Stellaris Federations Tier List

i no longer agree to your terms from now on you will agree to mine today we're going to look at federations in stellaris and try to rank them in a tier list now there are only five federation types in stellaris but interestingly i've actually got seven entries here yes i'm not just counting federations in this tier list i am actually going to count any galactic body any galactic governmental body that will perform to all intents and purposes pretty much the same functions as a federation possibly a bit more loosely sometimes a lot more tightly and structured generally speaking a federation is something you form with a very close friend and neighboring empire you get high enough relations with them you unlock the diplomacy tradition and then you can form a federation and you get to pick what type of federation you're going to have but which federation types are any good let's dive in and find out what's going on at the very bottom in my opinion the weakest federation type is the galactic union this is basically your straight out of the box generic federation the only requirement in order to form a galactic union is that you are not a barbaric despoiler otherwise every single empire type every single authority or ethic combination can form a galactic union but i think that might be why it is the weakest of the bunch when you start any federation you'll start right at the bottom at level one and there are perks for being every federation at this first level for a galactic union you're going to be getting minus 50 cohesion loss from ethics and plus 60 intel cap between members now that first one is somewhat useful it means you will need less envoys employed to improve and increase cohesion in order to get that cohesion up to start generating positive xp but overall i actually think this is a pretty useless perk yes it does help in some situations if you have a federation where the members are quite diverse but to be perfectly honest most federations you're going to initially form if you're forming them with an ai empire are not going to be opposing ethics to you they're probably going to be similar ethics and that's why you're happy and that's why you like each other and that's why you formed this first federation as we level up you're going to get president modifiers and member modifiers now the president modifier will only affect the president that's the that's the sitting leader the primary empire of the federation who are also incidentally in charge of the federation fleet now the level two perk for a galactic union the president will get plus one available envoys which is all right and all the members will get a plus 25 naval contribution effect and a minus 50 cohesion loss from new members so that last one basically every time you get a member added to your federation you're going to get a cohesion penalty that will if it goes below zero start causing your federation to lose xp and it could actually level down before you had a chance to bring your xp back up again after you've got a new member so this is actually i think a relatively nice though still quite minor perk the added naval contribution effect generally i think you're going to find that you are at the maximum fleet capacity for your federation fleet relatively quickly especially if you have four or five members all contributing some of their naval capacity at level three the president's going to get an extra influence now if you're going on the aggressive doing lots of vassalization that's probably going to be relatively helpful but overall otherwise in the mid game if you're doing something of a more passive game and you're not building lots of habitats you're not really using much influence then this isn't going to help that much members will get plus to unity per federation envoy and a plus 5 trust growth per federation envoy on top of that you'll get a 10 ship speed in federation space this last one is probably the best perk we've seen so far extra sublight speed is very very useful but the other two that's barely any unity and a small extra five percent trust growth is barely worth talking about at level four the president gets plus 10 diplomatic weight which is nice if you're working in the galactic community but that's really only equivalent to plus one envoy and it's an envoy you cannot change from working in the galactic community the members get a minus fifty percent cohesion loss from failed votes as whenever a vote to change law in a federation fails you'll also get a loss of cohesion and that could again impact your xp growth the final bonus here is you get plus 25 damage to crisis ships which is absolutely fantastic this is the best bonus we've seen now and in the end game extra bonuses damage to crisis are really good at the maximum level the president will be getting plus 10 monthly unity which is kind of pleasant but that i think only affects your jobs that's not a plus 10 monthly unity to every single unity source it's not uh multiplicative it's just additive the members are going to get plus two unity per federation envoy that's doubling up the previous perk we had again plus five percent trust cap per federation envoy and finally another 25 damage to crisis ships rounding it out here at plus 50 most of the bonuses that you've heard here are pretty useless most of those cohesion lost things are nice not really worth talking about the extra unity is fine not going to be very much though so again not great the main bonuses here are the extra damage to crisis ships that extra speed in federation space and the president getting equivalent to plus two envoys plus one influence and a little bit of extra unity overall though we could get these bonuses without forming a federation and that is why galactic union the vanilla version of federation is down here at the bottom in the f-tier and if you're enjoying this video please form a federation with that like button in the c tier we start getting federations whose abilities we wouldn't otherwise be able to replicate with traditions ascension perks or simply ignore the abilities we're going to get here though are still not absolutely fantastic so martial alliance is the ctf federation in my opinion now in order to unlock this one you must either be some form of militarist or have completed the unyielding tradition starting off you'll get plus 100 ship experience plus 100 army experience plus 25 ship build speed and plus 50 intel cap between members now that first one the ship starting experience is something we could get if we simply had the uh proper star based building to give us experience or alternatively we could fire off an edict so that's not really that useful the plus 25 ship build speed that's rather nice that will help us out quite a bit in wars especially in the early to mid game before we have a mega shipyard with building ships faster at level two the first upgraded level the president will be getting minus 10 claim influence cost which is nice but not something massive to write home about if you stack this with other claim influence cost reductions you can get some very very cheap claims or possibly zero influence claims which is great but really i i don't think anything too special with the member modifiers here we're going to get plus 25 naval contribution effect equivalent to the galactic union and plus 10 ship speed in federation space equivalent to the level 3 galactic union perk so those two nothing great though kind of useful and the the extra ship speed definitely very nice at level three the president's going to get plus one available envoy this is again very similar to the basic galactic union but then we get some cool member modifiers plus one admiral leader level cap and a really good one plus 10 ship fire rate in the early to mid game there aren't that many places you can get extra ship fire rate from so a 10 boost here is definitely very useful at level 4 the president is going to get some unity based on 10 of the fleet size of the federation fleet that should be somewhere in the region of 20 to 60 unity if you're at the max caps which you probably should be you're also going to get a plus 25 percent naval contribution modifier for all members and just like galactic union plus 25 damage to crisis ships the final level gives you plus 10 diplomatic weight of the president and plus 25 naval contribution effect with a further 25 damage to crisis ships now most of the bonuses here are pretty equivalent to the galactic union bonuses and some of them like the extra naval contribution effect are going to be very useless unless you are a tiny federation with tiny naval capacity but there are a few bonuses to this federation like the extra 10 fire rate to ships and that extra ship build speed which you won't be able to get with a galactic union and that's why i ranked this one one tier higher now i've talked quite a lot about the maximum fleet size of your navy if you have a federation navy and i do just want to touch briefly on what i'm going on about there basically as the centralization of your federation increases from minimal all the way up to very high you're going to be able to unlock higher and higher fleet contribution levels at the lowest level is none and for most federations that is galactic union research cooperative and trade league you're going to start at this non-level when you found your federation hegemonies and martial alliances are a little bit better they'll start at the low fleet contribution level which means that you as an empire will transfer 10 of your naval capacity or you'll lose 10 of your naval capacity that will go to the federation and the federation can have a maximum fleet size up to 200 which isn't actually that big as you go up centralization you can go from low to medium which has a maximum fleet size of 400 naval capacity and then all the way up to high which has a maximum fleet size of 600 naval capacity the time it takes you to reach this increase in naval capacity or increase in fleet contribution is very dependent on your federation type as certain federation types have lower requirements to get increased naval capacity in terms of centralization and centralization basically can only go up as you level up your federation so it is very much time locked if you're enjoying this video and the other videos on this channel you can help to support the channel by either becoming a channel member clicking the join button down below or becoming a channel patreon there's a link to that down in the description you can also use the super thanks to directly support the channel as well or finally you could purchase something from the humble bundle store using the link down in the description below until the 15th of june you can get your hands on a great city building game by paradox interactive city skylines for as little as one euro you can also get the full bundle on humble bundle including nine expansions and 21 add-ons for less than 20 euro the link is down in the description below we're now halfway up this tier list we've made it to the b tier and here we have the research cooperative this is the science-based federation you need to be either some form of materialist a machine intelligence or have completed the discovery tradition in order to unlock this federation type as you may have guessed from the placement of this i do think it's better than the martial alliance or galactic union and the thing is with this one that the bonuses you get are very different pretty much to anything we've seen before so starting off you're going to get a free research agreement with all members now if you're a player and you're playing with lots of ais those ais are i'm going to guess probably someone behind you technologically so this free research agreement is going to benefit them more than it will you you'll also get a plus 50 intel cap between members but this opening bonus is really not what is fantastic here it's what we're going to see coming up at level two we're going to get plus one research alternatives as the president now research alternatives are a hard thing to come by and maximizing the number of research alternatives you have gives you much better choice when it comes to picking your technology specifically in the mid game this is absolutely fantastic as a regular member you're going to get plus five percent research speed from agreement and a base plus five percent research speed that is equivalent to half of an ascension perk and that's really very good so far for anything we have seen compared to the rest of the tier list at level three the president will get a plus 20 diplomatic weight from technology and that should definitely help you as president because you should have a very high technology weight diplomatically so that will help in the galactic community and with vassal type interactions member modifiers here is another five percent research speed from agreement so basically what a research agreement does just for those of you who might not know is it gives you a 25 booster research speed if you're researching a technology that your research partner has already completed this is going to give you an extra five percent on top of that so so far we're getting 35 research speed from our research agreements we'll also double the rare tech discovery chance if another member already has that technology and that will be very useful to get some of the more important rare texts that can be hard to find at level four the president gets plus one available envoys this is standard stuff for a federation so far nothing too wild though looking down at our members we're going to get another five percent research speed from agreements we're up to 40 now and during a crisis we're going to get a whopping 20 research speed additionally that is really very good it isn't quite as good i would say as the plus 25 damage to crisis ships immediately but over a long enough period of time if you don't immediately wipe out the crisis and they don't immediately wipe you out this extra research speed is going to help you get those repeatables to put you over the edge and over a long enough period of time it is actually better and then at level five we get something absolutely amazing the president will get plus one mega structure build capacity and because you're going to be unlocking this definitely in the mid game the later part of the mid game or the late game that plus one megastructure build capacity means that we could end up at a total of four mega structure build capacity which is an absolutely bonkers number it also does mean you won't possibly need to take the edict or that that final edict or the ascension perk for this extra build capacity for megastructures because we're going to get it from this federation so overall we're getting the equivalent of around two ascension perks minimum before we look into some of the other stuff in this that we couldn't otherwise get there are some drawbacks to this as you'll have noticed from the previous table we saw you cannot get your fleet contribution up to high and that means your fleet will be capped at a maximum naval capacity of 400 rather than the other federations which will cap out at 600 so from that point of view it will be ever so slightly weaker on a military footing but i really do believe an overwhelming tech advantage here is going to make a massive difference and it's not just you all of your neighbors and friends in this federation are also going to be experiencing a tech boost so you can quite literally drag the ai into the future kicking and screaming but what do you think about this federation's tier list which federation is the most powerful and which one do you think is pretty garbage let me know down in the comments below and now we've made it all the way to the a tier these are the very good federation types it's not quite the best in my opinion there is something slightly better than this but it is very good in its own right and i think if you do prefer the elements we have at this level that's completely reasonable and i can see the reasons for that you'll also notice we don't just have a federation here we also got another symbol as well and i'm going to talk about that in just a moment first up we have the hegemony so a hegemony federation in order to get one of these you'll need to be some form of authoritarian or interestingly a rogue servator i do quite like the thematics of a rogue servator being able to form a hegemony or you could have completed the domination tradition tree when you take this federation type you'll get the instant bonus i do believe it's a bonus that your members are never allowed to leave the federation willingly they can't choose to do so unless you agree as president to let them leave they do get the secede casus belay against you the president and that basically means if they want to leave they can declare war against you and the rest of your federation friends and you should probably be able to beat them back into line there are also reduced centralization requirements for this one and you're going to get a base of plus 40 intel cap between members that is the lowest level of extra intel cap for any federation type but honestly i really don't think that should matter you should still be able to get up to the comfortable 60 or 70 with technology or possibly you actually make a spy network but in essence a hegemony is very very good if most of the other members are actually your vassals yes because you can shove your vassals into this hegemony and once your vassals are in there you can stick them with all sorts of contractual regulations that uh supersede their vassal contracts as part of a hegemony and do crazy legal maneuvering it is a wildly powerful thing as we move up the levels of our federation you'll notice there are some quite interesting things going on here so the president gets one set of modifiers or bonuses and the other members get another set but you don't get both and all of the other federation types the president got all of the member bonuses and the president modifiers as well but here that is not the case as there is a different position a different station if you will for presidents and regular low league members so at level 2 the president will get a minus 100 naval contribution cost meaning you will not lose any naval capacity for being president and that should very much help you keep your pesky vassals in line you'll also get plus one available envoys so a lovely double whammy here right for your first ability all of the other members get a very nice and respectable plus five percent resources from jobs output on every single pop on all of their planets that is absolutely wild at level 3 the president gains the established hegemony war goal basically that's going to allow you to declare war on another empire and bring them into the fold of the hegemony i actually think as of stellaris overlord this is no longer as powerful because you will almost always be getting uh the war goals to bring other members into your federation by forcing them to become vassals and i actually think that's a much better and much more powerful thing to do though you can use this established hegemony with more powerful neighbors and that does offset its disadvantages other members are going to get another five percent resources from job that's up to 10 now to all of their job outputs and minus 50 cohesion loss from new members that extra cohesion loss is going to help because at this level you're going to be going on the aggressive and attempting to subjugate the rest of the galaxy at level 4 the president is going to get plus one influence gain that is rather nice especially if you're making lots of vassals and doing lots of vassal contract renegotiations and then other members are going to get plus five percent resources from jobs for a total of 15 to all of their job outputs that is simply mind boggling minus 100 migration treaty upkeep and minus 100 research agreement upkeep that's kind of all right but as the president which you really should be in this case you're not really going to be using it that much the last level here level 5 the president will get plus 10 percent of every member's diplomatic weight this will help you astronomically in the galactic community and let you get up to all sorts of shenanigans when you want to throw your weight around don't forget this doesn't actually steal diplomatic weight from your vassals or your sorry your other hegemony members so if they are true vassals and you've got their diplomacy set to align with your diplomacy they'll vote along with you and you'll also get an extra 10 wait for each of them very nice the one thing you do miss out on here as a president is any extra damage to crisis ships because of the final level the other members are going to get plus 25 damage to crisis ships and they'll also generate unity equal to 10 of the federation fleet naval capacity usage and that should be again somewhere between the region of 20 and 60. overall what does make the hegemony massively powerful in my opinion is the legal aspect of what you can get away with if you have this federation type it allows you to give vassals what seem like phenomenally good contracts and then pull the rug out from underneath their feet as they suddenly realize that yes you promise to go to war with them whenever they want and they never have to go to war with you except federation law will supersede that and as president you can decide when you're going to war next up in the a tier we have something a little interesting now this is not specifically a federation from a very technical standpoint but to all intents and purposes it's going to function somewhat like a federation and that is the galactic imperium will be reorganized into the first galactic empire now the galactic imperium doesn't get a federation fleet instead you get a imperial armada but an imperial armada can be larger than any possible federation fleet size at a maximum level of 800 naval capacity you can also with an imperial armada pay less resources for each of your ships because you're going to get a lovely minus 35 reduction in alloy cost or general cost to the building of these ships for the imperial armada and that is very very good now yes it is true that if you become an imperial armada every other federation type you have not only yours but the other federations in the galaxy if they are members of the galactic community will be dissolved so you will lose all of the bonuses of whatever other type of federation you are in but there are still bonuses for being the galactic empire you can set up things like the imperial navigation agency to give you plus 15 sublight speed in every community uh space which is basically every federation members face you can get the imperial legions allowing you to recruit 12 imperial legion armies you can get the imperial security directorate -20 crime on all of your worlds plus two code breaking for encryption and a base of 80 intel on every member of the galactic imperium you can also set up an imperial charter allowing one of the corporate empires in the imperium to build imperial concession ports and that's going to give you some extra energy but only to a maximum of 100 so it's not that amazing anyway you can establish the imperial peace pax galactica forcing all empire members not to go to war with each other anymore and on top of that you can unlock the imperial crusade the imperial crusade basically functions like the established hegemony war goal and it will bring in another empire into the fold of the imperium so if you have the galactic imperium yes you are giving up a federation and that means you will lose your federation fleet but there is something that is quite important here and that is as a galactic imperium you have negated all federations meaning every competing power every competing federation will also be dissolved and they will also lose their federation fleet as well so it isn't all bad news for just yourself which does mean that from a relative perspective i still think that this is more powerful than having something like a galactic union or a martial alliance or possibly even the research federation and that's why i put it up here in the a tier in my federation's tier list thankfully this tier list hasn't been as long as some of the other ones we're only 24 minutes in and we're about to get to the s tier this is it this is the call out if you've made it this far please let me know down in the comments but without any further ado let's dive in and check out the s tier but what do we have right at the top of this till it's well you probably guessed because there is only one federation type but there are two items here and i will be going through both of them as they are rather interesting unsurprisingly the first thing here is the trade league now why is the trade league the most powerful federation in my opinion i do have a small caveat to add here it is much less powerful if you are a guest out consciousness as a guest out consciousness it's actually not very good at all and it's basically ftl okay so with that out of the way let's look at why it's asked here for every other empire type every regular empire in the game the first and most powerful part of a trade league is that you start off with the trade league policy this is the most overpowered and broken policy in the game it allows you to convert your trade value instead of having to choose between having trade being energy credits a mix of energy credits and consumer goods or a mix of energy credits in unity in this case you're going to get all three and at no extra cost every one trade value will convert into half an energy 0.25 consumer goods and 0.125 unity that is going to give you bonkers levels of unity and trade goods especially in the mid to late game if you have this federation type you're almost certainly be going to try and maximize your trade value and that's why you've taken the mercantile policy which coincidentally is one of the four things you need to be able to unlock this federation type you must have either completed the mercantile tradition be a megacorp have the corporate dominion civic or alternatively the merchant guild civic but because you only need to complete a mercantile tradition which if your trade as i've said you definitely want to do you want that merchant spam in your empire as well as those juicy bonuses to trade value then at that point it just becomes a no-brainer if you can get one of these going early enough you're going to see phenomenal power levels this federation and trade policy in combination with a few other things are going to mean you basically only need four or five jobs in your empire you'll need merchants to produce energy trade value and unity you'll need miners to produce minerals metallurgists to produce alloys and researchers to produce research other than that you will not need any other job which makes dollars so simple and easy to play if you're only needing five jobs rather than 25 but that isn't all it does we also get bonuses as you level the darn thing up so at level 2 the president will get plus one available envoys everyone will also get a lovely 5 boost to trade value and 10 ship speed in federation space again that ship speed is a nice modifier to have and the trade value is going to fit very well with your overall policy at level three the federation president gets plus one unity and gets plus five trade value protection this trade value protection isn't really that good it's nice to have but generally speaking just an extra plus five won't really be that noticeable other members or all members in fact will get another plus five percent trade value currently for a total of ten percent the president at level four will get ten percent diplomatic weight that's now equivalent to having two extra envoys from the federation and the members will get five percent trade value and a plus 25 naval contribution effect the final level means the president gets a whopping 10 trade value and all members get 5 so at the total here the president is getting 30 extra trade value which is completely bonkers and regular empires are going to be getting an extra 20 as well you'll also all get 25 extra damage to crisis ships which is very nice but as i've said earlier the main strength here is that trade league trade policy you really want to unlock a trade leak as soon as possible if you can if you're going for anything with trade value and you are a regular biological empire so again we have something which is not a federation we've got a bit of a weird symbol here what does this mean basically here i have what is the uh best thing you can possibly do for yourself and your own empire on a galactic politics level and that is becoming the custodian you'll have to be nominated as custodian and then win the vote but once you do you're going to unlock some pretty wild powers that are very very similar to being in a federation you will get a federation fleet of assault a little bit like the imperial armada or actually exactly like the imperial armada at a total of 400 naval capacity 800 at its upgraded level and with a reduction in ship cost you're going to get access to the galactic defense force but the reason this is here in the s tier rather than down below in the a tier is that the custodian can exist simultaneous to and alongside other federations it is not mutually exclusive that means you can be the president of a trade league federation as well as the galactic custodian so you can have a federation fleet and a galactic defense force fleet with a total naval power combined of 1400 which is wild given those ships have absolutely no upkeep whatsoever you also have a whole bunch of possible bonuses which you definitely want to impose or enact before you move on to the imperium if that's where you're planning to head because some of these are not repeated things like a united front to give you extra damage to end game crisis factions galactic mobilizations to just give everybody an extra 150 naval capacity which is simply insane and the galactic trade organization for a juicy extra 10 trade value there is no downside and absolutely no reason for you to ever not become the custodian if that option is on the table unless you simply hate power once you are custodian itself you're going to also get some massive bonuses extra influence extra diplomatic weight that is going to help you a lot in the galactic community as well as with imposing your will on other empires i'm thinking vassal contracts that require influence and lots of other areas all in all being the custodian in combination with a federation is the most powerful state pretty much any empire can be in although you do have to compete with the fact that other empires are still allowed to have federations as well so they can have up to 600 naval capacity if there are lots of other federations in the galaxy it probably is better to just cancel all of them and declare an imperium so that all of those evil and foreign federation fleets will go away but that doesn't mean that you will always do that and that is pretty much a niche case usually there are only one two possibly three federations knocking around even in very large games i talked a bit in this video about how you can use the laws and abilities of a hegemony to keep your vassals in line if you'd like to know more about using hegemony and vassals to conquer the entire galaxy and oh i don't know about 50 years click the video on screen now

Channel: Montu Plays

Views: 101,908

Keywords: Stellaris, stellaris gameplay, montu plays, montu plays stellaris, stellaris federations, stellaris federation tier list, stellaris tier list, montu stellaris tier list, montu plays tier list, stellaris galactic imperium, stellaris galactic empire, stellaris galactic custodian

Id: Z9jKyn8TD_8

Length: 31min 45sec (1905 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 03 2022