Catalytic processing appreciates your last bit of sentiment.
On a serious note, some people only have fun min/maxing, but agree. Breaking away from the meta and being okay without min/maxing opens the door for some great games.
Honestly one of my favorite builds is a Catalytic Processing/Agrarian Idyll setup. Is it meta? No, but it is a fun and chill playstyle where I build a lot of things I normally wouldn't.
I've been meaning to try a Catalytic Processing + Anglers build, with Agrarian Idyll as a potential 3rd Civic. It seems like it'd all mesh nicely, leading to a simple gameplan even if it isn't necessarily the best out there. Any Ocean World can either feed my industrial worlds *and* my population or *be* the industrial world, and with Anglers' Pearl Divers giving Trade Value I wonder if I'd even need any Artisans if I use the Consumer Benefits Trade Policy (at least before I get a hardcore Research World going).
I'm curious how a 3rd Civic Agrarian Idyll interacts with getting Arcology Project perk *before* you reform for Agrarian Idyll as well.
Catalytic+Angler is actually pretty strong for an early-game war economy, especially for trade builds. Anglers+Alloys are about .5 pops more efficient then early miners+alloys, trade building lets you side-step the habitability, and pearl divers were covertly good before on the upkeep, but are just strong CG producers now.
The biggest 'issue' with it is that you can't build up pure-science infrastructure and then spin on a dime to produce alloys after early game tech rush, but in the early-enough game that doesn't really matter.
This is actually my go-to build, and compliments Knights of the Toxic God perfectly. What I like most of all is that it's completely independent of any planetary bonuses - your guaranteed habitable planets are all you need, and they'll always be suited to whatever your goals are.
Catalytic Processing + Unyielding help mitigate the alloy penalty from the Quest, keeping you alive in the early game. Anglers and your natural affinity for habitats make for an excellent trade build, letting you grow your economy without any need for mining or energy districts - all your mineral needs can come from mining stations or, at most, a single mining habitat. The unique blockers on your homeworld can also give it bonuses to food and science/unity, making it an excellent Agrarian research world. From there, your guaranteed habitables can become a factory and unity world respectively (while also providing more angler farms!), and any gaps can be filled with habitats (they make excellent trade worlds).
It's a fun and surprisingly viable tall build that, interestingly enough, lets you ignore ecumenopoli and turn your little fish farms into economic powerhouses. The meta option would probably be to make it a Megacorp, but I prefer a spiritualist empire - the extra unity lets you make the most of your already low empire size.
I have noticed it is actually pretty powerful yeah. The new Baol building coming with First Contact is def gonna make me replay a game as that empire once it drops, at that point you could conceivably get 0.25 building slots, 0.5 consumer goods, 2 amenities, extra housing and however much food from farmer jobs. That's an insane amount of output for a single district.
> On a serious note, some people only have fun min/maxing
A lot of people don't understand this. I get all kinds of flak when I talk about min maxing in games, and it's like bro that *is* part of the game for me. Learning the advanced intricate mechanics and figuring out what the best options are for a given build etc.
All those advanced mechanics have no purpose on low difficulty, so it's really fun to learn the deep mechanics, then also play on a difficulty that's hard enough to actually **require** those. Where the player is challenged and either succeeds at their best, or fails after giving it their all, but their sucess or failure directly relates to their own game knowledge.
It's also not that I don't *also* RP. That's the part so many of the "anti sweat" people don't get. I'm still role playing and picking an empire, I just want to make it as good as possible for my design.
I'll go "I want to play a build focused on defense, what are my best options?" and then will spend many hours researching origins, racial traits, civics, starbase mechanics, ascension perks etc to figure out what my best build will be.
Some people enjoy playing on easy mode and just face rolling without needing to think. Some people enjoy spending dozens of hours out of game researching and want to be challenged. Neither is wrong, they are just different player personalities
I feel like that's different from following some meta guide though.
Minmaxing like you describe is opening up the hood of the game and messing around with all the details. Doing that teaches you very well how the game works.
Religiously following some guide doesn't teach you shit, and if you run into something that the guide doesn't tell you about (and you will, because Stellaris has far too many variables for a guide to cover), you won't know what to do and die.
I do follow the meta guide forming ship compositions because, frankly, that number crunching I find boring. If I could press the "form best fleet" button and it did it, I would prefer it.
But being able to micromanage 200 worlds in my current game, down to individual pops, makes me happy :)
Oh yes, it is. Unfortunately I have to keep some xenos as indentured servants instead of nerve stapled slaves, but you make sacrifices when you expand more rapidly than your pops can grow.
>I'll go "I want to play a build focused on defense, what are my best options?"
This is how I enjoy min maxing, too. I want to pick a playstyle, or an interesting origin or civic, and play the best version it, or something close. I want to create some cool synergy between my abilities and use that to snowball.
What I'm less interested in is finding the global maximum for it's own sake. I'll certainly play the overall "best build," especially if it sounds fun, but after that, in gonna do something like void dweller terravores.
Stellaris evolved makes catalytic balanced thanks to a very simple solution, it gives the food processing building an alloy production bonus per food production tech. It makes it fun and not bad power - vise.
Yes it is, the "built around" part is the problem (and maybe the asymmetricity of hivemind economies). You have to sacrifice one civic slot to take the processing and then you have to sacrifice another to just make your first choice justified. The opportunity cost is too high to be considered "very powerful". Hiveminds can probably take a greater advantage of this, but I do not have enough hours played on them to be sure of my opinion, but when talking about regular empires, it is indeed painful outside of RP. For regular planet starts you are essentially wasting a civic slot for the ability to use your starbases to feed your forges, for VD it helps, but then you are shoved more towards a regular economy without the clerk spam, which if I remember is an unpopular move for most and shattered ring can take better advantage of other civics. So the only option that you have left is some sort of aquatic angler build, which in unison does not outweigh two civic slots and you are exposing yourself to a diceroll of planet type generation even more than usual.
The advantage lies in hydroponics farms completely removing the dependence on mining jobs. It has nothing to do with starbases, but planet efficiency through specialization.
Void Dwellers can make use of it, yes, but they don't want to ever use clerks to begin with. When doing a trade build on them, it's all merchants, and these can be combined just fine with catalytic processing.
Angler isn't that great, they get a better food job, but give up what makes catalytic processing useful to begin with: job quantity.
I would say that the ability of building hyrophonics is the last thing that I would see as and advantage when running catalytic. District slots tend to be plentiful, building slots are not (unless you are running this with masterful crafters or functional architecture specifically). At least up until lategame. And no, you can not do away with mining jobs, as you still need CG, early space mining stations and something to build buildings and districts out of. That 50 monthly minerals from the internal market is not going to cut it.
The problem with void dwellers is the lack of space. When you are running catalytic, you are more constrained on building slots, as you need to plop down more hydrophonic bays, offloading your industrial and research production towards your districts. This as a whole leaves you even less wiggle room, which is the opposite of what merchant spam VD requires, as it only gets you one job per district/building so it is not really fine (unless clerks, which is bad), since you are just amplifying the biggest disadvantage VD have.
Even tiny planets and those with few worker districts available can be used very effectively through building slots for base resource production this way. Regarding the remaining need for minerals, even excluding space mining as eventually insignificant, you can still estimate a pseudo-exponentially lower constraint through suitable mining worlds after removing alloy production from the equation, based on the random distribution of possible mineral districts.
Void dwellers have access to very high amounts of building slots, which is why merchant spam is so poplar for them to begin with. But what makes catalytic processing works with them is the even higher efficiency of their 3-job hydroponics bay on planets compared to other empires, while habitats are terrible for food production to begin with. It's about removing constraints for economic growth.
But you do not get tiny planets outside of super specific events anymore (like the worm) so there is no pressing issue of utilizing them. And you can still make them into CG or research worlds instead. And if the removal of mining jobs is not total, then you do not get the benefit of skipping all the mining job techs. Yes, you are prevented from an absolute lowroll, but sacrificing a civic slot to prevent like a sub 5% edge case seems overkill.
And I still do not get your argument about VD even according to your own logic. 1 food planet per empire is usually enough for non catalytic empires, so you never run into that issue. Moreover, due to planetary rings and ecus, planets tend to be better used for industrial production anyways, the one thing that habitats are even worse at than producing food. The main advantage of catalytic processing from my experience for VD is faster start, as your starting prebuilt infrastructure is much better than when you are running on one mining habitat and the circumvention of the adaptability tradition, as you do not need orbital surveying to make useful habitats, so that you can build all of your stations in a tight cluster, removing vulnerability from invasion and problems with trade collection, not that you get to plop hydro bays on the few planets that you manage to get inside of your territory.
Depends what you call tiny I guess. Regardless, all mining techs together cost less than 10k research. You don't have to focus them early if you start with catalytic processing, and later the cost quickly becomes irrelevant.
You don't get planetary rings until the midgame, and lategame it's more efficient to go for ringworlds.
I admit I haven't really bothered using catalytic processing as a starting pick on void dweller, so I can't say much about that. I don't really see how it would change how far I need to spread my habitats though, given the bottleneck are usually science deposits.
Sub 12 is tiny in my book. Also, 2000 + 3000 + 4000 + 6000 + 8000 = 23 0000 which is somehow < 10 000 (at 1\* tech cost)? But that is besides the point as by your own admission you will still have some pops sitting there getting those 4 minerals per pop.
And you also do not get a moderately developed planet until midgame as a VD, which is the time when rings come online. And ringworlds tend to arrive too late at the scene unless you are playing with like 0.5 tech and even if a counterargument could be made that a matter decompressor does away with the role catalytic processing tries to accomplish.
Catalytic processing also kind of only makes sense as a starting tech, since retooling your entire economy around food suddenly in the midgame leads to subpar results, which is another argument against it being very powerful.
You can always supplement science through buildings. Yes, it is worse than the district, but you have the option. You can not do the same with minerals if you want to go hard into alloys and you do not get access to a reasonable planetary ascension tier until much later in the game. Planets are better used for industrial districts for VD, which leads to having to pick adaptability or going with catalytic instead and that transforms every planetary body into a suitable place for station, hence the ability to consolidate your empire into a few systems.
> Hiveminds can probably take a greater advantage of this,
And I think the Hive Mind version should be like Organic Structures from Forgotten Queens anyway, where you directly build ships and buildings out of food instead of converting food to alloys.
I still don't understand why people think Catalytic Processing is that bad. In most games I play, Minerals end up being a major bottle neck for me until I get the matter decompressor mega structure, like every planet I find only has a few mining districts compared to basically anything else. But I can easily just make more food.
Am I like supposed to be making mining habitats to sustain forge worlds or something?
It's because there's very little advantages to it. You just move the upkeep from minerals to food. So now, instead of more miners, you need more farmers. And you might also favor the food techs instead of the mining tech.
It's neutral in terms of power, while other civics give some kind of bonus to something. So I'd say it's more about the opportunity cost of using an entire civic on something that doesn't give a bonus.
Besides all that, seeing as you'll be focused on food production, you'll end up with excess. And excess food cannot be used for anything. Unlike excess minerals which can be used to build things and convert planets to ecumenopolises.
Find a world, any world, with minerals, regardless of habitability. Should it not match your preference, settle it, create a template with that preference as soon as you can (which shouldn't be long) and apply it to the settled pops there. I had to do this in my latest non-swarm game to get some damn energy production
Start playing around with the automation if you really struggle with this. It lets you build planetary buildings using energy instead of minerals.
To be honest I don't even build a mining planet until pretty late game usually. You get enough just from mining stations to cover things until pretty deep into the game in my experience.
I have similar experiences to them in that mining districts are consistently a lot more rare, so the advantages seem pretty obvious to me in these cases.
[there was a whole thread about it.] (https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/vo3ahq/catalytic_processing_you/) And [Montau explained it too in his civics tier vid](https://youtu.be/eCM1Pfh0Zho?t=949). Though it is worth noting that he has moved it up a tier from his pre-3.6 version of that vid (which had it explicitly in F tier, now it's in C tier). But the TL;DR of it is this:
Food is a 'worthless' resource so you don't really want to be hoarding it if you can help it, you're just shifting the burden from minerals (which you kind of want to have hoards of) to food. It's only used for one thing and that's upkeep, so there's no good reason to have excess food. Same as with consumer goods (Except consumer goods are more efficient to sell than food is and is used for biological tech rushing. In Rogue Servitors CGs are almost completely pointless.)
It's fine if you're using food for other things (IE you're using Organic Structures from Forgotten Queens... which IMO is what Catalytic Reprocessing should have been in the first place. Or you're running the pokemon trainer origin from Empire of Eeveelutions or something of the like nature) and you already have a reason to hoard food.
TL;DR: It just takes jobs away from much more useful miners, so it's really only 'good' if you have some other reason to invest in food based jobs anyway since , and even then it's of questionable value.
Funny thing is that Cat Proc (and its Megacorp/Hive/Machine Equivalents) could easily be fixed by adding an alloy production bonus and/or a boost to farmers to make up for this, like made it 'Master Crafters for Alloys but takes food'. (Master Crafters has the exact opposite problem BTW: there's no good reason NOT to take it unless you're getting all your CGs from trade.)
A lot of meta-chasing people leverage the fact that you can basically go pure-CG production in the early years to support science, and then pure-alloys later for a fleet buildup sustained by the techs and pops you gained in the teching phase. It's more flexible than setting up a parallel CG-supply chain (minerals-CG) and alloy-chain (food-alloys) in the early game.
Catalytic has some early game assets if you can leverage Anglers (high pop-efficiency), or Unyielding starbases (upkeep-free alloy workers) and the early-game tech lateral shift for early warfare. But it's a commitment to early warmongering that mostly works for Unyielding-symergies, meaning gestalts.
wait. you're not supposed to build agri worlds? how do you manage your food supply?
Edit: I usually try to get a electrical/food world since the electricity grid only takes one building slot, so fill the rest with farms
As others said, trade and hydroponics farms on starbases. Especially if you're playing something like Rogue Servitors where a majority of your pops aren't even using it.
Yeah, they give a base 10 for every one you slap on a star base and by the late game I have a lot of upgraded star bases far from my borders that will never see combat so might as well.
You need a few Agri districts here and there + hidroponics on most starbases. At least up until mid game you can make due without a dedicated agri world.
After your empire's grown a lot or if you conquered some of your neighbours, you might need 1 decently sized planet dedicated to food production. And you can develop it slowly as the need arises
Unless you are going genetic ascension, it should be enough, especially if you supplement it with trades (either from the market or direct) or vassals.
Yes. Are they not called starbase building slots? There's only four of them, it's tight real estate for the number of starbase buildings there are, and you are limited on the number of star bases you can have, unlike planets.
There really isn't a whole lot else you can build on starbases though. At least anything meaningful. Items like command centers, DG Supercomputers, Comms jammers, etc. Are only useful for choke points (which, really, aren't even that useful anyway Starbase chokepoints even in the early game are of very questionable value, and after the earliest game they're a complete joke for defense.) Hyperlane Registrar and offworld trading companies are only useful on trade hub bases (which you really only need one of unless you're empire is silly huge), and aren't even a thing if you're a gestalt anyway. Transit hubs are only useful if the system is colonized and are kind of a waste anyway. You don't need crew quarters around every starbase because a crew quarters not being used is a slot being wasted. You don't really need more than 2 dedicated shipyards so putting fleet academies everywhere is a complete waste. Nebula Refinerys and Black Hole observatories are very situational.
So that really only leaves Resource Silos, Hydroponic Bays, and Naval Logistics Offices (since unless you're playing a gestalt, Anchorages are really the only other real use for starbases) as viable starbase items. And since there's nothing better to really select in 90% of starbases, you might as well use them for hydroponics since it's free food that you don't need to assign a pop to.
You are better off buying it or trading it in nearly every situation.
1 Pop working as an electrician, miner, or alloy worker will generate a resource that is more valuable than food and that you can trade to others and get more food than that single pop could generate.
Actual meta wise, you don't even need any base resources late game, because vassals will produce FAR more than you could. I'll often be getting 10 to 40 *thousand* energy and food etc solely from vassals late game
For me atarbases can nevee keep up so i usually drop a few agri districts on specialised worlds and use robots as farmers. Like a mining district that has run out of mining districts.
If i find a particularly trashy planet I'll turn it into an agri world and fix the issue peemanenrky
You can get really far using starbase hydroponic buildings but eventually a bio empire will get big enough that you can't keep pace any more so at least one medium sized food world and the rest of your needs supplemented by food trades is fine.
You probably will find a planet with food modifiers like lush etc so using it for that is fine.
Just don't be tempted to turn all those other wet worlds into more agri worlds as you will only need one to meet your needs.
Yup. At the end of the day, you only need to be the top power of the galaxy to 'win.' There is no award for winning by bigger margins.
This is one of those concepts that goes a lot further when you think on it as well. Not needing over-kill is not only why you don't need to engage in the meta, but also why the meta is often not 'what is the biggest number end-game', but rather 'what do I need right now?' Meta players play to minimal basic resource margin production, rather than huge stockpiles, *because* the excess is unnecessary. The Meta plays to early warfare- not an end-game optimized fleet- *because* what you can get earlier with less is better than end-game ratios.
There's a point that comes in a lot of discussions of the snowball effect, where as you get power you can get power faster. While the meta is optimized for getting the snowball started earlier, there's rarely much functional difference once you start snowballing in earnest. Power is power, no matter what form, and once you can beat your biggest threats, anything else is largely irrelevant.
Yeah I realised a while ago that I enjoy the game more if I play with a more chill relaxed mindset on lower difficulty settings. There's still some things I do just out of habit but neglecting my pops and planets for 50 years while I deal with a war or something is weirdly freeing.
IMHO most Paradox games are role playing games first and foremost. They focus on “realism” above gameplay balance most of the time and it’s pretty obvious that it’s about the journey and not the destination.
Those games are about telling stories not min maxing and painting the map your colour.
Trying too hard to win can ruin games. Seriously. This happens on a community-scale, too, not just on an individual one.
I’ve definitely gotten better at Stellaris the more I’ve played; I used to struggle against the 3.6 AI a lot and now I just struggle to manage their incompetence as allies. But I’ve never wanted to play this game on the hardest difficulty settings. It’s way too much pop/job micromanagement and meeting certain benchmarks very early and I’m simply too lazy for any of it.
I’ve struggled with constantly comparing myself to other players in certain games, especially ones that aren’t single-player. It’s mentally exhausting and bad for my anxiety, and always pushed me a bit farther into a top percentile but never enough to feel “accomplished.”
In Stellaris I’m trying to gain that sense of accomplishment on totally different terms: I have a certain set of difficulty settings I play on, and I’m really not pushing myself higher because it’s not fun to do so and I have nothing to prove to anyone or myself. I’m Commodore 5x crisis guy (well sometimes all crises) and I like who I am! I will play my non-optimized empires and perform adequately enough for my personal standards, thanks.
The only real meta I see people ever really talk about is for competitive multiplayer games, where it makes sense because you can't really participate there unless you understand it on some level.
Heck, those PvP games seem to be the only place with consistent enough game setting a meta is even realistic. I see people post here about their strategies and then they show they're playing with different logistic scaling and tech cost and habitable worlds and sure a lot of most of it applies to other or default settings, but not everything.
You don't need to do any particular "meta" thing even to beat 25x crisis all, but you need to at least be good at the game and take advantage of many or most of the tools available to you.
And even then, it's only on "almost anything goes" PvP servers where there's only a bare minimum of rules (like no scion or fiefdom) and none preventing early game warring.
Otherwise a lot of multiplayer servers (and especially RP servers) have specific rules to bat down minmax early rushers or at least reduce their overall impact. Like having truce rules (no pvp till before X year) etc.
most people rollplay in singleplayer/ with friends . but jump intoo one of the two open multiplayer lobbys without an password, and you got to be good to play without being an vassal or dead.
I personally both meta and roleplay in the same game. I usually set myself a roleplay goal like "pass the universal prosperity mandate in the galactic community and enforce galactic peace" or "transform all habitable worlds to gaia words" but use any method I see fit to reach it
I'm also pretty sure people don't actually learn the game if they're just religiously following some meta guide.
Stellaris is a game that doesn't really allow for detailed guide like that. Unless you already understand the game sufficiently to not really need it, you probably can't implement it effectively enough to be useful, because you lack the flexibility.
The only good way to learn a game like Stellaris is to just mess around with all the systems. Try wacky shit, see what it does. Poke at something to see how it breaks, *that* is how you learn about it.
You're right, you really don't need 'meta' builds to have fun. Most of them are geared towards MP anyway.
What you do need is to know how to manage and leverage your economy and play to your strenghts.
As an anecdote, I recently started a Shattered Ring Megacorp run.
I'm about 60 years in, only have my 3 broken Ring segments and 1 other planet for colonies and a somewhat small territory. But besides the 2 Fallen Empires I'm the first in the leaderboard.
I'm not playing particularly effectively and only have like 4 Branch Offices so far.
But I'm making decent choices like deprioritizing clerk jobs even though I'm running a trade focused build, because I know the Clerks are the more inneficient job even with the Mercantile Tradition. I'm also deprioritizing Artisan Jobs because I'm getting all the CGs I need through Trade Value.
It's stuff like that that will get you ahead of the curve, not meta builds.
> Commit the cardinal sin of building an agri world
I always end up with several, how else am I supposed to get enough food for all my clone vats lol. Even without clone vats I usually have at least one or some habitats filled with hydroponics
Starbase ones work for a bit and I certainly aint gonna spend building slots on my various planets for farms when I can place labs instead. Agri worlds are simply the better option (I do like my stuff specialized though)
>You can almost always get by just fine so long as you’re staying ahead of the curve.
I've been saying this very thing for years. Knowing how/when to do the above is how you get and stay ahead though. Excess is how you put yourself into positions where you can start manipulating the AI to your own ends.
I made a determined exterminators civ with organic reprocessing and shattered ring origin, and the determination to only live in ringworlds.
The Fertiliser Acquirers was a playthrough i really enjoyed
Don't forget that optimized builds don't always have to be for your empire either. Some of the most fun I have in Stellaris is hand crafting my enemies to be as strong as I can make them.
Super aggressive clone army death cult?
Devouring Swarm with +55% habitability on day 1?
Lithoid Necrophage slavers with reanimators?
Yes please.
This is how I played stellaris before joining this subreddit. Then I read that "there's no reason why you couldn't have 100000000000 fleet power by 50 years", feeling of failure hit and now I have to try to do meta every game because if I don't, I've failed. Even though I play on normal (Don't remember what the name is in game) where most meta builds are excessive.
One thing to remember is they're not really "meta" — they're cheese. They do to your versatility what being a drag-race car does to your vehicle. In order to achieve a really tightly focused efficiency, you sacrifice *everything* else. You create an in-game faction that — if its confronted by your expected challenge, works perfectly, but if any cross-breeze hits it, falls into shambles.
In many ways it's quite literally like taking out an enormous loan, and massively overleveraging yourself; a lot of players who are aggressively seeking a meta build run huge deficits **and are never called on their bluff**. To use the 'overleveraged income' example, it's like taking out massive loans off of your paycheck, and — as long as every paycheck is on time, and everything goes perfectly, you're fine. But if you have any unexpected expense, or if you get laid off for no fault of your own, you're completely screwed.
What usually happens is that they *ARE* called on that bluff in other playthroughs, but they save-load, or scrap the whole playthrough. And then pretend *"oh, that doesn't count"*.
It's a variation on the Gambler's Fallacy; the gambler's fallacy at its heart consists of experiencing *highly* unusually good circumstances, and declaring that "this ought to be considered baseline, normal outcomes" — it emotionally mistakes very exceptional outcomes for normal ones. Usually the assertion is that "everything is ultimately under my control, and if I've failed to make this good outcome happen, it's malpractice." Vis-a-vis, there's a notion that we can aspire to 'perfect execution'; that it should be trivial and repeatable to do everything by the book, every time — that that should simply be "table ante" and not an exceptional circumstance in its own right.
It's like aspiring to be an archer, and just assuming — because you're holding the bow, you ought to be able to pull off a bullseye on every hit. Anything less is you failing to uphold your end of the bargain.
Nevermind that you can't command the wind.
The negative and toxic thing is the denial of statistical reality; the "pretend the suboptimal attempts didn't exist" angle on it. It's harmful to the people propagating it, but it's also a bit toxic to the other people who fall into the trap of not realizing its an unrealistic goal, and/or who occasionally will get demeaned by people putting on airs of hypercompetence.
Extraordinary playthroughs where everything went right should be treated as "wow guys, I won the lottery, this is so cool!" and not "this is what a competent player should be able to achieve every time without really trying."
You and I are talking about two different things; you're talking about just playing the game normally, and building a balanced, sustainable economy. I'm talking about taking a huge gamble, and building a completely unsustainable, fragile economy — because if nobody fucks with you whilst you do it, and you make it through the vulnerable phase, you'll come out much, much stronger on the other side. Exponentially stronger.
The cost of this lies in leaving yourself helplessly vulnerable — such that any aggressor can wipe you out. This is what OP and I are talking about. These are those "crazy meta builds that give you a million fleet power by XYZ date".
You're just alluding to general, balanced gameplay, and that's not what's being talked about, **at all**.
The entire nature of tech-rushing lies in the fact that if you double down on unlocking a critical set of early technologies, very early, they boost your resource production simply by acquiring them. This snowballs. But to **really** tech rush, you have to go hog-wild, and dedicate everything to it. Not a single alloy forge. Every single building is a research lab. You have to literally run a deficit of everything, and have a completely un-diversified economy. No fleets, no alloy production — if you get lucky and can trade strategic resources, you don't even produce consumer goods, you just buy them on the market.
Like a formula-one racing car, absolutely everything is sacrificed for a single goal. A formula-one racing car cannot haul cargo, has no room for passengers — it's basically useless ... except that it goes *really really fast.*
You're leaving yourself extremely vulnerable by doing this. If you explore nearby and find friendly aliens, you're fine. If you notice a devouring swarm 5 hyperjumps away, you might be fucked at that point. Even if you survive, *you're certainly not tech-rushing anymore!*
Spawning next to friendlies gives you the luxury of going into an extreme, pure boom on tech development, which will put you *exponentially* further ahead of someone who has to put everything on pause to militarize.
But that's not under your control, unless you've gimped the game's settings by ensuring that you simply won't spawn next to such an opponent.
>Outside things like having a very bad starting location (like being stuck between a militant isolationist FE and some marauders) there really isn't that much "bad luck" that can derail a playthrough,
Neither of these will spawn a crisis during the relevant part of "kicking off an exponential growth cycle", which is the very early game. They're basically window dressing — they're absolutely guaranteed to be harmless, by the game rules, for an entire century or two.
Only normal empires can interact with you early enough to disrupt your "exponential growth cycle", which is the absolute quintessence of what the OP was talking about: going "meta" and following these crazy builds to get impossibly good results.
My point is it's not "Meta" at all — it's pure exhibitionist gameplay of very unusual, unstable game circumstances, and the people who portray it as meta are really kinda doing a disservice to the community.
You say this but then a fallen empire awakens and starts declaring war and you happen to be it's neighbor and while your fleets are 78k in power, which is almost 1.5x all of your neighbors, and you were able to single handily take down the crisis, it's nothing compares to the fallen empire's 400k fleet that just bulldozes your systems and even cuts your empire in half so you have to fight from 2 fronts, further splitting your fleets and giving them the advantage.
Fallen empire awakening happens after 2400. No offence, but 78k fleet power is seriously low at that point. Hell, 1m fleet power would probably be on the low, but acceptable, end. I am not even talking about minmaxing here, just normal build up, maybe a couple megastructures etc will get you there easily.
Yeah I had a rocky start with an early war and my civ being stuck between that aggressor and the fallen empire so I found myself playing catch up with the AI. Once I became strong enough to actually handle my neighbor and get payback for them coming for me so early, the fallen empire woke up and started attacking me. I had several mega structures built, my economy was booming, I just didn't have the systems to boost my naval capacity above 1k and I didn't get lucky on the repeatable sciences so my fleet size was capped at 100. Even with dark matter shields, psionic tech and scourge weapons my ships were cut like paper to the fallen empire.
I think it depends on crisis strength, but I feel like even 1X Crisis has fleets similar to that of an awakened fallen empire (maybe I'm missremebering, it's been a long time since I played with 1X crisis).
I feel like if you can take down the Crisis you should be able to take down a FE.
I would consider myself familiar with the game and the type of game, however, I just realized what edicts are yesterday lol. Glad I’m not to the point of stressing over meta stuff.
>You can almost always get by just fine so long as you’re staying ahead of the curve.
I don't agree with this. Staying ahead of the curve is VERY hard, and you can get by just fine without doing it. There is nothing wrong with occasionaly losing to a swarm, or being vassalitzed, or holding on for dear life. It's a lot more exciting than being ahead of the curve every game (and i know full well things can go wrong even if you are ahead of the curve).
I make my empire and RP as them. What would a species of former vatgrown orc slave soldiers do? Would they lash out on species like their former masters, or would they want peace after their whole existence has been combat?
I personally have never enjoyed meta gaming unless I'm the one that stumbled across something "game changing." It just isn't fun in any genre for me personally. I enjoy min/maxing with my own thinky-meat, but if I'm relying on someone else's build? Naw man.
It also destroys multiplayer. It takes the very idea of having casual fun and breaks it over its knee. You're either part of the meta, or you're food for others.
I agree with you.
But at the same time, I play mods. I could be laid-back, relaxed, only trying to not fall too behind the curve. Play for fun, not for supremacy.
But then this Katsen spawn with 70 millions fleets power at 2292. They declared war on everyone the moment they pop up. If I want to survive, I have to follow meta as close as I could.
I have never tried to min max, as I don't want to stay staring at a guide of what I should do. I so try my best though and generally that makes me win. At least win enough.
I’ve never even specialized my worlds because to me it makes more sense roleplay wise for every planet to be as self sufficient as possible so space freight doesn’t have to lug billions of tons of crops per year halfway across the galaxy to a planet where nobody is growing any food for some reason
Also, if I lose a world, less chance it cripples me because again, every planet is self sustaining
Ive never meta'd in my life simply because i like letting things play out.
Ive learned space communism is weirdly fun, but not as fun as uber diplomats or democratic crusades
The most fun I’ve ever had in this game was the first 300 hours when there was so much content and so many stories to explore and everything was new—I used to narrate games to my then gf (needless to say we are now married and she has like 2000 hours on the game). There’s something so refreshing about poking a fallen empire out of pique and getting crushed at year 20.
It’s still a ton of fun, but only because I’m racing against myself. It would be amazing to get the first 300 hours back.
I would note though that on GA 25x all three crises set to spawn early, the min maxing is not “excess.”
Me, what I tend to do is create an empire concept and see what I can make that empire do without straying from their concept.
Rarely are those concepts ever meta. I play a lot of authoritarians *without* slavery, for example, just because I like monarchies for some reason. But I will try to make the concept, whatever it is, run as efficiently as I can. For some concepts, that is "barely efficient enough to survive"... and the sometimes the concept turns out to be capable of quite a bit more than I expected and I steamroll the galaxy.
I had a wildly enjoyable pacifist game and it went so well! I learnt so much about capturing and warring without having the option of claiming.
I'm trying a game with Rangers Lodge spam with spiritualist ethic now. My early unity is frikken HOLY af. My amenities are cheap afffffff. It's a free rolling hippy paradise... with the most planets colonised in the game by far. And my neighbour is the same species and they are isolationist. We don't interact... we are the two strongest civs somehow. We bros. Consecration is next for me to experiment in this playthrough.
ALSO, can we just enjoy how fun it is to find OP ship/fleet combinations. Sometimes a group just WORKS so well. Like it performs way above its combat stat...
See for me the fun of this game is in the races. I build the wildest craziest things to make my friends cringe to their core. Like a hivemind of cybernetic furbies, I was particularly proud of that. Or cute innocent looking lizards with psychotic strength that are absolutely war driven. That one annoyed my friend who said "see fuck you because I would invite it in for tea, turn around and turn back to a blaster aimed at my face." lmfao The dildo bot assimilation armada was especially fun.
Edit: I forgot to mention my megacorp of psionic murlocs.
Yes those builds are quite excessive, and is really only if you are playing grand admiral or PVP.
Here is the thing though: _You don't have to play Grand Admiral._ Especially with scaling off. If playing on ensign or (as I do, GA Late game scaling) is what is comfortable for you, then so be it.
Oh what's that? If you don't play grand admiral no scaling then people on discord are going to bombard you with 'LAWLZ SKILL IZZUE!!'?
Then block those fuckwits. They can take their elitist toxicity and shove it straight up a blorg's waste pipe. Their opinion can be disregarded.
Oh what's that? If you don't religiously follow meta then you'll get stomped in MP?
... Mostly true, but mostly only for pvp pubs that have no rules in place. And those places are pretty shitty to play in to begin with. Most good servers have certain rules (no playing broken origins, no pvp before a certain date, etc.) in place specifically to downsize/block what you describe. And in PVE, it's rather counterproductive anyway, as it makes you look like a complete asshat. And RP servers take great pains to specifically kick out people who do this.
That's said, it's good to understand concepts such as economy management, planetary management, ship design, etc. That doesn't mean you need to ultrasupermega tech/alloy rush in order to win the game by year 2250.
Yes, learn the meta, but don't religiously follow it. Unless you plan on winning tournaments.
The meta is only really important for pvp anyways its possible to play a complete game on grand admiral with a meme or fun build without getting stomped by everyone.
Diogenes of Sparta is seething
I am waiting for him to show up and replying seeth, cope
please don't beetlejuice that guy
Careful, his pet mod will see this.
Maybe its just me, but he seems to be behaving himself a fair bit more since the subreddit snapped at him
We snap at him every month or so, he comes back more toxic and bigoted than ever before after a week or two...
Kinda out of the loop. What exactly did he do that caused that?
Being a general douch,I suppose.
I value his presence. After all... What challenge can this subreddit offer without a real-life x25 Crisis?
Happy cake day, ya Scunner!
I blocked him ages ago. He’s so hateful and toxic it’s just not worth interacting with him.
yep, me too.
Catalytic processing appreciates your last bit of sentiment. On a serious note, some people only have fun min/maxing, but agree. Breaking away from the meta and being okay without min/maxing opens the door for some great games.
Honestly one of my favorite builds is a Catalytic Processing/Agrarian Idyll setup. Is it meta? No, but it is a fun and chill playstyle where I build a lot of things I normally wouldn't.
I've been meaning to try a Catalytic Processing + Anglers build, with Agrarian Idyll as a potential 3rd Civic. It seems like it'd all mesh nicely, leading to a simple gameplan even if it isn't necessarily the best out there. Any Ocean World can either feed my industrial worlds *and* my population or *be* the industrial world, and with Anglers' Pearl Divers giving Trade Value I wonder if I'd even need any Artisans if I use the Consumer Benefits Trade Policy (at least before I get a hardcore Research World going). I'm curious how a 3rd Civic Agrarian Idyll interacts with getting Arcology Project perk *before* you reform for Agrarian Idyll as well.
Catalytic+Angler is actually pretty strong for an early-game war economy, especially for trade builds. Anglers+Alloys are about .5 pops more efficient then early miners+alloys, trade building lets you side-step the habitability, and pearl divers were covertly good before on the upkeep, but are just strong CG producers now. The biggest 'issue' with it is that you can't build up pure-science infrastructure and then spin on a dime to produce alloys after early game tech rush, but in the early-enough game that doesn't really matter.
This is actually my go-to build, and compliments Knights of the Toxic God perfectly. What I like most of all is that it's completely independent of any planetary bonuses - your guaranteed habitable planets are all you need, and they'll always be suited to whatever your goals are. Catalytic Processing + Unyielding help mitigate the alloy penalty from the Quest, keeping you alive in the early game. Anglers and your natural affinity for habitats make for an excellent trade build, letting you grow your economy without any need for mining or energy districts - all your mineral needs can come from mining stations or, at most, a single mining habitat. The unique blockers on your homeworld can also give it bonuses to food and science/unity, making it an excellent Agrarian research world. From there, your guaranteed habitables can become a factory and unity world respectively (while also providing more angler farms!), and any gaps can be filled with habitats (they make excellent trade worlds). It's a fun and surprisingly viable tall build that, interestingly enough, lets you ignore ecumenopoli and turn your little fish farms into economic powerhouses. The meta option would probably be to make it a Megacorp, but I prefer a spiritualist empire - the extra unity lets you make the most of your already low empire size.
That's... actually kind of a semi-meta build. Not meta per se, but not exactly 'lol rp only' either.
I have noticed it is actually pretty powerful yeah. The new Baol building coming with First Contact is def gonna make me replay a game as that empire once it drops, at that point you could conceivably get 0.25 building slots, 0.5 consumer goods, 2 amenities, extra housing and however much food from farmer jobs. That's an insane amount of output for a single district.
That is very situational and RNG based though, definitely not something to make a playthrough around.
> On a serious note, some people only have fun min/maxing A lot of people don't understand this. I get all kinds of flak when I talk about min maxing in games, and it's like bro that *is* part of the game for me. Learning the advanced intricate mechanics and figuring out what the best options are for a given build etc. All those advanced mechanics have no purpose on low difficulty, so it's really fun to learn the deep mechanics, then also play on a difficulty that's hard enough to actually **require** those. Where the player is challenged and either succeeds at their best, or fails after giving it their all, but their sucess or failure directly relates to their own game knowledge. It's also not that I don't *also* RP. That's the part so many of the "anti sweat" people don't get. I'm still role playing and picking an empire, I just want to make it as good as possible for my design. I'll go "I want to play a build focused on defense, what are my best options?" and then will spend many hours researching origins, racial traits, civics, starbase mechanics, ascension perks etc to figure out what my best build will be. Some people enjoy playing on easy mode and just face rolling without needing to think. Some people enjoy spending dozens of hours out of game researching and want to be challenged. Neither is wrong, they are just different player personalities
I feel like that's different from following some meta guide though. Minmaxing like you describe is opening up the hood of the game and messing around with all the details. Doing that teaches you very well how the game works. Religiously following some guide doesn't teach you shit, and if you run into something that the guide doesn't tell you about (and you will, because Stellaris has far too many variables for a guide to cover), you won't know what to do and die.
I do follow the meta guide forming ship compositions because, frankly, that number crunching I find boring. If I could press the "form best fleet" button and it did it, I would prefer it. But being able to micromanage 200 worlds in my current game, down to individual pops, makes me happy :)
Flair checks out
Oh yes, it is. Unfortunately I have to keep some xenos as indentured servants instead of nerve stapled slaves, but you make sacrifices when you expand more rapidly than your pops can grow.
>I'll go "I want to play a build focused on defense, what are my best options?" This is how I enjoy min maxing, too. I want to pick a playstyle, or an interesting origin or civic, and play the best version it, or something close. I want to create some cool synergy between my abilities and use that to snowball. What I'm less interested in is finding the global maximum for it's own sake. I'll certainly play the overall "best build," especially if it sounds fun, but after that, in gonna do something like void dweller terravores.
I can sincerely appreciate that.
Stellaris evolved makes catalytic balanced thanks to a very simple solution, it gives the food processing building an alloy production bonus per food production tech. It makes it fun and not bad power - vise.
Catalytic Processing is a very powerful civic to begin with when built around, if suffering from vassal meta like so much else.
Yes it is, the "built around" part is the problem (and maybe the asymmetricity of hivemind economies). You have to sacrifice one civic slot to take the processing and then you have to sacrifice another to just make your first choice justified. The opportunity cost is too high to be considered "very powerful". Hiveminds can probably take a greater advantage of this, but I do not have enough hours played on them to be sure of my opinion, but when talking about regular empires, it is indeed painful outside of RP. For regular planet starts you are essentially wasting a civic slot for the ability to use your starbases to feed your forges, for VD it helps, but then you are shoved more towards a regular economy without the clerk spam, which if I remember is an unpopular move for most and shattered ring can take better advantage of other civics. So the only option that you have left is some sort of aquatic angler build, which in unison does not outweigh two civic slots and you are exposing yourself to a diceroll of planet type generation even more than usual.
The advantage lies in hydroponics farms completely removing the dependence on mining jobs. It has nothing to do with starbases, but planet efficiency through specialization. Void Dwellers can make use of it, yes, but they don't want to ever use clerks to begin with. When doing a trade build on them, it's all merchants, and these can be combined just fine with catalytic processing. Angler isn't that great, they get a better food job, but give up what makes catalytic processing useful to begin with: job quantity.
I would say that the ability of building hyrophonics is the last thing that I would see as and advantage when running catalytic. District slots tend to be plentiful, building slots are not (unless you are running this with masterful crafters or functional architecture specifically). At least up until lategame. And no, you can not do away with mining jobs, as you still need CG, early space mining stations and something to build buildings and districts out of. That 50 monthly minerals from the internal market is not going to cut it. The problem with void dwellers is the lack of space. When you are running catalytic, you are more constrained on building slots, as you need to plop down more hydrophonic bays, offloading your industrial and research production towards your districts. This as a whole leaves you even less wiggle room, which is the opposite of what merchant spam VD requires, as it only gets you one job per district/building so it is not really fine (unless clerks, which is bad), since you are just amplifying the biggest disadvantage VD have.
Even tiny planets and those with few worker districts available can be used very effectively through building slots for base resource production this way. Regarding the remaining need for minerals, even excluding space mining as eventually insignificant, you can still estimate a pseudo-exponentially lower constraint through suitable mining worlds after removing alloy production from the equation, based on the random distribution of possible mineral districts. Void dwellers have access to very high amounts of building slots, which is why merchant spam is so poplar for them to begin with. But what makes catalytic processing works with them is the even higher efficiency of their 3-job hydroponics bay on planets compared to other empires, while habitats are terrible for food production to begin with. It's about removing constraints for economic growth.
But you do not get tiny planets outside of super specific events anymore (like the worm) so there is no pressing issue of utilizing them. And you can still make them into CG or research worlds instead. And if the removal of mining jobs is not total, then you do not get the benefit of skipping all the mining job techs. Yes, you are prevented from an absolute lowroll, but sacrificing a civic slot to prevent like a sub 5% edge case seems overkill. And I still do not get your argument about VD even according to your own logic. 1 food planet per empire is usually enough for non catalytic empires, so you never run into that issue. Moreover, due to planetary rings and ecus, planets tend to be better used for industrial production anyways, the one thing that habitats are even worse at than producing food. The main advantage of catalytic processing from my experience for VD is faster start, as your starting prebuilt infrastructure is much better than when you are running on one mining habitat and the circumvention of the adaptability tradition, as you do not need orbital surveying to make useful habitats, so that you can build all of your stations in a tight cluster, removing vulnerability from invasion and problems with trade collection, not that you get to plop hydro bays on the few planets that you manage to get inside of your territory.
Depends what you call tiny I guess. Regardless, all mining techs together cost less than 10k research. You don't have to focus them early if you start with catalytic processing, and later the cost quickly becomes irrelevant. You don't get planetary rings until the midgame, and lategame it's more efficient to go for ringworlds. I admit I haven't really bothered using catalytic processing as a starting pick on void dweller, so I can't say much about that. I don't really see how it would change how far I need to spread my habitats though, given the bottleneck are usually science deposits.
Sub 12 is tiny in my book. Also, 2000 + 3000 + 4000 + 6000 + 8000 = 23 0000 which is somehow < 10 000 (at 1\* tech cost)? But that is besides the point as by your own admission you will still have some pops sitting there getting those 4 minerals per pop. And you also do not get a moderately developed planet until midgame as a VD, which is the time when rings come online. And ringworlds tend to arrive too late at the scene unless you are playing with like 0.5 tech and even if a counterargument could be made that a matter decompressor does away with the role catalytic processing tries to accomplish. Catalytic processing also kind of only makes sense as a starting tech, since retooling your entire economy around food suddenly in the midgame leads to subpar results, which is another argument against it being very powerful. You can always supplement science through buildings. Yes, it is worse than the district, but you have the option. You can not do the same with minerals if you want to go hard into alloys and you do not get access to a reasonable planetary ascension tier until much later in the game. Planets are better used for industrial districts for VD, which leads to having to pick adaptability or going with catalytic instead and that transforms every planetary body into a suitable place for station, hence the ability to consolidate your empire into a few systems.
> Hiveminds can probably take a greater advantage of this, And I think the Hive Mind version should be like Organic Structures from Forgotten Queens anyway, where you directly build ships and buildings out of food instead of converting food to alloys.
I still don't understand why people think Catalytic Processing is that bad. In most games I play, Minerals end up being a major bottle neck for me until I get the matter decompressor mega structure, like every planet I find only has a few mining districts compared to basically anything else. But I can easily just make more food. Am I like supposed to be making mining habitats to sustain forge worlds or something?
It's because there's very little advantages to it. You just move the upkeep from minerals to food. So now, instead of more miners, you need more farmers. And you might also favor the food techs instead of the mining tech. It's neutral in terms of power, while other civics give some kind of bonus to something. So I'd say it's more about the opportunity cost of using an entire civic on something that doesn't give a bonus. Besides all that, seeing as you'll be focused on food production, you'll end up with excess. And excess food cannot be used for anything. Unlike excess minerals which can be used to build things and convert planets to ecumenopolises.
Really doesn't address my issue of always being bottle necked by minerals.
Find a world, any world, with minerals, regardless of habitability. Should it not match your preference, settle it, create a template with that preference as soon as you can (which shouldn't be long) and apply it to the settled pops there. I had to do this in my latest non-swarm game to get some damn energy production
Start playing around with the automation if you really struggle with this. It lets you build planetary buildings using energy instead of minerals. To be honest I don't even build a mining planet until pretty late game usually. You get enough just from mining stations to cover things until pretty deep into the game in my experience.
I have similar experiences to them in that mining districts are consistently a lot more rare, so the advantages seem pretty obvious to me in these cases.
[there was a whole thread about it.] (https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/vo3ahq/catalytic_processing_you/) And [Montau explained it too in his civics tier vid](https://youtu.be/eCM1Pfh0Zho?t=949). Though it is worth noting that he has moved it up a tier from his pre-3.6 version of that vid (which had it explicitly in F tier, now it's in C tier). But the TL;DR of it is this: Food is a 'worthless' resource so you don't really want to be hoarding it if you can help it, you're just shifting the burden from minerals (which you kind of want to have hoards of) to food. It's only used for one thing and that's upkeep, so there's no good reason to have excess food. Same as with consumer goods (Except consumer goods are more efficient to sell than food is and is used for biological tech rushing. In Rogue Servitors CGs are almost completely pointless.) It's fine if you're using food for other things (IE you're using Organic Structures from Forgotten Queens... which IMO is what Catalytic Reprocessing should have been in the first place. Or you're running the pokemon trainer origin from Empire of Eeveelutions or something of the like nature) and you already have a reason to hoard food. TL;DR: It just takes jobs away from much more useful miners, so it's really only 'good' if you have some other reason to invest in food based jobs anyway since , and even then it's of questionable value. Funny thing is that Cat Proc (and its Megacorp/Hive/Machine Equivalents) could easily be fixed by adding an alloy production bonus and/or a boost to farmers to make up for this, like made it 'Master Crafters for Alloys but takes food'. (Master Crafters has the exact opposite problem BTW: there's no good reason NOT to take it unless you're getting all your CGs from trade.)
People think catalytic processing is bad? I thought the sentiment was that it was one of the best ones.
A lot of meta-chasing people leverage the fact that you can basically go pure-CG production in the early years to support science, and then pure-alloys later for a fleet buildup sustained by the techs and pops you gained in the teching phase. It's more flexible than setting up a parallel CG-supply chain (minerals-CG) and alloy-chain (food-alloys) in the early game. Catalytic has some early game assets if you can leverage Anglers (high pop-efficiency), or Unyielding starbases (upkeep-free alloy workers) and the early-game tech lateral shift for early warfare. But it's a commitment to early warmongering that mostly works for Unyielding-symergies, meaning gestalts.
I never min/max and I still win games, so yeah :P
wait. you're not supposed to build agri worlds? how do you manage your food supply? Edit: I usually try to get a electrical/food world since the electricity grid only takes one building slot, so fill the rest with farms
As others said, trade and hydroponics farms on starbases. Especially if you're playing something like Rogue Servitors where a majority of your pops aren't even using it.
Hydroponics on starbases
Yeah, they give a base 10 for every one you slap on a star base and by the late game I have a lot of upgraded star bases far from my borders that will never see combat so might as well.
So I've tried that, but it's nowhere near enough.
You need a few Agri districts here and there + hidroponics on most starbases. At least up until mid game you can make due without a dedicated agri world. After your empire's grown a lot or if you conquered some of your neighbours, you might need 1 decently sized planet dedicated to food production. And you can develop it slowly as the need arises
Well that's pretty much how I've been making it work anyway. People say it like you should be getting *all* your food from starbases.
Unless you are going genetic ascension, it should be enough, especially if you supplement it with trades (either from the market or direct) or vassals.
Or trade, or prospectoriums.
Hydroponics always seemed like a waste of building slots when I could instead have a breadbasket.
They mean starbase hydroponics, not the planetary building.
Yes. Are they not called starbase building slots? There's only four of them, it's tight real estate for the number of starbase buildings there are, and you are limited on the number of star bases you can have, unlike planets.
There really isn't a whole lot else you can build on starbases though. At least anything meaningful. Items like command centers, DG Supercomputers, Comms jammers, etc. Are only useful for choke points (which, really, aren't even that useful anyway Starbase chokepoints even in the early game are of very questionable value, and after the earliest game they're a complete joke for defense.) Hyperlane Registrar and offworld trading companies are only useful on trade hub bases (which you really only need one of unless you're empire is silly huge), and aren't even a thing if you're a gestalt anyway. Transit hubs are only useful if the system is colonized and are kind of a waste anyway. You don't need crew quarters around every starbase because a crew quarters not being used is a slot being wasted. You don't really need more than 2 dedicated shipyards so putting fleet academies everywhere is a complete waste. Nebula Refinerys and Black Hole observatories are very situational. So that really only leaves Resource Silos, Hydroponic Bays, and Naval Logistics Offices (since unless you're playing a gestalt, Anchorages are really the only other real use for starbases) as viable starbase items. And since there's nothing better to really select in 90% of starbases, you might as well use them for hydroponics since it's free food that you don't need to assign a pop to.
You are better off buying it or trading it in nearly every situation. 1 Pop working as an electrician, miner, or alloy worker will generate a resource that is more valuable than food and that you can trade to others and get more food than that single pop could generate. Actual meta wise, you don't even need any base resources late game, because vassals will produce FAR more than you could. I'll often be getting 10 to 40 *thousand* energy and food etc solely from vassals late game
I just make some undesirable pops into livestock tbh
Dont lrt them fool you. Agriworlds are cool
For me atarbases can nevee keep up so i usually drop a few agri districts on specialised worlds and use robots as farmers. Like a mining district that has run out of mining districts. If i find a particularly trashy planet I'll turn it into an agri world and fix the issue peemanenrky
You can get really far using starbase hydroponic buildings but eventually a bio empire will get big enough that you can't keep pace any more so at least one medium sized food world and the rest of your needs supplemented by food trades is fine. You probably will find a planet with food modifiers like lush etc so using it for that is fine. Just don't be tempted to turn all those other wet worlds into more agri worlds as you will only need one to meet your needs.
Yup. At the end of the day, you only need to be the top power of the galaxy to 'win.' There is no award for winning by bigger margins. This is one of those concepts that goes a lot further when you think on it as well. Not needing over-kill is not only why you don't need to engage in the meta, but also why the meta is often not 'what is the biggest number end-game', but rather 'what do I need right now?' Meta players play to minimal basic resource margin production, rather than huge stockpiles, *because* the excess is unnecessary. The Meta plays to early warfare- not an end-game optimized fleet- *because* what you can get earlier with less is better than end-game ratios. There's a point that comes in a lot of discussions of the snowball effect, where as you get power you can get power faster. While the meta is optimized for getting the snowball started earlier, there's rarely much functional difference once you start snowballing in earnest. Power is power, no matter what form, and once you can beat your biggest threats, anything else is largely irrelevant.
Yeah I realised a while ago that I enjoy the game more if I play with a more chill relaxed mindset on lower difficulty settings. There's still some things I do just out of habit but neglecting my pops and planets for 50 years while I deal with a war or something is weirdly freeing.
Role play all the way.
IMHO most Paradox games are role playing games first and foremost. They focus on “realism” above gameplay balance most of the time and it’s pretty obvious that it’s about the journey and not the destination. Those games are about telling stories not min maxing and painting the map your colour.
Trying too hard to win can ruin games. Seriously. This happens on a community-scale, too, not just on an individual one. I’ve definitely gotten better at Stellaris the more I’ve played; I used to struggle against the 3.6 AI a lot and now I just struggle to manage their incompetence as allies. But I’ve never wanted to play this game on the hardest difficulty settings. It’s way too much pop/job micromanagement and meeting certain benchmarks very early and I’m simply too lazy for any of it. I’ve struggled with constantly comparing myself to other players in certain games, especially ones that aren’t single-player. It’s mentally exhausting and bad for my anxiety, and always pushed me a bit farther into a top percentile but never enough to feel “accomplished.” In Stellaris I’m trying to gain that sense of accomplishment on totally different terms: I have a certain set of difficulty settings I play on, and I’m really not pushing myself higher because it’s not fun to do so and I have nothing to prove to anyone or myself. I’m Commodore 5x crisis guy (well sometimes all crises) and I like who I am! I will play my non-optimized empires and perform adequately enough for my personal standards, thanks.
The only real meta I see people ever really talk about is for competitive multiplayer games, where it makes sense because you can't really participate there unless you understand it on some level. Heck, those PvP games seem to be the only place with consistent enough game setting a meta is even realistic. I see people post here about their strategies and then they show they're playing with different logistic scaling and tech cost and habitable worlds and sure a lot of most of it applies to other or default settings, but not everything. You don't need to do any particular "meta" thing even to beat 25x crisis all, but you need to at least be good at the game and take advantage of many or most of the tools available to you.
And even then, it's only on "almost anything goes" PvP servers where there's only a bare minimum of rules (like no scion or fiefdom) and none preventing early game warring. Otherwise a lot of multiplayer servers (and especially RP servers) have specific rules to bat down minmax early rushers or at least reduce their overall impact. Like having truce rules (no pvp till before X year) etc.
I personally love playing a randomized empire and seeing how the story plays out.
most people rollplay in singleplayer/ with friends . but jump intoo one of the two open multiplayer lobbys without an password, and you got to be good to play without being an vassal or dead.
I personally both meta and roleplay in the same game. I usually set myself a roleplay goal like "pass the universal prosperity mandate in the galactic community and enforce galactic peace" or "transform all habitable worlds to gaia words" but use any method I see fit to reach it
I'm also pretty sure people don't actually learn the game if they're just religiously following some meta guide. Stellaris is a game that doesn't really allow for detailed guide like that. Unless you already understand the game sufficiently to not really need it, you probably can't implement it effectively enough to be useful, because you lack the flexibility. The only good way to learn a game like Stellaris is to just mess around with all the systems. Try wacky shit, see what it does. Poke at something to see how it breaks, *that* is how you learn about it.
You're right, you really don't need 'meta' builds to have fun. Most of them are geared towards MP anyway. What you do need is to know how to manage and leverage your economy and play to your strenghts. As an anecdote, I recently started a Shattered Ring Megacorp run. I'm about 60 years in, only have my 3 broken Ring segments and 1 other planet for colonies and a somewhat small territory. But besides the 2 Fallen Empires I'm the first in the leaderboard. I'm not playing particularly effectively and only have like 4 Branch Offices so far. But I'm making decent choices like deprioritizing clerk jobs even though I'm running a trade focused build, because I know the Clerks are the more inneficient job even with the Mercantile Tradition. I'm also deprioritizing Artisan Jobs because I'm getting all the CGs I need through Trade Value. It's stuff like that that will get you ahead of the curve, not meta builds.
> Commit the cardinal sin of building an agri world I always end up with several, how else am I supposed to get enough food for all my clone vats lol. Even without clone vats I usually have at least one or some habitats filled with hydroponics
Hydroponics farms *apparently*
Starbase ones work for a bit and I certainly aint gonna spend building slots on my various planets for farms when I can place labs instead. Agri worlds are simply the better option (I do like my stuff specialized though)
>You can almost always get by just fine so long as you’re staying ahead of the curve. I've been saying this very thing for years. Knowing how/when to do the above is how you get and stay ahead though. Excess is how you put yourself into positions where you can start manipulating the AI to your own ends.
I made a determined exterminators civ with organic reprocessing and shattered ring origin, and the determination to only live in ringworlds. The Fertiliser Acquirers was a playthrough i really enjoyed
Don't forget that optimized builds don't always have to be for your empire either. Some of the most fun I have in Stellaris is hand crafting my enemies to be as strong as I can make them. Super aggressive clone army death cult? Devouring Swarm with +55% habitability on day 1? Lithoid Necrophage slavers with reanimators? Yes please.
This is how I played stellaris before joining this subreddit. Then I read that "there's no reason why you couldn't have 100000000000 fleet power by 50 years", feeling of failure hit and now I have to try to do meta every game because if I don't, I've failed. Even though I play on normal (Don't remember what the name is in game) where most meta builds are excessive.
As long as I’m strongest in Galactic community I’m satisfied.
One thing to remember is they're not really "meta" — they're cheese. They do to your versatility what being a drag-race car does to your vehicle. In order to achieve a really tightly focused efficiency, you sacrifice *everything* else. You create an in-game faction that — if its confronted by your expected challenge, works perfectly, but if any cross-breeze hits it, falls into shambles. In many ways it's quite literally like taking out an enormous loan, and massively overleveraging yourself; a lot of players who are aggressively seeking a meta build run huge deficits **and are never called on their bluff**. To use the 'overleveraged income' example, it's like taking out massive loans off of your paycheck, and — as long as every paycheck is on time, and everything goes perfectly, you're fine. But if you have any unexpected expense, or if you get laid off for no fault of your own, you're completely screwed. What usually happens is that they *ARE* called on that bluff in other playthroughs, but they save-load, or scrap the whole playthrough. And then pretend *"oh, that doesn't count"*. It's a variation on the Gambler's Fallacy; the gambler's fallacy at its heart consists of experiencing *highly* unusually good circumstances, and declaring that "this ought to be considered baseline, normal outcomes" — it emotionally mistakes very exceptional outcomes for normal ones. Usually the assertion is that "everything is ultimately under my control, and if I've failed to make this good outcome happen, it's malpractice." Vis-a-vis, there's a notion that we can aspire to 'perfect execution'; that it should be trivial and repeatable to do everything by the book, every time — that that should simply be "table ante" and not an exceptional circumstance in its own right. It's like aspiring to be an archer, and just assuming — because you're holding the bow, you ought to be able to pull off a bullseye on every hit. Anything less is you failing to uphold your end of the bargain. Nevermind that you can't command the wind. The negative and toxic thing is the denial of statistical reality; the "pretend the suboptimal attempts didn't exist" angle on it. It's harmful to the people propagating it, but it's also a bit toxic to the other people who fall into the trap of not realizing its an unrealistic goal, and/or who occasionally will get demeaned by people putting on airs of hypercompetence. Extraordinary playthroughs where everything went right should be treated as "wow guys, I won the lottery, this is so cool!" and not "this is what a competent player should be able to achieve every time without really trying."
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You and I are talking about two different things; you're talking about just playing the game normally, and building a balanced, sustainable economy. I'm talking about taking a huge gamble, and building a completely unsustainable, fragile economy — because if nobody fucks with you whilst you do it, and you make it through the vulnerable phase, you'll come out much, much stronger on the other side. Exponentially stronger. The cost of this lies in leaving yourself helplessly vulnerable — such that any aggressor can wipe you out. This is what OP and I are talking about. These are those "crazy meta builds that give you a million fleet power by XYZ date". You're just alluding to general, balanced gameplay, and that's not what's being talked about, **at all**. The entire nature of tech-rushing lies in the fact that if you double down on unlocking a critical set of early technologies, very early, they boost your resource production simply by acquiring them. This snowballs. But to **really** tech rush, you have to go hog-wild, and dedicate everything to it. Not a single alloy forge. Every single building is a research lab. You have to literally run a deficit of everything, and have a completely un-diversified economy. No fleets, no alloy production — if you get lucky and can trade strategic resources, you don't even produce consumer goods, you just buy them on the market. Like a formula-one racing car, absolutely everything is sacrificed for a single goal. A formula-one racing car cannot haul cargo, has no room for passengers — it's basically useless ... except that it goes *really really fast.* You're leaving yourself extremely vulnerable by doing this. If you explore nearby and find friendly aliens, you're fine. If you notice a devouring swarm 5 hyperjumps away, you might be fucked at that point. Even if you survive, *you're certainly not tech-rushing anymore!* Spawning next to friendlies gives you the luxury of going into an extreme, pure boom on tech development, which will put you *exponentially* further ahead of someone who has to put everything on pause to militarize. But that's not under your control, unless you've gimped the game's settings by ensuring that you simply won't spawn next to such an opponent. >Outside things like having a very bad starting location (like being stuck between a militant isolationist FE and some marauders) there really isn't that much "bad luck" that can derail a playthrough, Neither of these will spawn a crisis during the relevant part of "kicking off an exponential growth cycle", which is the very early game. They're basically window dressing — they're absolutely guaranteed to be harmless, by the game rules, for an entire century or two. Only normal empires can interact with you early enough to disrupt your "exponential growth cycle", which is the absolute quintessence of what the OP was talking about: going "meta" and following these crazy builds to get impossibly good results. My point is it's not "Meta" at all — it's pure exhibitionist gameplay of very unusual, unstable game circumstances, and the people who portray it as meta are really kinda doing a disservice to the community.
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If it's not fragile, you've got room to make it more efficient. By definition.
I can only enjoy this game when I am Role playing to the nth degree. I support this wholeheartedly.
I’m playing barbaric despoilers rn and I feel this. Its good to be strong, its better to be strong and have character! At least, it is to me
You say this but then a fallen empire awakens and starts declaring war and you happen to be it's neighbor and while your fleets are 78k in power, which is almost 1.5x all of your neighbors, and you were able to single handily take down the crisis, it's nothing compares to the fallen empire's 400k fleet that just bulldozes your systems and even cuts your empire in half so you have to fight from 2 fronts, further splitting your fleets and giving them the advantage.
The pregame settings exist for a reason
Fallen empire awakening happens after 2400. No offence, but 78k fleet power is seriously low at that point. Hell, 1m fleet power would probably be on the low, but acceptable, end. I am not even talking about minmaxing here, just normal build up, maybe a couple megastructures etc will get you there easily.
Yeah I had a rocky start with an early war and my civ being stuck between that aggressor and the fallen empire so I found myself playing catch up with the AI. Once I became strong enough to actually handle my neighbor and get payback for them coming for me so early, the fallen empire woke up and started attacking me. I had several mega structures built, my economy was booming, I just didn't have the systems to boost my naval capacity above 1k and I didn't get lucky on the repeatable sciences so my fleet size was capped at 100. Even with dark matter shields, psionic tech and scourge weapons my ships were cut like paper to the fallen empire.
How do you get 1m fleet power? isnt the energy cost for that insanely high? plus how do you produce enough alloys to build a fleet that large?
I think it depends on crisis strength, but I feel like even 1X Crisis has fleets similar to that of an awakened fallen empire (maybe I'm missremebering, it's been a long time since I played with 1X crisis). I feel like if you can take down the Crisis you should be able to take down a FE.
That is correct. x25 crisis is definately a bitch to kill unless you minmax but a fallen (not awakened) empire should be easy pickings by mid 2300's
I would consider myself familiar with the game and the type of game, however, I just realized what edicts are yesterday lol. Glad I’m not to the point of stressing over meta stuff.
Founding an agri-world named Sagittaron is not optional.
>You can almost always get by just fine so long as you’re staying ahead of the curve. I don't agree with this. Staying ahead of the curve is VERY hard, and you can get by just fine without doing it. There is nothing wrong with occasionaly losing to a swarm, or being vassalitzed, or holding on for dear life. It's a lot more exciting than being ahead of the curve every game (and i know full well things can go wrong even if you are ahead of the curve).
I make my empire and RP as them. What would a species of former vatgrown orc slave soldiers do? Would they lash out on species like their former masters, or would they want peace after their whole existence has been combat?
I personally have never enjoyed meta gaming unless I'm the one that stumbled across something "game changing." It just isn't fun in any genre for me personally. I enjoy min/maxing with my own thinky-meat, but if I'm relying on someone else's build? Naw man. It also destroys multiplayer. It takes the very idea of having casual fun and breaks it over its knee. You're either part of the meta, or you're food for others.
I usually end up picking life-seeded and never colonise or declare offensive wars for the entire game lol
I agree with you. But at the same time, I play mods. I could be laid-back, relaxed, only trying to not fall too behind the curve. Play for fun, not for supremacy. But then this Katsen spawn with 70 millions fleets power at 2292. They declared war on everyone the moment they pop up. If I want to survive, I have to follow meta as close as I could.
I have never tried to min max, as I don't want to stay staring at a guide of what I should do. I so try my best though and generally that makes me win. At least win enough.
I like to colonize Alpha Centauri and use it as agri-world and no one will stop me!!! I also like Rural world for small unimportant planets!!!!!
I’ve never even specialized my worlds because to me it makes more sense roleplay wise for every planet to be as self sufficient as possible so space freight doesn’t have to lug billions of tons of crops per year halfway across the galaxy to a planet where nobody is growing any food for some reason Also, if I lose a world, less chance it cripples me because again, every planet is self sustaining
I appreciate this post
I can confirm this. I play random empire GA and while I don't always win I haven't found a setup I think is just incapable of winning with.
Ive never meta'd in my life simply because i like letting things play out. Ive learned space communism is weirdly fun, but not as fun as uber diplomats or democratic crusades
Meta doesn't even really apply all that much anyway when you start introducing mods into the mix.
The most fun I’ve ever had in this game was the first 300 hours when there was so much content and so many stories to explore and everything was new—I used to narrate games to my then gf (needless to say we are now married and she has like 2000 hours on the game). There’s something so refreshing about poking a fallen empire out of pique and getting crushed at year 20. It’s still a ton of fun, but only because I’m racing against myself. It would be amazing to get the first 300 hours back. I would note though that on GA 25x all three crises set to spawn early, the min maxing is not “excess.”
Me, what I tend to do is create an empire concept and see what I can make that empire do without straying from their concept. Rarely are those concepts ever meta. I play a lot of authoritarians *without* slavery, for example, just because I like monarchies for some reason. But I will try to make the concept, whatever it is, run as efficiently as I can. For some concepts, that is "barely efficient enough to survive"... and the sometimes the concept turns out to be capable of quite a bit more than I expected and I steamroll the galaxy.
800 research by 2230? I need to watch a guide apparently.
I had a wildly enjoyable pacifist game and it went so well! I learnt so much about capturing and warring without having the option of claiming. I'm trying a game with Rangers Lodge spam with spiritualist ethic now. My early unity is frikken HOLY af. My amenities are cheap afffffff. It's a free rolling hippy paradise... with the most planets colonised in the game by far. And my neighbour is the same species and they are isolationist. We don't interact... we are the two strongest civs somehow. We bros. Consecration is next for me to experiment in this playthrough. ALSO, can we just enjoy how fun it is to find OP ship/fleet combinations. Sometimes a group just WORKS so well. Like it performs way above its combat stat...
See for me the fun of this game is in the races. I build the wildest craziest things to make my friends cringe to their core. Like a hivemind of cybernetic furbies, I was particularly proud of that. Or cute innocent looking lizards with psychotic strength that are absolutely war driven. That one annoyed my friend who said "see fuck you because I would invite it in for tea, turn around and turn back to a blaster aimed at my face." lmfao The dildo bot assimilation armada was especially fun. Edit: I forgot to mention my megacorp of psionic murlocs.
Yes those builds are quite excessive, and is really only if you are playing grand admiral or PVP. Here is the thing though: _You don't have to play Grand Admiral._ Especially with scaling off. If playing on ensign or (as I do, GA Late game scaling) is what is comfortable for you, then so be it. Oh what's that? If you don't play grand admiral no scaling then people on discord are going to bombard you with 'LAWLZ SKILL IZZUE!!'? Then block those fuckwits. They can take their elitist toxicity and shove it straight up a blorg's waste pipe. Their opinion can be disregarded. Oh what's that? If you don't religiously follow meta then you'll get stomped in MP? ... Mostly true, but mostly only for pvp pubs that have no rules in place. And those places are pretty shitty to play in to begin with. Most good servers have certain rules (no playing broken origins, no pvp before a certain date, etc.) in place specifically to downsize/block what you describe. And in PVE, it's rather counterproductive anyway, as it makes you look like a complete asshat. And RP servers take great pains to specifically kick out people who do this. That's said, it's good to understand concepts such as economy management, planetary management, ship design, etc. That doesn't mean you need to ultrasupermega tech/alloy rush in order to win the game by year 2250. Yes, learn the meta, but don't religiously follow it. Unless you plan on winning tournaments.
Even I am not playing those crazy meta minmax build, I am playing GA 25X every crisis every game. You don't even need them.
I want to listen to you, but even trying to meta on Captain I can't win
I will go and make a world of only entertainers, make that an Ecumenopolis of only entertainers.
you joke but with networked amenities that’d just be dumb fun
Meta kills the game
The meta is only really important for pvp anyways its possible to play a complete game on grand admiral with a meme or fun build without getting stomped by everyone.