Corporate Overlords

Stellaris has lately occupied the place for me that Civilization used to hold in the 90s and 2000s: the strategy game I keep coming back to in between other gaming ventures, endlessly replayable, with a long personal list of variations I want to try and new victory conditions to achieve.

 

One of the things that kept Civilization fresh was periodic expansion packs, typically two or three per main entry. Stellaris has far surpassed that, with 18 pieces of DLC and counting, ranging from minor cosmetic additions to major overhauls of systems or new dimensions of play. Thanks to the largess of my brother Andrew, my latest game included two brand-new (to me) big expansions: Megacorp and Nemesis. I'm not quite finished with that game, but I've defeated the Crisis (which arrived in 2420, a new record for me!) so it should be smooth sailing from here on out. This post mostly focuses on the "new" things, with some coverage of said game.

In order to get the most out of the Megacorp expansion, I decided to play as a Megacorp. In future games I won't necessarily do that; I see now that the expansion adds a lot more stuff besides literal Megacorps, so I wouldn't have been missing out if I'd gone with something else. That said, Megacorps are really interesting to play as, particularly for diplomatically-oriented playstyles like mine. Megacorporation is a new government type, roughly equivalent to an Oligarchy but with a unique set of civics to choose from. There are a few minor changes to diplomacy; in particular, you can't vassalize other empires or make protectorates or tributaries, but you can make them Subsidiaries: you agree to defend them, and they pay 25% of their Energy income to you.

The defining feature of a Megacorp, though, is Branch Offices. You can open Branch Offices on planets settled by other civs that you have a commercial pact with. This costs an amount of Energy and Influence scaling with the distance from your borders. Once established, you earn Energy income based on the Trade value of the planet. You also gain the ability to build Megacorp Buildings in your branch office. These are usually symbiotic buildings that give a benefit to both the hosting empire and to yourself. My personal favorites were:

• The Commercial Forum gives them a Merchant job and you 25% more income from the planet.
• Corporate Embassy gives them a few Clerk jobs and boosts your Diplomatic Weight, increasing the Economy part by 5%.
• Mercenary Liason Office gives them a Soldier job and their armies from this planet some extra starting XP, and giving you more Naval Capacity.
• Temple of Prosperity gives Prosperity Preacher Jobs and increases Spiritualist Ethics Attraction (more on this below).
• Xeno-Outreach Agency gives them a boost to Trade Value and increases your empire's Immigration Pull.
  

There are a lot of other building options, but most of them give you a flat amount of resources like some Minerals or Food, which I didn't find very useful; a boxed-in Megacorp that can't expand on its own might find them useful, though. You are limited to constructing a maximum of 4 buildings per planet, though, and less than that based on the level of the capital building. There are some pretty interesting factors to consider when planning the buildings. Some, like the Commercial Forum, provide more value based on the wealth of the planet. Others, though, provide a flat bonus regardless of the Trade. In my game I only opened Branch Offices on high-value planets, but I could definitely see an argument being made for always opening them, and just focusing on the right bonuses for each planet.

My empire was named the Hanar Mercantile Guild, but on further reflection we were basically space Scientologists: a ruthless for-profit religion that collected staggering sums of money from the entire galaxy, and poured the proceeds into real estate and further expansion of our evangelizing. Specifically we followed the "Gospel of the Masses" and "Free Traders" civics, later adding "Mastercraft Inc." as our third one. I took Fanatic Xenophile for the large 20% Trade bonus, but the extra Envoys also came in very useful when buttering up other civs to approve commercial pacts. I opted for Spiritualist mostly to get the Gospel of the Masses civic. This was my first game taking Spiritualist as an ethic, but all of my games so far have included large Spiritualist populations: due to my xenophile playstyle, I sign agreements with Spiritualist empires and inevitably get a crabby Spiritualist minority to placate. Gospel of the Masses gives you bonus Trade for every Spiritualist pop on your planet or on a Branch Office. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I was the only empire in the entire galaxy to be Spiritualist! I had my work cut out for me. These dianetics weren't going to e-meter themselves.

 

I selected Hegemon as my Origin so I could bootstrap a Trade League. As with my other Federation or Hegemon starts, I was prepared to restart if I had a bad position or allies, but this one was pretty good. The Jesselniks had plenty of room to expand to the west, the Bosh'tun were soft-boxed-in by a xenophobic fallen empire to the south but could still grow a bit, and I had lots of room to grow east. I put all of my starting Envoys into supporting the Hegemony, until my Cohesion got up to 100, at which point I convinced the other two starting civs to reform into a Trade League. There is huge synergy between the Trade League and Megacorp: automatic free commercial pacts with all members, bonuses to trade value, trade route protection, and so on.

 

Another huge advantage of the Trade League is that it unlocks a unique Trade Policy that combines Consumer Benefits with Marketplace of Ideas. So each Trade gives you 0.5 Energy, 0.25 Unity and 0.25 Consumer Goods. I ran that for most of the game, which lets you cruise through Ascension Perks and avoids a common early-game resource bottleneck. Before long I was running a large and consistent surplus in Consumer Goods. Fortunately, Megacorps have discounts when trading on the Galactic Market (and even bigger discounts when they host the Market). In the past I've manually sold large batches of items when I hit my limit and built Resource Silos on starbases to increase my capacity. This time I was good about setting up automatic monthly trades, selling off excess items (consumer goods, food) and buying useful things (alloys). There's a little bit of micro involved there thanks to the fluctuating prices, but overall it let me run a leaner and more efficient economy without huge stockpiles of useless goods. Eventually, though, I was offloading so many consumer goods that their value had cratered to something like 0.1 energy per good, so later in the game I swapped back to pure Wealth Creation. I still had a surplus of Consumer Goods and my income skyrocketed.

Trade is huge for megacorps. In all of my other games of Stellaris, trade has been something you passively acquire as you build city districts: you hope to keep as much of it as you can, but it's a mildly beneficial side-effect. For megacorps, though, it's absolutely worth focusing on trade: you can get a lot of trade multipliers, so clerks will generate more energy than the equivalent technicians would. You also have the flexibility of adjusting your trade policy and directly converting trade into unity and consumer goods (assuming you're in a Trade League, which you should be). You also have easier access to Merchants, giving a further boost to trade generation. But all of this means insane Piracy levels thanks to the extremely lucrative trade routes back to your capital. Fortunately, there are several Federation perks and Galactic laws that can increase your base trade protection, but even so my navy was kept busy for a long time while I desperately hunted the Gateway technology.

The boosted Trade can feel borderline broken at times. One big example was dealing with Fallen Empires: they could have Overwhelming Technology and Fleet Power, and still be ranked as Pathetic relative to me due to the insane strength of my Economy. This let me do some stuff that I would otherwise never get away with, like colonize systems adjacent to the Fanatic Xenophobes.

 

One complaint I'd read online was that if you play as a Megacorp, you inevitably end in a galaxy with multiple other Megacorps, which isn't fun since they'll aggressively open their own Branch Offices and block you from expanding your corporation. I'm not sure if that's changed or if I was just lucky, but I didn't encounter any other megacorps in this game.

 

As I said above, the Megacorp expansion adds a lot of stuff besides the titular Megacorps. The Caravaneers are fun; somewhat like the Curators from Distant Stars, they're a unique Empire with a more story-based Diplomacy interface and some cost/reward choices to make. They remind me of Ferengi from Star Trek, eager traders who love commerce. You do need to keep on your toes, as some of the deals are good but many are objectively bad. There's also a bunch of related events that can trigger when they're around, some of which have very rewarding outcomes. I didn't luck out on any of the mystery boxes I purchased. Very late in the game I was bored and decided to destroy their home base, which ended up being really fun and funny: in addition to some instant loot, you also gain a permanent increase to your Opinion with all other empires, and unlike everything else in the game it does not decay. Furthermore, shortly after you destroy their base, they'll pop back up again in an adjacent system, where you can destroy them again, and collect more loot and a stacking opinion bonus!

 

Megacorp also adds a bunch more Megastructures. These don't require taking an Ascension Perk, which is a nice change from the ones Utopia added. I acquired basically every new structure other than the Mega Art Installation. I conquered a ruined Sentry Array and restored it, built a Strategic Coordination Center (which boosts your naval cap, starbase cap, defense platforms, and sublight speed) and an Interstellar Assembly (boosting diplomatic weight and opinion). I also made the Science Nexus and the Mega Shipyard as usual.

 

One minor gripe I have with the game is that so many big parts of the game only come at the very end of the tech tree. By the time you can start actually building your first megastructure, you're researching future techs. It feels weird to build a Science Nexus after you've already learned all of the unique technologies. And while the Interstellar Assembly is cool, by the time I could build it I had already passed the "I Am The Senate!" threshold of running roughshod over the entire galactic community. Instead of the megastructures requiring a lot of investment and then propelling you forward (as with Civilization Wonders), they're built by empires that are already ahead of everyone else and then ensure that nobody could possibly catch up. I'm not necessarily complaining, since I like being ahead, but I think they would be way more interesting if they were available earlier in the game.

While Megacorp made big obvious changes to my game from the very start, the Nemesis expansion didn't really become a factor until later in the game, but I liked that. The mid-late game tends to be the least exciting, so anything that shakes that experience up is good!

I'd previously played a game with the Espionage system. Somewhat like how Federation unlocks many more options related to Federations, Nemesis unlocks most of the functionality of espionage. I think I like it. It gives you some levers to interfere with other countries without actually going to war with them, which is a good match for the types of games I typically play. The base-game Gather Intelligence is borderline useless, but the Nemesis-only Operations can be pretty cool, especially options to steal technology or to poison relations between two allies. The main downside is that espionage eats up a valuable Envoy; but as a fanatic Xenophile I was swimming in envoys, and would often park them spying on my biggest rivals while I wasn't completing First Contacts or building up Cohesion. Broadly, espionage gives you something different and potentially useful to do.

The Traditions were a bit different this time around; thanks to the extra tree offered by Nemesis, I had to choose which ones to pursue. For the first time ever, I did not choose Discovery: science is incredibly useful, but I tend to take a commanding science lead relatively early in the game, and I (correctly) believed that I would do well even without taking this. I grabbed Expansion early to support my rapid growth out, finished Diplomacy to soften up other empires to join my Trade League or at least sign a Commercial Pact, took Mercantile to further supercharge my Trade, and filled out with all-round strong traditions like Prosperity, Domination and Harmony. 

Likewise, I did not take Technological Ascendancy like I normally do. I explored some brand-new ones I was curious about, like Consecrated Worlds to support my Spiritualist faction, Universal Transactions to supercharge my Megacorp orientation, and Xeno-Compatibility to benefit from the influx of immigrants I was receiving. For the ascension path, I took Psionic Ascension again. I've always enjoyed this one for the writing, but by the end of this game I realized that it would work much better for a xenophobic empire. Psionic is a very powerful trait, but only your founder species gets it, so you'll be much better off if 100% of your pops are Psionic than if only 5% are. Similarly, Psionic Leaders are amazing, but in my game I had to cycle several dozen new leaders before a Psionic one would pop. And unfortunately it looks like Xeno-Compatibility won't pass down the Psionic trait to hybrid species, so that particular combination wasn't nearly as useful as I had hoped. I have yet to try the Synthetic or Bio ascendancy paths, so I'll probably try one of those the next time I play a Xenophile game.

 

MINI SPOILERS

This is my third time opening the L-Cluster and my third time discovering the Drakes. That's a pretty good outcome, but according to the wiki it should only happen about 20% of the time, so that's a little weird. I'd like to experience something different in a future game. Likewise, I got the Unbidden again in this game, maintaining a 100% streak of encountering that particular Crisis. It isn't too surprising since I always ban robits and always discover jump drives. I might shoot for a full synth game in the future to try and trigger the Contingency, or maybe just use my Game Settings to invoke the Scourge. As with my last game, this one (on Captain) was pretty anticlimactic. I had a Federation Fleet, a Galactic Fleet, and a bunch of Battleship Fleets. They all flew to the Unbidden insertion point within a couple of weeks and wiped them all out by the time they'd taken three systems. It's a far cry from my first victory, where I desperately retrofitted all of my surviving ships to properly outfit them to counter the Unbidden's shield-and-laser build.

 

END SPOILERS

Since then I've mostly been amusing myself with Galactic Community shenanigans. I got myself appointed Galactic Custodian (even before the Crisis triggered) and have mostly gotten my way, but not always! A new wrinkle of the latest game version is that when you send an Envoy to Improve Relations and have the appropriate Diplomatic Tradition, there is a small chance each month that the Envoy will earn a Favor from that empire. Now, in the past I've bought up Favors and used them to achieve diplomatic agreements or persuade a federation vote. But they can also be used to add 10% of the other empire's Diplomatic Weight to your own vote in a Galactic Council vote. Which is a long way of saying that, if a total of 10 Favors are called in against you in a vote, then it will completely wipe out your own position: even if you have more Diplomatic Weight than everyone else combined, with enough Favors they can block your votes. Which feels a little frustrating, but also kinda exciting, as it's a rare example of a catch-up mechanic in Stellaris.

 

I can't really blame them for trying to block me, though: everyone was mostly cool, even when I was voting more powers to myself, but my big scheme was to push through the Divinity Of Life series of resolutions that boost Spiritualism and slow down and eventually ban robotics. Again: I was the only Spiritualist empire in the entire galaxy: more than half of the others were Fanatic Materialists, and quite a few had started Synthetic Ascension, so it really was a matter of life-and-death for them. I failed a couple of times on the vote, which always has a 20-year timeout before you can re-propose. I vigorously used my Council and Custodian powers to hustle votes open and closed as soon as I could, trying to burn off opposing favors faster than they could be re-acquired. This late in the game I actually had an Influence surplus, and once it reached the 1k max I re-proposed the Divinity proposal. I cashed in a bunch of opponent Favors, which were much smaller than mine but were able to counteract the 6 or so against me. I kept a close eye on the vote, and as soon as I could gavel the session closed I did so. There was much howling and gnashing of teeth, but that same proposal weakened the diplomacy of the Materialist opposition, so I needn't fear its repeal. Already the winds of change are blowing, as civs are finally joining me in embracing Spiritualism and paying for their audits.

I have a while left to go in this game and am not sure if I'll run out the clock, end it, or try for something big. I was tempted to try and become the Crisis in the 75-80 years I have left; I'd saved my final Ascension Perk just in case I decided to pursue that.  But you can't become the Crisis as a Xenophile, and I'm Fanatic. Doing the ethics shift would be pretty tedious, so I might save that for another time. Although, there are ethics shifts if I decide to become the Galactic Emperor, or if I get a "lucky" roll in the Shroud and get a Chosen One, so... we'll see.

 

I am glad that I was able to more-or-less wind up this game when I did. A new update to Stellaris is imminent, and it looks like it will be pretty disruptive. But potentially really good! The focus is reworking Unity, which sounds amazing to me. In every game that I've played I finish with a ludicrous surplus of Unity: all ascension perks claimed, all Unity Ambitions active, and still millions of Unity points piling up with nowhere to go. And that's without ever building any autochthon monuments or otherwise focusing on Unity: in this game, with the Spiritualist boost and Priests, it was even more ridiculous. Anyways, the change is wide-ranging, but it seems like the gist is that Unity will be used for intra-empire activities that have previously cost Influence: stuff like deciding elections, reforming the government, issuing edicts, managing factions and so on. Influence will continue to be used for extra-empire activities, like making claims, building Outposts, proposing Galactic Community resolutions, and so on. I'm sure it will take some getting used to, but in principle I think it's a fantastic change that makes sense and will keep both resources valuable.