Stellaris - Wide vs Tall (Post Federations)

so here's a position you've probably found yourself in at some point whilst playing Stars you're collecting the new game button and you're trying to decide what type of Empire you're gonna be playing this time around well there is so much more to the game than just picking your ethics your civics you've crates your origins and of course your various cool ship designs are you gonna play as a total war species are you going to assimilate everything left right and center of course only if you have synthetic dawn or are you going to dominate the galactic community bringing peace and prosperity to the galaxy only for your house of cards to come tumbling down when neither the Khan or the fallen empires awaken these are the questions that you can ask yourself but the real question is how are you going to be playing because the game is designed to have rather distinctive play styles that you can choose right at the start of your run and it's not particularly obvious that these are available to you we talked about this subject back in 2017 and since then there have been significant changes to the pop system as well as the addition of the galactic community the updates to the various Federation types and so much more so we're gonna read ress the subject and taking a new definition on what are the differences between playing wide and tall now we're gonna get things off here we're playing white playing wide is the de facto standard if you're a person who's just picked up the game you're going to try to get the largest possible Galactic Empire that you could possibly muster taking territory after territory swiping down Z now empires for oppressing them under your boot of vassal ization or tribulation well these are pretty standard and there is a lot of definitions that we can throw towards wide empires they usually have dozens of planets sometimes in the hundreds yes that is totally possible you have massive amounts of resources coming from both space mining stations but also massive amounts of tech coming in from your planets you've got loads and loads of conquests and you can force your Seabees all the time you've really focused on that expansion and supremacy you have large trade networks a key monopoly for alloy production your preferred ascension probably synthetic because they are great generalists and also extremely powerful although in Federation's they got a little bit of the nerf bat but still they are not a force to be trifled with now total war empires excel at playing wide in any origin that synergizes with this sort of play style will work really well with this of course what are you going to be your preferred precursors well of course it's going to be to buy all of a cyber x bottle because of being able to generate guy our worlds anywhere and cyber x because of that delicious free ring world plus the war for to give you basically unlimited alloys now there's a lot of weaknesses attached to playing wide as well you will require whole planets of bureaucrats to stabilize your empire sprawl and actually go somewhere somewhere on the tradition tree or in the Tecla rankings that right there is pretty important you got to be fighting a lot of other empires that are gonna be in a similar tech level as you which is not always a good thing because those that have the power as well as the technology are the ones that win now you also probably have a lot of conquered non-specialized worlds that contain species that we'll have to integrate and we'll be unhappy for a long time which will slow your production rate especially if they're machine empires you can't really integrate them and you will end up with whole worlds that are basically desolate especially if they build any machine worlds and then they become effectively useless unless of course you go down to synthetic path and you will be able to use them then again also tracking worlds becomes really tedious if you don't automate them and I personally don't automate sectors at all because well let's be honest here I don't think anybody really trusts the AI to be able to handle the upgrading and stabilization of sectors efficiently so you're gonna end up with entire areas of space that are not necessarily optimized for gameplay and that right there is something that you want to keep in the back of your head now you'll have large fleets to fight against threats you can do aggressive politics good potential of being able to take on any of the fallen or awaken empires in the late game and having a relatively easy time fighting the con but you will be distributed a lot you will be having to fight a lot of conflicts on a lot of fronts and that right there could be problematic versus total war empires that can swoop in and take entire chunks of your territory which isn't sometimes a little bit of a weakness unless of course you've got yourself gateways and then of course all bets are off now you'll have a strong place within the collective community because of your fleet power and as well as your massive economy you'll be able to take control of that community quite easily by pushing things into your direction and anybody that doesn't want to vote for your stuff you just invade an atom to the width of your empire the Empire is wide and beautiful and there is nothing that can stop you finally there's the issues of factions very wide empires tend to have a lot of ethics divergence which means there is a lot of factions to deal with now in the early game this may cause some problems with your influence income and also causing you to not being able to expand all that much in that case you can just go ahead and try to tribute eyes or Basile I somebody tick up the influence and then integrate them later on that's always a good way of doing things I would say so but in the meantime you will have massive amounts of factions that all want their own thing you're gonna spend quite a lot of time and resources trying to suppress them that right there can be a bit of a problem then there is a play style that I feel not a lot of people are utilizing or at least if you're a new player this is probably not something that pops in your head and that is the tall Empire tall empires are defined by only having a few planets habitats literally everywhere as well as mega structures popping up relatively early nearly all resources are coming from these habitats and they're focused on science as well as production because of its powerful districts that you can get through set habitats again alloy production is crucial here as those habitats do need to be built so trying to throw in an acumen a play or two is generally a good idea especially if you're trying to go for those mega structures one of the real problems here however is the fact that you're going to need to do a significant amount of specialization specialization is the key to playing tall and that can be seen by going through what I would say is the preferred essential perk here which is bio engineering you can tailor your population perfectly to work on every single habitat as every habitat needs to have its own specific purpose there is no generalization with playing tall the habitats themselves are specialized to such a degree that they are either research mineral energy or trade production and these are very specialized all by themselves and it basically means that if you're going for that bioengineering ascension you can specialize every single habitat 2:32 optimized for the resources that are being generated there why are habitats so good for playing tall because they utilize a resource in space and multiply its effects if you have two minerals hanging out on a planet somewhere and you just mined them with a normal mining station you will get Minerals that's relatively straightforward if you plop a habitat on there that multiplies due to the districts that can utilize the resources even better and specifically the research districts are becoming incredibly useful in these scenarios because you can just plop on a single science tile and be like yeah I will have 50 people working on this single unit of research and that right there really illustrates why tall empires are so powerful even only using such a small footprint in space now there are of course weaknesses attached to this and that is relatively straightforward you are so vulnerable in the early game you only have a few planets you're probably not even going to leave you are starting constellation within the game maybe a little bit further out to get a couple of choke nodes here and there just so that you can put down a fortress habitat because yes those are a thing and that's pretty much it from that moment onwards you're going to need to save up your influence and save up your alloys to get more and more habitats on their way now another problem there is is that sooner or later because if you're going down the bioengineering path you will start churning out pops like no tomorrow and all of those pups need to live somewhere which is why you're going to need to transfer into ring worlds sooner or later which basically means that the cyber X is really the go-to for tall empires not only just because of the ring world that you can get with him but also the war Force which can generate untold amounts of alloys just by throwing in some of your minerals and that right there is really the clinch you can of course get some of the other ones that save the youth or something along those lines and still get a couple of pop bonuses etc but the cyber x are really the way that go fort all empires not a real problem with this is is that tall empires by this specific definition are only really feasible if you have either utopia or Federation's there is really no other way to go because utopia gives you the access to the habitats ecology and Federation gives you the king of playing tall which is void Weller's who will automatically have access to habitats to begin with which is a little bit of a sad thing because I really wish that there would be more efficient ways of playing tall whilst not lagging behind and not being able to generate the amount the pups that you need is a real problem for tall empires which means you need to spam those habitats everywhere but because you have such a small footprint within the galaxy it means you can focus quite a lot on your defenses having massive stations everywhere habitats with fortresses on them tons of fortresses make them a real challenge to take especially of a tall Empire is well developed and in addition if a tall Empire is manage to set itself within the galaxy at large they'll be able to turn out fleets like no tomorrow because of their massive alloy production which they would normally need in order to generate their habitats in the end playing tall is actually quite a lot of fun because still you need to juggle all of those habitats and they still have a limited amount of space on them and being able to balance the amount of habitation that is available on said habitats is really really challenging and it's it's really really funny you should definitely go and try it out but yeah tall empires dominate the galactic community with their massive tech output as well as their economy because alloys are king in the game RNA I would like to say so finally there is of course the issue of factions with tall empires you can very easily control your factions and that is done by the following first of all never have anybody get any migration packs with you you want to keep full control of your population in addition because of all your worlds being confined to such a small amount of space you can put black sites in your system stations very easily to make sure that ethics do not drift into negative locations that you don't want to have and also the amount of unity you produce and after a while you have so much of it you'll be able to basically do whatever you want when it comes to building habitats they're not all that expensive you can spend those on edicts down the line the real kings as I mentioned void Weller's and also kind of sort of ring world origin are really the way to go here if you want to try them up but it's absolutely doable with a normal build empire just be aware that the habitats technology does not drop until tier three of engineering in the end the main difference between wide and tall empires is not the size of their space it's not the size of their economy they can both generate massive amounts of resources within their allotted area they can work with however there is one defining feature that is different between these types of play styles and that is the usage of alloys and influence it's very important to remember this a wide Empire will use their alloys on fleets on stations to control territory and in addition influence will come to play there whereas tall empires are using their alloys and influence to build more habitats for their population to grow even quicker make no mistake both of these types of empires are total power houses if they're played correctly and just because an empire is small doesn't mean you should underestimate it it could be a wolf in sheep's skin thank you so much for watching this video on the differences between wide and tall play styles if you have an opinion in you think hey inspect this is something you should know about playing tall or maybe even than the mysterious Everest built or that so many people talk to me about feel free to give it down in the comments below in the meantime though I want to thank my patrons for making this video possible if it wasn't for you I wouldn't have to time to update a video from 2017 which is hilariously out of date so thank you so much once again comments below and also I've selected a couple of videos on your screen right now that may be of interest to you if you are somebody who plays solarz or want to learn the magnificent world of the game itself we're gonna know and log off here thank you so much for watching until next time take good care of yourselves and as always playing wide or playing tall I don't care as long as you have fun

Channel: ASpec

Views: 312,042

Rating: 4.9542956 out of 5

Keywords: Stellaris, ASpec, A_Spec, Wide, Tall, Build, Overview, Tutorial, How To, Habitats, Ringworld, Ecumonopolis, gameplay, strategy, megastructures, footprint, economy, science, fleet

Id: mdbhiQXCHe8

Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Darvin3]

I feel he's defined tall so narrowly that the term is rather useless and even misleading. As he correctly notes, there is only one viable way to play with a small footprint (habitat spam) so its less a playstyle and more of a specific build. He's basically lumped the entire meta into the category of wide, meaning he's comparing generalizations about the meta as a whole to one very specific build. And that's very misleading to a newer player who might now think that megastructure rush or tech-rush isn't something you can do while playing "wide", which is just flat out wrong.

A few other nitpicks:

1. I would disagree that habitat spam is viable with a normal empire. You need the Federations origins to pull it off, and it's at best a suboptimal backup plan otherwise. Without the Void Dwellers origin you don't get the Void Dwellers trait, which takes away the efficiency bonuses that make habitat-based economy more efficient than planet-based economy, and without that extra efficiency it doesn't really shine. You can still do it with Shattered Ring, but honestly you can make anything work with Shattered Ring because it's stupidly OP. Moreover, habitats just appear too late in the tech tree for normal builds to get traction with this. By the time you have them you're way too far behind if you were stuck with a small footprint.
2. Systems make up very little of your sprawl, and having a bigger footprint does not have a noticeable impact on how many bureaucrats you need to run. If I have 200 systems and you have 20, I need to run about 12 extra bureaucrats. If you have substantially fewer bureaucrats than I do, it means you have substantially fewer pops than I do, and that's a bad thing.
3. Factions are not a big deal. I know a lot of people OCD over them, but seriously you can keep most of them happy just by doing things you were going to do anyways, and ignore the handful of unhappy malcontents.

[u/Jonny0cash]

What’s the ‘’Everest’’ build he talked about at the end of the video?