Ad Astra

It's been a little while, but I dived (dove?) back into Stellaris. I've accumulated a few new DLC over the last couple of years thanks to the largesse of my brother, and enjoyed seeing what they added to the game, along with the regular procession of free game updates.

As is usually the case, I restarted a few times before landing on a keeper of a run. Some of the restarts were due to bad luck or bad decisions, but a big part was just getting reacquainted with the game and coming up to speed on the changes since my last run. A problem I frequently made was neglecting my military. Even with the game settings modified for less aggressive AI, they will definitely notice if you present a rich target with few guns and few allies. I like to play more pacifist games, but you're a lot less likely to get attacked if you have a big fleet.

There were two huge gameplay changes I noticed. The first was Unity. Previously, Unity seemed like the most useless abstract resource: it was useful in the first part of the game to unlock Tradition trees, but by the end of my games I would always be producing way more Unity than I could spend on Edicts; unlike most other resources, there's no way to convert it or cash it out. I would end up with huge surpluses despite never really investing in Unity-producing jobs or buildings, beyond the automatic ones like capitals. So I stayed far away from playing as Spiritualist or other approaches that seemed design to boost Unity.

In the current game, Unity has a lot more uses. It's the main currency for Leaders - more on that later, but where in the past you recruited them with Energy, now you pay Unity for recruitment and upkeep. There's also the dumping ground of Planetary Ascension. You can pay a large amount of Unity to boost the effects of your planet's designation; for example, if it's a Mining World, you'll get a bigger boost to Mineral production and cheaper maintenance for Miners; on a Science World, research complexes will get progressively cheaper and researchers require less upkeep. (I think the overall effect is similar to Centralize State in Europa Universalis IV.). Perhaps more importantly, it will also reduce the Empire Size impact from the districts and pops, which in turn will boost your overall research speed and tradition unlocks. The Unity cost for Planetary Ascension grown exponentially the more you use it, and even by the end of the game I still had use for more Unity.

Leaders have also been reworked; the overall impact is that they are more powerful, versatile and have more personality. You can select the abilities a leader gains when they level up, allowing you to groom and shape them as you like. These choices come from a semi-randomized list, so they will end up each being somewhat distinct, but you can still guide them to fit your planned strategy. You can manually select some leaders to serve on the government Council, where they will serve ministerial positions. These provide useful boosts to the empire - for example, a "Head of Research" will increase the Research Speed by an amount scaling on the level of the leader, while a "Minister of State" will increase the effectiveness of Improve Relations and the speed of operations like First Contact and Espionage. Leaders can also have abilities that apply buffs to the entire empire while they're on the Council, like increasing Stability or providing more Trade Value.

The roles of leaders have been adjusted as well. Generals and Admirals have been folded into a single "Commander" class, which I think is great - Generals felt really useless for most of the game. You can still take level-up powers that will make a given Commander better at space combat or ground combat, but they're interchangeable. Governors have been moved to a new "Official" class; these work similar to before, but you can now assign an Official to either the Galactic Community or your Federation, which is more impactful than the old Envoy-based approach. Finally, Science no longer requires a Scientist heading up each of the three main research categories; instead there's a single Head of Research on the Council. In addition to their traditional work with exploring, surveying and conducting archeology, Scientists can now also serve as the Governor on a planet. This isn't as effective as an Official, but it does produce a bigger boost for Research, so it can be a good move for research-focused worlds. Overall I found Scientists a lot less useful in the endgame in the new system than previously: once you've surveyed everything, there's very little for them to do.

Oh: And (again thanks to a gifted DLC) I had access to "Legendary Paragons", who are especially powerful and moderately expensive Leaders. They may appear randomly or as the result of some action (like certain archeology excavations). They have their own unique large portraits and dialogue on recruitment. They have more traits than an equivalent-level Leader would, including some unique traits unavailable anywhere else. They don't feel game-breaking, but give great flavor and were a lot of fun.

In all of my restarted games, I was trying to play the same type of empire: playing around with the new utility of Unity, I was a Spiritualist, Xenophilic, Pacifist Democracy with the Ascensionist civic. I was planning to boost Unity to cruise through the Tradition trees, while using Pacifism to keep my Empire Size low.

In my final successful run, I lucked out in a few ways. I had some friendly neighbors, instead of a bunch of Devouring Swarm Hive Minds. In particular, one Spiritual neighbor invited me to join a Holy Federation with them, which I had planned to do anyways once I had that option. I pretty aggressively recruited other friendly empires into the Federation as well, and we ended up with a nice defense pack that protected us against potentially hostile adversaries.

It's interesting all the variations that occur between games. In first few games, I had pretty interesting pre-FTL versions of Sol III (Earth) that were cool to observe, as well as a lot of pre-FTL civs in general; I haven't run across many of these before, and had fun running operations on them. Another recent game update has been getting unique technologies by observing "primitive" civilizations, and I'd unlocked a lot of those before getting stomped in an earlier game. In my final game I didn't get to build any observation posts until pretty late in my expansion, and only unlocked a couple of techs, but it's still fun to see all the different scenarios that can play out for these planets.

I had a couple of L-Gates in this game, and focused on getting Insights whenever I could, so I was able to unlock the L-Cluster before the mid-game year. It was definitely a risk to open it then, as I would have been completely unprepared for an invasion. It worked out really well, though: for the first time I got the outcome where you meet "The Gray", a super-powerful entity that takes the form of a massive warship; I think it has like 80k power or something. With that alone, I instantly flipped from the least powerful to the most powerful fleet in the galaxy, removing any risk of getting declared on.

I'd been looking forward to playing a Spiritualist game for a while. I was technically Spiritualist during my Megacorp televangelist run, but that was a bit different, with Spiritual just being an entree to draining rubes of their bank accounts. This game was more of a Shroud-focused excursion. I took the "Teachers of the Shroud" Origin, which was powerful and cool. You start off with Latent Psionic, which is a great perk in its own right and also basically gives you an extra Ascension Perk. You also have contact with the Teachers of the Shroud (the exact name is randomized, it can also be called something like the Shroud Coven), a Curators-style Enclave that's focused on Shroud stuff. This gives an unlockable wormhole-type connection with a distant part of the galaxy, possibly opening up a useful expansion path. There are some nifty purchases you can make from them, but the Influence cost kept me from indulging until pretty late in the game.

I've definitely played with the Shroud before, but I think this was my first time since they added the new Covenants. The only option used to be "End of the Cycle", a sort of doomsday pact with the devil where you would get very powerful for 50 years and then lose the game. There now are other covenants, which give a lot of perks and a few penalties. The Shroud is infamously RNG-based, and I burned a lot of energy, zro and time trying to get the Covenant I wanted or even any Boons out of the Shroud. Eventually I made contact and signed a Covenant with the Instrument of Desire; this has a lot of effects, the most useful being a straight-up boost to the resources produced by every. single. pop.

Around this time, I also started to muse about Becoming the Crisis. I've had Nemesis for a while, and thought it was cool that they added the option to become the bad guys, but never felt tempted to pursue that path. Now, though, I was mulling it over. Fighting the Unbidden for the fifth time didn't sound all that exciting, and as a Spiritual empire I was unlikely to trigger the Contingency. As a Pacifist and Xenophile I was doubly locked-out from choosing the Crisis Ascension Perk; but from Wiki-trawling I knew that proceeding along the Covenant line would eventually give me the option to reform into an Authoritarian Spiritualist, which would open the route to the Crisis. And, the more I thought about it, the more I enjoyed the dark narrative of this timeline: A peaceful and spiritual empire begins communing with spirits, gradually falls under their thrall, and eventually brings about the end of the galaxy. It has a nice resonance with the Ashen Veil of Fall from Heaven 2.

I delayed for a long time before picking it; I also wanted to get the mega-structure Ascension Perks and get those rolling before flipping to the Dark Side, but those are gated behind very late-game techs, so I spent a ton of time without my full Perk loadout. This kind of doubly penalized me in particular, since I was also pursuing Planetary Ascension: You can get more Planetary Ascension tiers (not to be confused with Ascension Perks) as you unlock more Ascension Perks, up until 5 tiers with 9 perks; once you get the 10th perk, you unlock an additional 5 tiers, letting you ascend to level 10. Reaching 10 basically removes that planet entirely from your Empire Size penalty. If I'd been able to reach that earlier, it could have had a significant impact on my research speed.

But, while I was waiting for those last Perks I had time to generally prepare and scheme for my diabolical plan. I finally picked up Become the Crisis in the late 2300s; that was late enough to build a huge tech lead over the rest of the galaxy and harden my defenses, but early enough that I didn't have to worry about Fallen Empires awakening or the actual Crisis starting.

One thing I learned from the wiki that I hadn't realized before is that there actually is a viable path where you pick the Become The Crisis perk without actually Becoming the Crisis. BtC proceeds through a series of tiers. In order to advance to the next tier, you need to both complete a Special Project (via research) and acquire a certain number of Menace Points (via various sources like destroying ships, invading planets, vassalizing empires, etc.). The Tiers grant really powerful abilities, balanced with a large Opinion malus with all other empires, and those abilities alone could be a really compelling reason to pursue the Crisis.

For me, the best intermediate benefits of BtC are the new War Goals and the Menacing class of ships. You gain the ability to declare war on any empire to either destroy them or "imposed inclusion", resulting in a vassalization. This bypasses the prep work that's usually necessary for a military expansion and lets you easily fire off wars at will.

"Menacing" ships parallel the main ship classes, with Menacing Corvettes, Menacing Frigates and Menacing Cruisers (but no Menacing Battleships). At first I wasn't clear on the benefit, but the biggest perk is that you construct Menacing ships with Minerals, not with Alloys; Alloys are incredibly precious, so being able to build a fleet (or a large chunk of one) with just Minerals is huge. Menacing ships upgrade with your tech, but unlike regular ships and defense platforms their build cost doesn't scale, and they always cost the same flat amount of Minerals; when new tech is available, you can upgrade for free. Finally, you can gain huge boosts to Menacing ship build speed, letting you almost instantly replenish any lost ships.

For me, I stuck with my regular fleet of Battleships as my main heavy hitters; but I switched to Menacing Corvettes for my rapid-response / quick interdiction fleets, and was really happy with how they worked.

While I was building Menace Points to progress the Crisis tiers, I basically started off with the weakest unaligned Empires I could find, used the "Imposed Inclusion" to vassalize them, then moved on to the next-weakest unaligned Empire. I mostly did this solo with my Federation Fleet, though my Holy Federation allies pitched in when they could.

By this point in the game, there were two big federations: the Holy League, where I had become President-For-Life and which dominated the northwest quadrant of the galaxy, and the Cosmic Pact, a mostly-xenophobic non-contiguous alliance based in the south and west. Roughly a third of the galaxy was unaligned, but as I approached the late 2300s all of them had become my vassals.

I was now getting ready to flip the switch. Fortunately you can select when to complete each Special Project, so before taking the final step I launched what I started to call my COINTELPRO phase: using my diplomatic skill to sow discord and chaos in the galactic institutions that could stop me.

In the Galactic Community, I had been steadily advancing Divinity Of Life resolutions to promote Spiritualist ethics; the last few steps actually outlaw some Materialist-type actions like Synthetic Ascension. I also moved through several Military Sanctions so violators' Naval Capacity would diminish. Just before Crisis-ing, I also pushed through the higher stages of Unchained Knowledge, which similarly penalize non-Materialist policies. The sum total put a lot of empires on the wrong side of galactic law, hamstringing their power broadly.

Of the two major federations, the Holy League was definitely the most powerful; mostly due to me, but those empires in general were strong compared to the Cosmic Pact. I used my unsurpassed powers to cripple the federation: I disbanded the Federation Fleet, set the Fleet Contributions to None, reduced Centralization to Minimal, switched most votes to require unanimous action, and, in my last act, abolished the Diplomatic Weight for voting. Whoever my successor as President would be, he or she would inherit a broken and unwieldy institution, incapable of reforming itself as a galactic power.

I also kicked off a war between the Holy League and the Cosmic Pact; I don't remember now what my War Goal was, it might have been a Liberation War against one of the members. I knew that after becoming the Crisis the galaxy would declare war on me, so I was hoping to set up a three-way fight, and that some of the Holy League / Cosmic Pact fighting would draw away attention from me.

It worked out even better than that: once I reached the final tier of the Crisis, there was a war declared against me; but only my former members of the Holy League were part of it. Holy League was fighting both me and the Cosmic Pact, while the Cosmic Pact was only fighting the Holy League and not me.

I wasn't expecting that, but on further reflection, it probably makes sense given the rules of warfare. I'm more familiar with the EU4 war rules at the moment than Stellaris, but I don't think the engine supports two nations being on the same side in one war while they're on opposing sides in another war. So given a pre-existing war, only one side could declare on me. It may just be luck that it was the Holy League that turned against me. (Which, the more I think about it, actually was the ideal outcome; otherwise I would have been stuck in my crippled Federation for the duration of the conflict.)

MINI SPOILERS

"Become the Crisis" actually has a really compelling narrative and structure, with some great writing and neat mechanics. Again, it reminds me a bit of the Ashen Veil in Fall from Heaven 2, and more broadly the Armageddon mechanics. Story-wise, your scientists become aware of the Shroud, and the great power latent in that realm, and become obsessed with tapping it. This starts off as a pure knowledge-based initiative, but gradually turns into an insatiable lust for power. By the end, your civilization's goal is to tear the veil between reality and the Shroud, unlocking unimaginable volumes of energy, which your population will use to transcend to a higher plane of existence.

Mechanically, you progress this by upgrading a megastructure called [checks the wiki] the Aetherophasic Engine Frame. You need enormous quantities of Dark Matter to upgrade it: 20,000 to start and a total of 140,000 in total. You get that Dark Matter by using special Star Eater ships; these are basically like the Death Star from Star Wars, but instead of blowing up planets you blow up stars, turning them into black holes and destroying all planets and anomalies in the system.

Blowing up a star also returns the system to being unowned, and it's a very melancholy feeling to see blank stretches beginning to march across the galaxy map, an inversion of the expansion of color that drives the early game.

At certain phases of the upgrade, Psionic Avatars will invade the galaxy. I'd assumed that they would only target my empire, but from scanning the galaxy map I noticed that they can appear everywhere, adding a hostile threat that impacts the whole galaxy. This makes me think again of FfH2, where threats like the Horsemen and Hell Terrain impose such specific universal harms that all empires are strongly incentivized to oppose the evil, even beyond the compelling motivation of not wanting to lose the game.

Overall I found the situation relatively easy to deal with. I'd completed my Gateway network, linking my capital together with heavily fortified Citadels on the borders of my empire. The Citadels alone could repel the periodic invasions from Holy League attackers, possibly with a couple of Defense Platforms lost, or I could quickly crush them by rushing through a fleet. The Psionic Avatars just lurked in their systems and were easily hunted down by my large fleets.

The biggest threat I faced were the Fallen Empires. I had two in this game, the Shard of Xenophobes and the Progenitors of Xenophiles. The Shard declared on me soon after I became the Crisis, and I wasn't sure why: their war goal is the standard lebensraum, but I'd carefully avoided ever expanding next to them. I did pick up a vassal who was a pre-FTL civ that has spawned right next to the Shard; I don't think that counts as one of my systems, but if the Shard had declared on my vassal maybe I'm the one who gets the war declaration? Or maybe they just declared because of the huge opinion malus ("Trying to destroy the galaxy: -1000") and the game used their existing standard text instead of a new one.

As usual, war against FEs is a little wonky; for decades their Economy and then their Fleets were considered "Pathetic" next to mine, but their Technology was still "Overwhelming", which means that their total power is a lot stronger than it looks on paper. Fortunately, FEs still have absolutely miserable AI for combat. They weren't quite as dumb this time as in the past: at least they were attacking my systems instead of flying to the opposite edge of the galaxy for no apparent reason; on the other hand, they tended to fly forward, take a system or two, then pause, return home for no apparent reason, and pause before trudging back to where they were before.

The Shard had two fleets, one of about 240k and the other around 120k; the bigger one zoomed straight into the northeast quadrant of the map, which I had carefully colonized behind the FEs, and had under-protected with Starbases since I hadn't planned to initiate any wars with them. So before long this fleet was hovering over a planet of mine and a scary stack of Space Marines was heading near them to drop.

Fortunately, the smaller fleet popped through a wormhole into the southwest quadrant of the galaxy and started making its way towards a chokepoint with a Citadel. I carefully timed out their arrival, then moved in my entire navy, 3 full fleets of battleships and another 3 fleets of corvettes. (Well, not QUITE entire - I had the Gray warform defending one Star Eater and a fleet of corvettes defending the other one. But most of them.) Despite their superior tech, I quickly overwhelmed them.

As usual, I was briefly tempted to continue fighting for a Victory, but quickly talked sense into myself for a White Peace. On paper I had a much higher Fleet Power, which gave a bonus for acceptance, and that single battle (which only actually destroyed a single Battlecruiser and two Escorts but sent a lot more MIA) gave something like 50% War Exhaustion. The calculus could have swung dramatically if they took a planet from me, so I was pleased to call off the war before that happened.

A year or so later, the Progenitors also declared war... against the Holy League! I'm still baffled why and how this happened; the Xenophiles are incredibly easy to get along with. But now my main opponents were fighting THREE wars: against the half of the galaxy in the Cosmic Pact, against little ole' me who's just trying to destroy the universe, and against an incredibly powerful Fallen Empire. The Progenitors swiftly took control of most of the Androj Commonwealth, the most powerful remaining empire in the Holy League.

In the meantime, I'd steadily been marching my Star Eaters through Holy League territory. I think you can destroy any star, including ones you own yourself, but I wanted to keep my existing empire intact. I was focusing on my former allies, although I would also blow up systems that they owned but the Cosmic Pact controlled during their war.

The graphics for blowing up stars are really cool. At first glance Stellaris is a typically stale Paradox UI, just a map with a ton of icons and text, and that's definitely the view you'll be looking at for 99.99% of your playtime; but when you do zoom in on systems, they can be quite beautiful, and space battles can look incredible, with lots of lights and effects. Whenever you open a system whose star has just been cracked, you'll see a remarkable explosion as the star explodes and the lights go out; I eventually realized that there's an ongoing animation for the entire process, where you can watch the Star Eater gradually powering up and emitting its beam and the desperate struggle of the astral entity to survive.

The free-for-all wars gradually wound down. The Holy League made peace with the Progenitors, at the cost of Humiliation, significantly harming their effectiveness. Hostilities with the Cosmic Pact wound down soon after. I was curious if the former Pact members would now join the war against me; they did not, although I was already near the end and maybe they would have once the truce ended or something.

I did have another war against the Shard. They immediately declared war the instant our truce was up, without sending me any demands first. This time I was prepared for their maneuvers, and I patiently waited for them to reach one of my armed-to-the-teeth citadels before teleporting in my entire fleet, wiping them off the map, and then quickly calling for a White Peace.

MEGA SPOILERS

A few other story beats continued to play out as I approached the end. There's an event where a massive psychic backlash emanates from the Shroud; according to the wiki, this should kill some random Psionic pops and Psychic leaders, but apparently since I had taken the Psionic Ascension we were prepared for that eventuality and didn't suffer any consequences. That was cool; some of the writing for BtC can feel a little odd as a Psionic Ascension empire since it sounds like the Shroud is a new and mysterious realm when we've actually been dipping in there on the regular for well over a century. But it was really neat to see specific reactions to our particular situations.

At long last, we finished upgrading the last stage of the frame and: Boom! The entire galaxy exploded! The energy released from the Shroud detonates all of the remaining stars in the galaxy, incidentally killing every living and mechanical entity throughout existence. Very dark, literally, but also really cool to see. In  my games I'm usually the one saving the universe from destruction, so it's neat to see what destroying the universe looks like!

Probably my favorite thing about Becoming the Crisis is that it very definitively ends the game at a specific point in time. In past Stellaris games, I'll often beat the Crisis with, like, 30 or 40 years left in the game, which means that if I want to record my score I have a very boring couple of play sessions where I'm just playing on high speed, typically ignoring all the empire management stuff and running out the clock. There was none of that here, just a big BOOM, then a nice clean map full of black holes with absolutely nothing to take my attention besides quitting.

END SPOILERS

Stellaris is one of those games that I can keep coming back to over and over again, a good combination of familiar and novelty. The core game mechanics have felt really fun for years, the randomness keeps things interesting, and the steady advancement of game updates and new expansions add lots of fun new bells and whistles. It would be a perfect "desert island" sort of game to just play over and over again; since it's always competing against other, often newer games that I want to play, I tend to go for years between campaigns, and it feels a little like a new game each time I come back to it.

Lately I've kind of had my eye on a couple of other Paradox games: Hearts of Iron IV and Vicoria 3 are both set in places and during times that I've lately been fascinated by, and I love the idea of playing as, say, Spanish Republicans during the Civil War or creating a socialist utopia in 1860s Germany. But do I really need yet another game that has dozens of DLC that I could easily play for hundreds of hours? Probably not, but that doesn't stop me from dreaming!