increase to your tech cost to your tradition costs and to certain campaign costs as you can see here at the bottom it says will increase the cost of technologies traditions leaders edicts and campaigns so you want to keep this well managed if you push too far by say making let's say let's say i colonized all of these worlds i'm sorry i'm not colonized we made an outpost on each one of these stars and let's say one of these stars had a world and we colonize that world and we just fill it with districts well our sprawl is going to increase substantially even though we don't have a huge empire so don't think of this as a representation of the size that you like the the size on the map of your empire think of it as what your empire is currently utilizing even if you go and you establish outposts on all of these stars over here there's a good chance your empire sprawl won't get out of control because like i said one one empire sprawl per district on a planet we click here you can see the total these every each one of these colored in blocks is a district that we own so that is contributing to that empire sprawl with a total of 11 districts so you can get out of control if you've got two planets that are have a lot of districts you've spent a lot of time on a call another colony so each one of these things is going to really contribute against this so try to be wary of it but don't worry if you tip over just a little bit envoys are individuals that are going to help you out when it comes to establishing first contact doing any kind of diplomacy in which they will be able to increase relations decrease relations or they can be used for espionage you won't be using them in the very initial portions of the game in the first like 20-30 minutes but once you encounter a race you will we'll have a whole section on that then we have our total empire population our total star base capacity if you push above starbase capacity remember outpost is not a starbase and an outpost would be when i construct one on a surveyed system so you don't have to worry about going over this number unless you're making star bases and we'll go over when is a good time to do that and you've got your naval capacity so naval capacity will increase and so will all of these things that have caps they all can be increased with technologies with districts with ship yards or individual what are these things called traditions there's plenty of ways to increase them so don't worry about getting approaching those caps you'll be able to go over them now on the left side over here we have a lot of different menus and to be totally honest this is probably one of the hardest parts of the game for me when i was getting into it i was like oh this is so intimidating so what i'm going to tell you is all of these are pertinent but they will not be pertinent in the first couple hours of your gameplay contacts will start to populate with all the people you find throughout the empire they'll be easily found within this menu you can jump into either diplomacy or into espionage very easy very straightforward pressing f2 we've got the situation log think of this as your quest log if you're thinking from a conventional rpg standpoint this will start to fill up with anomalies um other little side quests and that kind of fill your situation log that will show you where they are on the map um even first contact will be a part of the situation log now in addition to that anomalies will go in here in specific sorry situation log will have your geographical digs not anomalies so anomalies will go into here and you have your victory tab and again don't worry about this this you'll you i you'll never really use it um jump into market here you have the ability to buy and sell your resources as you could expect and you can also do monthly trading if you so wish if you get to that level planets and sectors ignore it you don't really want to do any kind of auto sector management until you get to the point where you even have another sector to auto manage so by that time you'll get your feet wet in that direction and it won't be as scary but ignore this entire menu for this for the time being expansion planner is a way to say if i'm looking at my map and i've discovered five planets they'll be on here and i can go through here to just quickly expand into them so you have see your habitable planets is surveyed is colonizable so you can click these things to quickly filter stuff out but for the most part you'll you'll know where those planets are like this one for example here i've clicked off is surveyed we can see these two planets since they are within our center our survey range and our i'm sorry sensor range and so i can immediately jump to them if i so wish once i survey those locations and i can do the colonization and everything and manage it all from here not super important to be totally honest policies is a big one and this one will be very dynamic it's going to change as your empire changes as you grow and the big part of this is going to look at stuff like diplomatic stance expansionist you can change these off to isolationists to cooperative or to belligerent and with each one of these there's going to come some boons and some penalties isolationist is a good example so with this your administrative capacity is increased by 15 that's your empire sprawl so administrative capacity is the number on the right 50 where this number on the left is your empire sprawl so 31 sprawl versus 50 capacity um where is this um monthly unity is going to increase so the thing that increases your experience towards those quote unquote talent points and then diplomatic weight is decreased and diplomatic influence cost is increased you're an isolationist you don't want to talk to people you just want to be left alone governing ethics attraction plus 25 and border friction plus 200 border friction is when your border meets up with another um empire and it will cause either stressful or not stressful friction depending upon what your diplomatic stances are certain ones are barred to you because you can see here um we do not have a merchant guild civic um we do not have the supremacy traditions finished so certain ones of these you can't even use but war philosophy unrestricted versus liberation wars horrible bombardments so i would just kind of take a look through all these a lot of them let me do this i think this is probably a better way to look at this so these are the ones that you'll probably have them the most to deal with in the early portions of the game [Music] i think these are the these i'd say these are the three big ones war philosophy you could argue in there too but diplomatic stance you'll want to choose one of these this always will coincide all of these policies will coincide with how you made your empire to start it's like a default stance for them all so if you decide well you know what let's just first contact we'll always go cautious that way whenever we encounter another race we're not going to just jump immediately into a conflict we'll be cautious about it we'll go that route so you'll take care of that our diplomatic stance will just stay expansionists we want to grow we want to get bigger we'll stay with that now trade policy is another big one so the way trade works this might be better off suited in its own its own uh section but we'll just kind of do it together if i click we'll jump into our star system we'll click on our star base here and we're going to click trade routes so this are all these are all the systems or the the systems around us and we can see our collection range is one so that means anything that is one jump from deneb these three locations right here we will get trade from them so rightfully when we go back to policies f6 we've got ways to deal with this trade each trade value collected earns us one credit consumer benefits gives us 0.5 credits and 0.25 consumer goods or marketplace of ideas trade value earns us 0.5 credits and 0.25 unity personally i would go with marketplace of ideas this will give you more unity so you can jump through those traditions faster and you're going to really need those in the early portions of the game to push through the game quickly now moving into edix you'll get basically kind of think of these as stances or little things that you can do to quickly boost specific roles you want to give the empire right now we've got fortify the border so this will last until canceled star base upgrade speed plus fifty percent star based capacity plus two empire sprawl from system plus ten percent and it will cost you influence remember we don't want to spend influence on willy-nilly and i would honestly just not do this edict you would focus on a different one probably one called map the stars which we'll talk about when we go over what to do in the beginning portions of the game society management is again going to bring you into your traditions panel you can click it here or just press f8 either one this is where we'll go through our individual traditions now the two i recommend and we'll go over this again more so later would be expansion and then discovery and i would do just the reach for the stars portion of expansion and then go into discovery because discovery has a huge amount of benefits especially in these first ones and we'll again we'll go over that in a later section relics allows you to sell or do stuff with the minor relics that you will get from surveying planets from doing individual researches or or anomalies that pop up not as huge in the very beginning spend most of your time surveying rather than actually doing any of the anomalies that pop up if you get hey anomaly detected just say leave it be unless it is a particularly easy one that's going to take you near no time to do just leave it and do them all once you've expanded and solidified your borders crisis this is only going to be active way later in the game so don't worry about it chip designer where you're going to build your ships you will need to use this and i'm going to cover this in the later section where we talk about what to do with the initial portions of the game because i think this is going to be more important there fleet manager will become more valuable as you get more fleets in the beginning portion you can really ignore it you can manage your entire fleet from this button right here and never even go to the fleet manager but as you get more fleets it's going to be far easier to manage them from this portion but again you're not gonna you're hard-pressed to get multiple fleets in the first handful of hours of your gameplay technology is super important here so the big thing here with technology is every single scientist has got a perk you can see this one has expertise in computing this one has a spark of genius which is a very good strong perk another one here has got adaptable leader experience gains 25 this one can be good but typically this is one you'd want to give to someone in a science ship not someone researching your technologies so let's replace this one real quick let's uh we got tabby cat here huh tabitha mccall and she is our adaptable one and we also have meticulous anomaly discovery chance plus ten percent so we actually don't have a lot of amazing people to research uh this one is spark of genius is a really good one because it increases research speed by ten percent now if we go back to this menu here actually technology what is really kind of important with this is taking a look at the little icons now when we look at this one with expertise computing this obviously increases the research speed of computing and i'm going to click select research it'll prop up three different random researches and as you go down different traditions you'll get access to more so on and so forth but this specialization will increase the chance of those specializations appearing as a research for physics society or engineering whatever it is and you typically always want to focus at the beginning of the game on those 20 bonuses this is going to be a huge increase to your research speed so we're going to select this one and here for society again i would go unity if possible planetary unification is a very strong one and so is the 20 research one another really strong one would be uh the genome mapping with population growth speed and then lastly here with engineering we've got a bunch of different ones now this one's probably the best to go without the gate but ideally you'd want to put someone with voidcraft in this location and we'll talk about this in a little bit but if i go to leaders and press recruit well we unfortunately did not get a um a leader here with voidcraft um as scientist but that's okay you don't need one it's just like i said earlier it increases the chance of voidcraft technologies appearing in this menu and at any point you can change these researches by just pressing this button and just swapping onto a new one now you can see that this says zero out of two thousand if you swap out that progress retains so if you decide you know what this isn't a priority we're when we're 500 into it we can switch to afterburners without a problem but again you want to try and find someone with um voidcraft which looks like a single little rocket ship and that one will actually be better at discovering some of the things like megastructures and stuff down the line that are way way way important to you and you'll also need these technologies to discover new ships like destroyers and cruisers and all the things that progress up from corvettes it really depends too of course on what type of empire going with but you'll constantly be cycling these uh researches and or these these technologies into place but focus on the 20 ones out the gate if you can they're gonna be your big big big boons jumping into factions now i've been told a number of things here you don't ever really need to worry about this you'll get your first faction at around 11 years into your gameplay and they will you can appease them they're really for role play purposes from what i've under from what i've been told and they really aren't going to really make or break your game especially in the beginning you can suppress them costing you influence i do not recommend that and you can promote them costing you influence again i don't recommend that either just kind of let them go until you understand the game better and then fall back on what their issues are when we jump forward i can explain them a little bit better because we'll have some to look at claims not important right now because right now you're going to be expanding claims are essentially the same thing as they were for crusader kings three you create a claim to get a cashless belly to go to war with an empire you can say hey you know are our borders but up against each other i'm going to make a claim on the system within your border and that's the one i'm going to attack and that's how i'm going to do things so we're going to go to species now next and these are all the species in your empire right now it's just humans you're not gonna ever use it in the beginning portions of the game so don't worry about it and lastly leaders now leaders are your governors your scientists your admirals and your generals we went over just a little bit on how to recruit them but when we jump into what to do in the beginning portions i'm going to show you a quick little quote-unquote hack to get you another early scientist so you can focus on having more science ships out early but that covers the base of the ui the other thing i want to talk about real quick is over here and right now this this is very minimal right you can just the sectors everything your shipyards your military fleets it seems very easy but this will start to grow very big as you get more ships more fleets more shipyards especially more outposts on there more colonies your factions will be displayed here it will start to get a little out of control so you can just kind of collapse these things as you see fit and it's a really nice way to kind of manage what you do and don't need like maybe hey you're not in the middle of a war why have your military fleets open close it or hey you know you've given all of your tasks to all of your ships go ahead and close that too so those things are going to be very important to just kind of manage everything at a glance but i just wanted to give you a quick look at that you have a number of filters that you can apply to the map if you need a quick look at things but they will help you out and say okay here's the neighboring map mode ai attitude like do they like you do they not like i'm sorry do they hostile towards you whatever the opinion map mode the intel map mode diplomatic map mode all these things that you're not really going to worry about too much in the beginning in fact i think the first 30 hours of the game i didn't touch these in the lower right corner but one button that is super huge is the alt button if i hold it down see i hold it down and causes that right here i can see that on this system these white numbers mean that i don't have anything they're producing from them so if i click on my my construction ship then right click i see i have the ability now to build research stations and mining stations here because i these two were required mining stations and that one requires a research station so when you start to expand and you move across the map you will find the alt button invaluable because you'll have sent multiple construction ships out to make multiple outposts across the map for you and by holding down alt you can quickly see okay well there's a lot of green numbers here i know i've created those respective stations there either mining or research i know i need another one here or there depending on whatever it is there's a white text i gotta go fix that but that is the quick little crash course here on the ui you've got some quick navigation buttons here too if you want to jump into those but they're pretty much i'd say easier to go through over here but that concludes just talking very quickly about the ui first dollars now we've switched gears here to talk about diplomacy i've loaded into one of my saves and you can see you've gotten quite a bit of land here i'm also over my empire sprawl and my star bases and my energy credits are hurting so um just trying stuff out but like i was talking about that alt button earlier you can see if i hold it down i can see everything across the whole map and like i was saying too with the outliner it gets pretty big it gets pretty out of control and i'm not even very far into this game but let's get back on track here with diplomacy so i'm going to go to contacts and you can see we have a lot of diplomatic relations with a lot of different races across the map i'm just going to scroll out and you can see they're down here over here one's over there and then the united nations of earth are right here let's bring up the united nations of earth first click this icon or you can click diplomacy here this brings this up and you have some other options here you can press this button to choose different empire if you want to to just quickly navigate without having to go back to a bunch of different menus but taking a look here we can take a look at the big thing here which is the ai's attitude towards us right now it's friendly if i hover over this depending on your standing with them you might not be able to see their opinion of us and our opinion of them if you have particularly bad standing you won't be able to see these things but this is of course the big one here right so right now this bar shows us how far we are towards the next level of opinion or net and that is measured by this right here so that's the total relation so our positive relations are at 426. and if you see here the relation levels at the bottom the next one is excellent relations at 750. since we're at 426 we're about at this point in that bar so we haven't quite hit excellent relations conversely just to kind of show you a juxtaposition here very quickly we'll switch over to these guys these guys that bar is full right and you're like oh maybe these guys like me no it's just showing that when i hover over this we are right at the beginning of tense relations we're not quite at neutral neutral's at negative 300 since we're at negative 367 we're still in the tense relations portion so once we push to uh negative 299 it becomes neutral relations so if this bar is confusing that is why moving back here to earth we can see a number of other things we can see their diplomatic stance they're cooperative they do want to talk with us and we can see their overall relative power to us equivalent in our fleet power superior they are superior in their technology over us and we have equivalent economic power and then this left portion we get a little some other things like okay here is their origin their prosperous unification uh here is their race and there's the breakout of their empire sprawl if we can see it yet their empire colonies their empire population and then lastly their diplomatic weight now these things are increased by their fleet power their population their economy their technology everything and cooperative also adds to this as you can see here and then we also get what their ethics are and their civics are right here and their type of government so their name is united nation of earth representative democracy with a federer and their federation builders so a nice quick break out now if i move over to this right portion i can also see a bunch of other information right we can see rivaling an identified empire and rivaled by an unidentified empire and those rivals typically help with military dictatorships you establish a rivalry there's a chance you're probably going to go to war but it'll help out with some of your factions who will say oops wrong button there factions they'll say something like oh we want you to be local rivalry uh positioning ourselves as the rival of at least one empire will please the military officers association which is the primary um faction that i want to appease for whatever reason and these issues for these guys are going to pretty much dictate how your diplomacy works aggressive diplomacy failing to allow for offensive warfare will displease the military officers association so if you're trying to please specific factions within your empire it's going to change how your diplomatic stance is with the empire that you encounter are you going to be aggressive you're going to jump to war you're going to just jam your your fist down their throat i don't know why that's what i said that's what i'm sticking with um or are you gonna try to i think one of these is i've actually think none of these on this playthrough are like that but some of them say like you know we are they want to move towards a more peaceful end and you would appease that if that's the kind of federation or i'm sorry the faction you want to support within your empire so moving back here to the united nations of earth we have got commercial packed with us it shows pretty much all the agreements and wars and packs and everything through here you can just hover over to find out what there are what they are and for the most part you won't be really embroiled too much with them in the early game as far as having them greatly affect you it's pretty much going to be are you at war with them or are you not and do you have a closed border with them and do you not closing borders is not as hostile as it sounds because if i have closed borders they can't go through my lands to make another station or connect another part of their empire or envelop me whatever they want to do so closing borders is often times of quite a good thing unless you want to have really strong diplomatic relations with that empire like for example united nations of earth i have an open uh border with them then you get a whole bunch of decisions as it were you can improve or harm relations by doing so you click this button and you would assign a envoy to do this for you then you've got make a claim we talked about this but this would be we'll scroll down and take a look this is my border this is theirs we can click this and there we go it's going to cost me 25 to do this and i have a claimed system um you can add a couple more into here and say okay we're going to claim all these these these well we can only do the ones that are that are close to me um i'm going to do that and oops sorry and those are the ones i'm going to make a claim on and that's going to be part of my cast's belly to go to war that's what the claims are offer a trade deal in which case you to start a trading break defensive packs commercial packs and the commercial packs defensive packs all these things allow for like a research agreement so we are currently able to learn the those additional resources from our physics our society and our engineering research from this research agreement and we share that back with them the commercial pack gives us pretty much credits and they get credits from us defensive pact is exactly what it sounds like you'll also see something that says ensure independence that's like a one-sided defensive pact in which case if they say hey we ensure you're gonna your independence then they will come to your aid if you're attacked if you and share their dependence where is it actually i don't think i think yeah if you have a if you have a defensive pact you can't but independents will pretty much ensure a one-way defensive pack whoever insures it is the one that will defend the one that they're insuring pretty much migration treaty is exactly what it sounds like close the borders open the borders demand vassalization in which case they become a vassal state of yours demand tribute from them ask to be their vassal offer tribute to them you can create an embassy in their lands which is going to help you with espionage we'll go into a little bit build a spy network which that will also help declare war declare a rivalry which is not a war keep in mind not a war and then form a federation and that's a pretty cool one that you won't get until quite later in your timeline because you need the federation diplomacy tradition unlocked then you can just insult them if you really want to add a salt to injury so i will actually do espionage as its own section but let's jump now over to espionage espionage is the new system that was added in with stellaris nemesis and depending on how you go about this you have access to a ton of operations let's start from the top over here so we have got our infiltration level and this will increase over time as long as we have an envoy positioned to set up a spy network it will slowly increase this over time and we will start to get more and more information out of the target empire that will translate over here into intel intel is changing at a rate of minus 0.08 per month to a minimum of zero and right now we're getting a medium on our on the government intel the diplomacy intel economy and technology but minimal or low on military and these will give us stuff like the relative fleet power location of starbases everything like that if you hover over this diplomatic packs may grant additional intel on the other party regardless of the current intel level so this is telling us here that as we set up embassies and research and defensive and migration and commercial packs it gives us more and more information on their relative portions of their society so it's actually a very very huge um boon to set up a spy network in places you maybe aren't ready to attack just yet but you want to get more information on them maybe they're just just out of reach and you want to really just kind of hone in on everything and then you have operations this is obviously the lion's share of what this all does so lion the operation is divided into two portions here the difficulty which is obviously hell for all of these as you can see held with that like that's six mix pluses and then the infiltration level so you have to have this infiltration level to do these operations and we can do all the way down to sabotage sabotage sabotage starbase we can't arm privateers unfortunately and then you've got your difficulty which is based off of your relative encryption so right now ours is routine which is unfortunate because that just means it means it sucks and the only way to increase this that i've been able to discover is by technology so in the beginning portions of the game you probably won't have a ton of luck doing any of these operations but i'm going to quickly go over them just for the sake of talking about them real quick you can gather info you can spark diplomatic incident i can cause something embarrassment involving an envoy of the united nations i prepare a sleeper cell and this is nice because if i move this envoy off of here i will start to lose infiltration level and intel the sleeper cell will prevent that decay and it's very nice in case i have to use one of my two envoys on something else i won't lose any infiltration level acquirer asset is basically an individual who will help you in all of these endeavors it will help reduce the difficulty level your extort favors where you get a favor from the the parent action smear campaign to lower relations between the united nations and of earth and another empire so you can target two empires to try to get them to go to a proxy war essentially steal technology from them sabotage starbases and then arm privateers which will land will randomly spawn somewhere in their space to attack so you have a lot of really cool benefits you can use here and it is nice to be able to use espionage to kind of change the sway or or the balance of power in the galaxy without having to directly go into conflict but i wanted to quickly show off the new espionage menu and just talk about it briefly you won't be using it as much because everything will have such a high difficulty until you unlock better encryption but it was worth just kind of going over really quick on a high level the next subject i want to go into is planetary management just to kind of quickly go over this so here is our planet menu for our empire capital and as you grow out your other colonies these colonies will start to become aggro worlds or bureaucratic centers whatever it is and those will be assigned by simply producing more districts there so you don't really need to worry about that there's nothing about the actual planet that becomes that world unless you kind of make it that direction so let's go over this from top to bottom we have our type of world that this is and our habitability of course it's 100 because it's our capital world we talked about that before we have who the governor is we have colonial spirit here any kind of benefits or boons will be right here then we have a pretty important panel this is what's pretty much going to be the thing you're going to be looking at the most first off we get decisions which will allow you to do specific things to basically give a boost in one direction to basically um fine-tune or burst a specific thing like says for example distribute luxury goods amenities plus 25 percent and immigration immigration pull plus 25 percent or 120 months so you can use these in a situation where you say need them like stops all pop growth on the planet reduces stability while active or increased stability and adds more soldier jobs whatever it is you can quickly do them through their decisions i haven't found a good one to use in the very beginning of the game and if you do know one please by all means let me know in the comment section but for beginners you probably don't even need to worry about it but next this is our stability now stability is pretty important because it changes depending on whether or not it's above 50 if it is above 50 you get this effects from high stability resources from jobs trade value and immigration pull are increased that value is pretty much 0.6 percent trade 0.6 jobs and 0.4 immigration poll for every point over 50. if that drops below 50 you lose 1 trade 1 job production and plus two to emigration push meaning people are going to leave the planet so keeping your stability above 50 is key that's what gets you that effects from high stability this is your population obviously the total amount of population on the planet and you have a number of other things so crime in the early portions is not crazy you probably won't run into this very much but if you do there's a chance that certain things will spawn on your planet like a crime syndicate stuff that is maybe permanent and won't ever leave or you might just have random events that happen for a certain set number of months this will pretty much be based off of stability and overall happiness and any enforcers that you might have on the planet right now at zero we don't need to worry about it housing obviously is the number of houses that you have across your districts and from your buildings and you'll see this number go up and down depending on the population right now so you can see here effects from free housing immigration polls two percent so since we've got houses our planet is um looks it looks appealing to people to immigrate to now if there is less they will or even negative and it's overcrowded they will emigrate from it now there's also the amenities which is basically just things that help out with general happiness so as you can see from high amenities citizen pop happiness plus eight percent amenities are increased by buildings or other little factors that will give um entertainment uh from specific jobs such as i don't think i have any on here no but where's there's an auto hollow theater right there that'll give you some amenities can also be produced i believe too from not alloy foundries luxury residence gives you some amenities too as well to help out so some benefits from amenities help out with happiness now you have current unemployment you never want this to be anything other than zero if it is you need to start making some jobs and when you look over here this shows us that there are three available jobs now in my other playthrough you saw a bunch of negative red numbers at the top here right empire sprawl all these things my empire sprawl had grown so in out of control because i was just making districts i was just pressing these buttons and just going oh cool let's color them all in don't play like that i have already made the mistake so you don't have to basically look to see if you have available jobs either zero or one that means there's time to make another district because you you've got room to make more jobs on the planet if you've got available jobs three and you make more districts that doesn't mean the districts are producing it just means that they're there and with as a result of that you're going to increase your empire sprawl you're going to increase your available jobs you're going to lower your stability so you don't want to do that always look at this number just go ahead and here click this if if this is at zero or lower you'll see a little red icon over here that'll say hey there's a job issue you just go over and you check it out and you fix it you're done so just make sure zero or one then make a district and the district should coincide with the districts that you need and i would say that really your generator districts are a very good early start and focus because you want to be able to get credits to get leaders to get scientists to make science ships another big focus is probably going to be in your industrial districts to give you alloy to make ships and consumer goods to supply your research stations with jobs and we'll get to those in a little second here mining districts are going to help you out in giving you the materials you need to make buildings but you'll also get them passively from setting up mining stations so it's not as important you'll be using a lot of generators and then the agriculture district will allow you to create food not as huge because like i've said before huge uh huge uh food is not the most important of resources then lastly you have city districts here which you can see clerks produce trade value and amenities they also help out with trying to mitigate a little bit your empire sprawl but remember you're building a district too so it's not a full on mitigation but it's important just to kind of have those things in mind now as we move over here we have this button here called features now there when you look at this we have a total number of six districts that we can make on this planet these little hash marks through these tell me that three of these districts are blocked when i go to features it tells me which ones are blocked and why and how much i can pay to remove the blockage and what it will do so sprawling slums will increase my population industrial wasteland will unblock fertile lands and it will max agricultural districts plus two and this will increase my cultural districts plus two as well both of these not so much of a priority in my mind this one a priority is going to give me more populations more jobs so on and so forth so try to look for breaking apart the blockers for the focus you have on a planet and i would say make your planets focused on one thing at a time generator for the first planet you create isn't a bad idea nor is industrial district just go with base it off of how many districts are available to you you don't want to force a planet to be an industrial district or an industrial planet if it only has like four slots but for the most part these two will be somewhat similar from what i understand the generator one is typically a little more rare you'll always find less generated districts than the other two from what i understand now you also have buildings now buildings are essentially your specialized workers all the districts create general workers while these guys create these specialized ones for them for the most part there are different situations here like metallurgists turn minerals into alloys administrative office offices here are going to help with your administrative capacity remember that is your empire sprawl button or a number here on the right autocathon monuments will help out with unity and society research civilian industries will help out with consumer goods essentially these things are about taking one resource and converting it into another even if it's people you know jobs whatever have what have you hollow theaters use jobs to create um uh what they're called amenities and unity and also takes consumer goods luxury residences precinct houses research labs resource silos and strongholds you'll probably never ever use resource silos so don't ever worry about them unless you know a specific instance in which you would please let me know in the comments but research labs are going to be the first building you're going to create on your capital as soon as it is okay to make that when i say okay i'm saying you have um a good economy going and you can sustain the job of the research labs because you don't really need to jump into it too fast but once you do it's going to really help out with your research so we're going to click population oh well you know what before we do that this is the total trade value of this planet itself and this is the planet's total production now if you see a deficit number here don't worry you don't have to neutralize that number and make it a zero sum total for the planet it's just telling you that if you're saying hey you know why do i have minus 40 consumer goods well this planet's got a deficit of minus 20. let me see what i can do to mitigate some of that here but it's pulling it's telling you that's where it's going to pull from your empire to use those consumer goods don't worry about the deficit here and trying to make all their be zeros out of one planet it's just not going to happen you're going to have some deficits on some planets it's okay we're gonna click population here and this is what i was talking about with these jobs so we have the different strata the different tiers rulers at the top administrators specialists like metallurgists who are going to be making um minerals into alloy but i've been talking about this quite a bit here oops i didn't mean to press that button press this button just you click on on this thing itself or you can hover over any one of these if you so wish but if we go down to researchers we're seeing that four consumer goods are being used two consumer goods each for each one of these guys to produce 10 total um physics society and engineering research so that's what i was saying you're going to be using those consumer goods to use on your researchers to increase your research of as a whole but just to kind of rehash that there then we have all of our workers these are the guys that are clerks technicians miners and farmers and you can click to say hey you know i really want i want all these guys to to go over there instead but we don't need to do that i would just kind of let this automatically do its thing then you get the split of your uh entire faction is it all human is there are there ai on the planet is there other races on the planet um do you have ai assembling do you have a certain race declining while another one is growing because of immigration immigration so not as huge i would say if you are just starting the game i wouldn't really worry about it armies that you have stationed on the planet again not so huge in the beginning portions of the game and i wouldn't worry too much about it you're really only going to be dealing with this when you get into really big conflicts with other nations and you have corporate if you are a mega corp you can establish branch offices and the such but that is a quick rundown of the planetary management now let's go into how to kind of get the initial portions of the game started okay it is time to take everything that we've learned and put it together for the beginning of our campaign now i'm going to talk about some things that i've already discussed previously but just to put them all here so they're in one nice neat category helps out when you're starting out now this is some things that you should do before you even unpause the game and having the little tutorial bot around is actually quite a bit of help if you don't really understand things he'll at least kind of refresh you on them as you jump through stuff so let's jump into our home system and we have got everything that we need right we've got a number of mining stations some research stations we've got one construction ship one science ship our little fleet and our shipyard and then also our capital which is right here which is right here so what we're going to first talk about are traditions and that is gathered through the unity we've talked about this before but the first ones that you should really be focusing on are both expansion and discovery you can min max this by going into one then the other then finishing the other off and finishing the other off or you can just just go down one to begin with and there's really no wrong answer here personally i think these two in discovery are so strong so to boldly go is going to increase the survey speed of your science ship and that is significant by 35 no less so they'll be able to survey more planets and discover more and more and more of the galaxy around you why that is so important is in the beginning portions of the game you want to find out where other empires are it gives you an idea of where you can expand and if those empires are hostile how to expand your capital planet and where to build star bases you don't want to just build star bases all willy-nilly like i was saying earlier you want to have a focus point so toboligo is such a really good strong one and then after that just finish this portion of the tree off and then get this one last because science division gives you additional research alternatives and why this is important is we talked about this before with research but every single branch physics society and the other one that i can't think of on top of my head uh engineering has got uh three researchers three technologies you can research this adds a fourth one into the mix and that is quite nice so you'll have that right off the gate and like i said before getting your technology up as fast as possible is really important you don't want to get caught in the dust with that or else every faction around you is going to be that much stronger so those are your traditions you won't encounter them for probably about your first hour or two until you really get enough unity but then you'll just dive into these and each one is going to cost you more and more and then eventually you're going to unlock your ascension perk and we'll go over that when we jump forward what we're going to do right now is talk about the beginning portion then i'm going to jump forward to show you off a little bit of how this is going to come to fruition but we'll talk about ascension perks once you finish once we finish this section but then after that it's really nice to go down expansion this is going to reduce your starbase influence cost just this one to start off with and then colonize fervor makes it so new colonies start with one additional population getting your first colony out as soon as possible is going to be huge because that's going to help boost your economy and you're going to only be able to find that colony by searching the stars for a potential planet we might have one here we're going to find out um so that those are traditions and that is probably the the quick and down and dirty of how you should focus go to discovery first followed by expansion now here's a kind of a cheesy thing you can do but you start off with these ships and they're usually fitted out by the ai you get three ships they're all set up now you can do this if you want it's kind of cheesy but turn off auto generate designs clear the design and then save it and then if we go over here to our military fleets click it and then you see this button right here we can upgrade them and it's going to give us 132 alloy see how it said minus 132 alloy so that's gonna just give us a quick little alloy boost that's kind of a cheesy way to do things you're just gonna add it back on later but it's a nice way to get some money in the early game now in addition to that we've got another thing we have to take care of so let's take a look at research so right now we have our scientists in their roles and we've talked about this before but just to rehash it you want each one of these researchers to be kind of focusing on something in specific so with physics the very first one you should definitely be doing is this one get that 20 bonus to your research it's going to help you out a lot now lorenza here let's have her do the same thing here 20 on this one we have the 20 you saw earlier in the video we had unity that's a good one too or population growth if neither this or unity are available i would probably go with this to start off with because it's just so much better to get that early bonus so you can tech up quickly see right now we're only getting two percent research progress this is going to help us out significantly then our last one here is engineering now in this case i actually don't have very many great options but we're gonna go with zero g refineries to get nebula refineries this these things will be strong in the mid to well not even mid but uh later early and mid game and it will be very helpful so we can go ahead and choose that one now remember what i said here engineering we want to try to get someone with voidcraft so we can start to get some of the cooler um engineering researches so let's take a look at our leaders and we've got this guy he's our other one that we don't have um doing any research and he is going to give us archaeology excavation speed that'll be nice when he is out exploring not going to be so great when he's inside researching and the madman or the maniacal here can actually be better put from what i understand you want that one to go into sorry maniacal should go here so we're going to swap her him go back to this and put her there so it it doesn't do a whole ton because she obviously has green and you want someone in with blue in this section but putting this guy here from what i've heard with society in specific is quite good because it unlocks some cool ascension perks um now for physics here we don't have any blue perks to put into this section so that's okay now let's go ahead and click recruit now we do have an option for a expertise in computing and i actually like to have computing in that research field i think it's a pretty good one but you'll see right here that we are barred by not having enough um credits we've got 200 the cost is 200 and this one up here we only have got 100. so here's some kind of tricky little ways to get around that so we're gonna go to market f3 and we're gonna sell all of our food and i know you're probably thinking what how do what do you mean i sold my food now my people can't eat we're still producing 12 food so you're fine don't worry about it this is already after consumption when you hover over it you can see we've produced 40 20 is consumed residual 12 is going basically into our quote unquote stock so you're fine don't worry about it but this gives us 200 credits to buy a second leader so go to leaders go to recruit and we're going to recruit this frank knox here and we're going to go back to technology and swap her out with him back again to technology one more time and you can see that this research progress went up because he is contributing to it with his computing specialty so what i i just to kind of rehash one more time with technology try to get computing in physics and try to get voidcraft in engineering and anything else you can for a society go for it anything green will really help you out what i've heard though maniacal is a really good one so these are all set but now we still have our science ship so this science ship is all set with this guy in control and that's good so let's go ahead and press m to go to our map and we can see we have quite a bit around us and this can be tedious you can just right click and press survey and he's going to take his time and then you're going to have to do it again and again and again and again well you can hold down shift and cue up a whole ton of these commands so this way he can just go about his business and then once you see this icon turn to um a series of little z's like he's sleeping or he's just in orbit like this one says he's in orbit then you know okay well he's ready for some more surveying and if you hover over this icon too you'll see the progress of each individual aspect of the system and how long it's taking him to survey it or where he's at in the surveillance so if he's surveying the system here of savonia so this one then i can see by hovering over it where he is in the progress of the overall system and this bar will fill up as he does the individual aspects of these systems so that's a great little point to do with your survey ship it's going to go out and do its business now with your construction chip remember we talked about these little numbers and how they are currently in white rather than green well we want to build all of our mining and research stations so you can right click here and i can press this button and it's going to build both of the mining stations then i can build this button and it'll build both of or the one a research station but if i jump down here click my construction ship and we kind of look around where is it okay so here's our research station or the one that we need to build and where is our other one there is our other mining station now you have a choice to make you can either prioritize the minerals which will allow you to make more stations or the credits which will allow you to kind of function i guess a little bit better according to other things your upkeep won't be as as taxed because you're spending more time getting credits rather than minerals so my take is go ahead and build our mining station here on the energy credits it'll give us some credits to start off we just depleted some of them we're getting minerals at a rate of 26 right now so this will recover quickly enough that we can get the next station out fast so those are some initial things that you should be doing right out the gate once we've done all that the game is pretty much a matter of rinse and repeat you're going to go ahead and keep exploring these systems and you're going to build outposts on those systems with the construction ship i'm going to go ahead and unpause while i talk about the capitol new sitrep and in this capital here we have got some things to talk about now we talked about how you don't want to have a whole bunch of available jobs sunk into this and you want to make sure that you're kind of going at the pace that your economy is growing right you don't want to just build districts because you can build districts because you think it's going to help it's not i promise you're going to hamstring yourself but when it gets to a point where you've started to expand and you've gotten to a good level of income coming in across both your minerals your energy your consumer goods and your alloy it's time to decide what kind of building to build now this will be dependent upon one of two things what are the i'm sorry it'll be dependent upon one thing what are the people around you are they hostile empires well you're probably going to need a bunch of ships so it's time to make an alloy foundation this will increase the output of alloy so you can upgrade your ships but most importantly so you can make star bases and upgrade the modules on star bases making an outpost does cost simplest influence and alloy but making the star base is really going to be able to help out in the early game because it can deal with a fleet in the earliest portions of the game on its own now let's say you have a non-hostile empire next to you well time to rush that time i know i know and we're gonna talk about that in just a second um well actually pause right here go with research labs because that means you're gonna be able to tech up faster you're going to get more out of your research stations in the system and i just strongly recommend it so that you get to the techs that you need so that you can actually be competitive in the uh the galactic sphere of stuff whatever that word i'm trying to look for now every so often you're going to get these anomalies and i've said this before take a look at the difficulty and the time this isn't that hard it's only anomaly level two at this point i would probably research it just to get it out of the way but in the earliest portions of the game just leave it for now even if it's a nom level three four five six seven eight nine ten whatever just leave it you can come back and do these at any point it's not going to hurt you sometimes they'll give you a little boon and that's nice but i would not necessarily focus on doing anomalies until my empire has grown to the point where i am butting up against the borders of other empires then i can go inward and start to deal with these anomalies because my science ships won't have anywhere to go i'll have explored all the world that i can explore all the worlds that i can explore and my my science chips are just kind of chilling so well time to start looking at anomalies so leaf bee for now unpausing to talk about this construction ship like i said it's now snoozing and we have enough minerals to make another station here so we're going to right-click and i'm at this point i'm going to have it do we're going to do another mining station so we can get more minerals to make the research station again uh prioritizing one over the other depends also on the system like if you're in one system here uh we'll wait for this to i'm actually gonna fast forward this to the fastest speed um as this starts to to uh look at more of these systems you're gonna be able to figure out what you should prioritize in those stations now one thing i forgot to say we made that extra scientist i'm stupid i totally forgot to talk about this go to your shipyard and build another science of ship that was the whole point of making of getting this additional scientist so i totally messed up and telling you that i apologize but go ahead and do that we're going to fast forward that while it does it and this will allow us to expand in multiple directions the point of doing this like i said is figuring out what is around us finding out where we should jump to next with our construction ship we have a science ship assign a leader we're looking for the one that says available here we go construction complete i'm going to pause real quick just to show this off one more time hold down shift right click survey survey and we're going to jump forward a little bit here to kind of show you how this all pans out but i want this to finish surveying this location we're going to fastest yet again our construction is complete so we can actually make another station over here with our construction ship that guy is just hauling down there and this dudes let's take a look at how this is going pass completed cool we're all done there and he's going to move to the next location you can see progress is moving he's down over there and now he is looking at short so when our construction ship finishes up here we're going to talk about um construction complete pull this down we're going to talk about outposts so clicker construction ship right click here and build a outpost or starbase now ideally i'm not going to lie to you i should have gone here first jump because it has a planet and there's a chance that and we've been able to potentially inhabit this planet so i should have done that um you know but we're going to go there right now but for the sake of this video we'll just go ahead and build this starbase to talk a little bit about how this works so speeding up one more time the construction ship should start to head there it'll it'll slowly take its time we might even get lucky and ah so it looks like we have had a first contact i didn't even see it happen oh this is our policy for first contact so we'll say we'll be cautious you might not get that um dilemma and i'll be honest too putting an outpost on a single location like this is not overly worth it because i it is in the long run but i'm saying i shouldn't have not have prioritized this location because it just has one single statement we'll leave that for now and i guess this is a good thing to show you guys like right like construction don't just jump to the first location and build a starbase immediately like it's not going to help you in the long run as you can see here i've just wasted influence and alloy to just make a single credit station so hopefully this next one that we discover down here is more worth it to talk a little bit about that so this is going to go a little bit further and we have our first tradition so let's go ahead and go to discovery then we're going to go to adopt you have to adopt the tree first and then you can start to go into the tree moving forward here a little bit more again and just waiting for science chips over here how much longer so we have quite a bit of uh things over here in ump that will take some time construction complete so now that that's done you we can see there's another planet over here and let's say you know hey this is this is way more worth it than this location i just i'm just going to go over here and build a starbase well if i were to do that i don't think this will show because we haven't revealed it yeah we can't um but every outpost needs to have an adjoining border to be built now when i say that i'm not saying that it won't be built i'm saying that it will exponentially go up in cost for every system jump it is away from your borders so this is 60 influence and 90 alloy if i wanted to do this one rather than this one and since it's one jump away i believe it doubles in cost it goes up significantly so do not jump over your own systems the ai might do it to you but don't do it to yourself because the influence cost is alone is just not worth the headache so we're almost done here on yump and by almost i mean not very close we're going to move our construction chip over this direction let's take a look at our capital right now and we're getting closer to to moving into making a possible another job with our research labs and our technology should be starting to get ready to about one quarter of the way there and i kept that mistake in there because i want it to be really apparent that you know anomaly found okay gain a level good and you know this one actually i would do it's such a small amount of time we could just knock it out um i wanted to keep that mistake in there to show you guys like how easy it is to just simply go okay build an outpost build an outpost build an outpost and how that really isn't the right necessarily best way to go about this and as we can already see that this planet right here is habitable okay good good yes good we got a cool resource right there and i find that i always like accidentally pause and just kind of hang out there so we're almost done here which is good we can talk a little bit about colonies now anomaly found leave it be for sure that's challenging and recon completed so when we take a look at what we've got here around us we can see some pretty interesting star systems and these are important to take note of so you can see that all these systems are interconnected with their hyper lanes well jump here is in a really good position because it is a choke point in order to get into the rest of my empire you need to go through this same thing over here in order to get into the rest of my empire you need to go through this prioritizing these choke points is huge because once you do it your entire empire can be insulated from the inside out after that because okay i'm going to take this i'm going to build myself a star base here and if this is where a hostile empire is then this location is going to get an actual star port and i'm going to really build it up and it's going to be a bastion of defense but if there's nothing over here or it's it's a non-hostile empire then i don't need to waste money on it so making sure that you expand and check out the empires around you as fast as possible is going to dictate the speed at which you're going to grow and the buildings you're going to make in certain locations don't just think build outpost upgrade build outpost upgrade just fill it fill any city with districts in districts and districts like i said go slow make sure your economy can hold it i've been going at such a fast pace right now that i'm sure i could have built a ton of things and i just haven't done it right now because i'm a little focused on trying to teach teach the lesson of construction ships so this guy is making his um uh the starbase here and then we will talk a little bit about colonies before jumping ahead new sit rep okay going just a little bit more further forward and this system in and of itself is kind of like lackluster right we only get one little uh mining station here but it is still just kind of part of what we have to do so let's go ahead and click the construction ship and just have him yeah we've got plenty we've got plenty of resources so let's click click on this location and this has a 70 percent habitability it's good enough let's go ahead and colonize because like i said you want to colonize as fast as possible now i think we're actually really close to to a this will happen in 352 that's in two months um now yeah we'll just go ahead and do this so you can click on this location and press colonize then this will create the ship and send the colonize us in the the colony ship there to do if you go through the shipyard and build your colony ship you have to manually do it so this is just a kind of a way to save you some time click this green planet press colonize like here there you go you get to name the planet or the colony and unpause and you can go you can see that it will start to do it on its own you don't have to do anything it's going to make the ship as it's doing and that ship will come down here completed and leave for now and we'll start to do its own thing so we're going to go ahead and traditions we're going to choose to boldly go now this brings up the last portion of what i want to talk about before we jump ahead and that is e-dicks so we've done a lot so far right in the small amount of time we've jumped to two different systems we've increased our empire by two systems because that's how that works and we've already discovered a third habitable planet which is actually even more habitable than yump and to be totally honest it was a better system overall too look at better physics research we got minerals and we get exotic gases so definitely look at all the planets around before you jump right into colonizing the first one you see but do get that colony ship out quickly so since we chose to adopt there here we go since we chose to adopt discovery you can hover over it and it says adoption effects unlocks edict mapped the stars anomaly research speed increased by 20 percent so let's go over here and go to edix and we can see that we have an edict called map the stars this edict pushes for further galactic exploration to bring light to the darkness and find what wonders lie beyond and this one is huge because it increases our survey speed by an additional 25 percent anomaly discovery chance plus 10 and then ship hyper lane detection range is plus one so you can see right now this is what we can what we can see at this portion of the map now we don't quite have enough influence to do this and that's mainly because we made this second outpost on accident but when you get to this point you want to and choose map the stars quickly because this is going to greatly increase the speed at which you can survey and that will allow you to just push further and further so leave b for now uh we'll research that one but take a look here at this science ship like i was saying look to see if you have anything that's idle click it and set up a bunch of surveys you can unlock a technology where things will automatically survey for you but really you're kind of fine doing this and what i've accidentally done was kind of make it so i'm gonna have to move back on myself because i want this guy to go out this direction but we'll go ahead and deal with this in time and move over here then back over here and then up here well this guy is pretty much set for the for the foreseeable future with plenty of things to do and same thing with this guy we'll go here then we'll go here then we'll go out here then here and that map the stars edict is going to make that time stack up with the other tradition we just got a little bit ago here that 35 will stack with that 25 putting in a 60 survey speed increase not to mention any technologies that you so happen to choose that would increase that as well but this gives you an idea of how to start the beginning portions of the game i know this was kind of fast and we did mess up in places and i wanted to show you exactly how those mess ups can affect and slow down your game because now we can't do this map the stars edict for quite a bit of time we have to wait until our influence gets to 200. so you can see that a slight little misstep like that can actually set you back but this hopefully shows you that to take your time pace it out i had it on fastest so it was easy for me to make a lot of mistakes let me jump ahead and show you how this can all kind of come together in one of my other campaigns jumping back to this campaign we can kind of see what i've done with some of these choke points and how i've been able to use them so over here at voom we've set up an actual star hold and add gert tab as well i think i've actually just decided to move it over here at one point but voom is a real big choke point here that you should be focusing on and it's the same thing down here at zom i saw that this was another human faction and at first they looked like they were going to be hostile towards me and ended up actually becoming firm friends so this location i can actually dismantle and have it repurposed to not being a star hold whereas voom here it's not the worst to keep this location because again it's at that choke point into the rest of my empire the same thing down here at zom because this person is hostile to me so is this one down here so this allows me to keep my fleet where's my where's my trusty fleet fleet oh this will be back here at seoul so my fleet's over up here i can bring my entire fleet to this location and if i look at zom i can see it's got 1.1 k actual military power and that's quite strong so you can see this as kind of an added firepower on top of my sheet my uh uh fleets 668. and another thing i wanted to talk about is these ancient drones now these have a 907 that's actually a pretty substantial fleet that not even my own fleet can actually combat against it's got destroyers in here combat drones mining drones so you can look at this as its own sort of bottleneck or its own sort of choke point i could kill this and then make a base here or i know that this hostile fleet will essentially protect me from anything coming from this direction now of course this is kind of against the edge of the map so it's not that worrisome and same thing up here it's not as worrisome but i can already see that the uns united nations of earth have already started to kind of look over in this direction so i can build if i want another star hold here to hold this choke point or expand out and find another choke point up here working around these choke points is going to be huge to the growth of your empire because it allows you to create a picket line that you can then fill in from that line backwards into your empire and if you don't do it quickly though you have to kind of be wary because sometimes the ai can jump you and make a little hole in your in your empire it can happen it's not happened to me in the four or five playthroughs i've done to test a lot of this stuff but it can happen to you so be wary of it if you are um butted up against a very expansionist ai that just goes to gobble stars up quickly just be wary of it but hopefully this now gives you a better idea of how to start off in the initial portions of stellaris and you have these kind of first stepping stones in place and you can put all this together to help you get your feet wet in a solaris nemesis then lastly before jumping into dlc is discussing interstellar dominion the ascension perk that i recommend now this does a pretty significant bonus to you it reduces your star base influence cost by 20 percent and claim influence cost by 20 you can choose other ascension perks by all means but this one is a really good early one as you're getting your feet wet in the game star bases become a lot less of a of a barrier against your economy by having a 20 star base influence cost reduction now the last subject i want to cover is downloadable content for stellaris and this can be a really overwhelming portion of breaking into stellar so let's just kind of go through this and break things down so for one you have all the dlc that is broken up into these separate categories you've got expansions content species packs and then story packs and it can be kind of hard to determine which ones to get and i'm just going to be honest with you the expansions are all probably the best ones to get because they add a lot to the game there's a higher bang for your buck if you had to choose one you probably just not as worth it megacorp is a little bland not not a whole ton going for it utopia apocalypse federations and the brand new nemesis are really really enjoyable and they just add so much to the game now as far as the content packs go really all these are up to you they're purely um not prosthetic they're purely cosmetic so you really don't need to jump into any of these if you don't want to i think these are actually um linked to the special version of the game i have i think that might be the galaxy edition these series pack i'm sorry species packs include some new species now i will say the lithoides and the necroid packs actually include more than just simply cosmetic additions of the game they have unique mechanics attached to both lithoids and necroids so they are worth it if you are interested in those races but you're not going to miss anything by playing through the game without them versus say the expansion packs they're going to add a lot to the campaign as a whole and the story packs will as well and i honestly find that leviathans and synthetic dawn as well as ancient relics add a lot to the game leviathans are going to be adding in these individual ancient creatures for you to fight or individual trading outposts synthetic dawn and ancient relics also add a lot as far as little tiny forays with your situation logs to just make the world feel of the galaxy feel more alive the distant stars you could skip out on if you so wish but i know this might not be the most helpful of guides here but i really do truly feel that all the expansions add so much to the game and it's really hard to skip out on them the species packs are purely cosmetic for the for the exception of lithoids and necroids which add specific mechanics to them and then the story packs really make the game come alive i would if i had to choose two of these four it would be leviathans and probably synthetic dawn and you can find a link to my nexus store in the description and the pin comment like i've said before where all of this is 50 to 75 off up until march 19th so if there's any you're missing go ahead and use my nexus store you'll get a steam key where you can then redeem and pick up any dlc you are missing for stellaris and at that it brings our video to a close now i know we've covered a lot of different subjects it's really dense and you might have actually gotten lost along the way and probably replayed portions of this video and for all intents and purposes some of this information might become outdated on the next patch so don't feel bad about being frustrated with stellaris any paradox game is going to have a high barrier of entry whether it's hearts of iron crusader kings stellaris europa anything out there so don't get frustrated with yourself just keep going at it save a whole bunch and try new decisions try different ways of approaching your campaign i promise that's the way that i learn and if you just learn to break the game by going through those little tiny um dilemmas where you go okay well what does this do i'm going to save right here i'm going to try this one i'm going to see what it does and maybe you play the game for 30 or 40 years and go well what did that other one do and you jump back to that old save then you go through the other dilemma branch so don't be afraid for your first playthrough to just go through as many holes as you can wormholes black holes all the holes and you'll really find yourself discovering more about the game go slow read the tool tips look at all these little nuance because although there is a ton of information and it really can be a census overload it's really just about slamming your face against face against it and failing a whole bunch until you get to where you want to get that's like that's like a life lesson more than just a game lesson but um hopefully this helped break out or break down some of the barrier of entry for you for stellaris and if you have any questions please by all means go ahead and leave a comment below i'll do my best to help you out and if you are a veteran of stellaris and i maybe got something wrong or there wasn't 100 something 100 right please by all means correct me in the comments getting as much information out as possible makes it easier for people to jump into games like this because it does have that bariventry but once you break it down it is such an enjoyable and beautiful game to really get into so again thank you so much for watching here today don't forget to like comment subscribe all that fun action but have a good one and take care

Channel: ItalianSpartacus

Views: 65,819

Rating: 4.9336281 out of 5

Keywords: Starting Stellaris Guide in 2021 (Updated for Nemesis & Patch v3.0), stellaris nemesis, stellaris getting started, stellaris 2021, stellaris 3.0, stellaris 3.0 update, stellaris beginners guide, stellaris beginners guide 2021, getting started 2021, 2021, stellaris new player, stellaris starting tips, stellaris espionage, your first steps, empire creation, stellaris returning players, stellaris dlc guide 2021, planetary management, stellaris, stellaris nemesis gameplay

Id: WQ4HzczXNKM

Length: 109min 1sec (6541 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/TheItalian567]

Ahoy my bros! I've done a bevvy of guides for Crusader Kings 3, and I'm shifting my focus here to Stellaris with the launch of the new Nemesis DLC. I wanted to put out an updated guide for people that are looking to get started OR for returning players of Stellaris that never got a chance to really break into it.

Here is a list of the chapters in the video to see if this guide is relevant to you:

• Empire Creation
• Game Details Screen
• User Interface
• Diplomacy
• Espionage
• Planetary Management
• Your First Steps
• DLC Guide

Conversely, if you have any tips that would help out a new player to the game, please share them so that people can jump in, head first, with the game!