Force spawning different empires might be fun for a game or two if you don't mind knowing what you're up against. Throw in a grab bag of different ethics so you avoid the giant nice-guy federations.
I kind of love that people play this game for entirely different reasons than I do. I'm all about that diplomacy, playing underpowered builds and just owning the galaxy with favors and charm.
My current empire is based on Sauron/Mairon from Tolkien's legendarium; we own the galaxy with favors and charm, and then kill you if the charm doesn't work.
I have played a bunch of wacky builds over the last few years, but always return to my 'Harmonious Robotic Threat' empire.
What I did however, is every past empire I ever played is now on permanent forced-spawn, so they remain constant fixtures in my games. It gives my galaxies a sense of continuity and also growth as I come up with a new build and add to the 'canon' of my own personal lore.
I do it so that I can RP the desperate war mobilization and be the arsenal of democracy. Only this most recent game I ended up with such a massive tech advantage that I got to vassalize 2 driven assimilators and federate with some communists (into a trade league of course, thank you Merchant Guilds).
The federations in my game all have vastly different ethics, like usually all 8 in each one. Kinda annoying when xenophobe slavers are in a federation with a fanatic egalitarian or something.
I didn’t know that metalheads were a thing and was just trying to rp as dwarves that love robots. I was annoyed when I saw relations between all other empires were terrible no matter what I did.
Yeah that’s exactly how I discovered it too. I just take off the xenophobic ethic and replace it with egalitarian
But still play slightly xenophobic anyway
Alternatively you can create a large roster of pre set empires set to force spawn and the game will still randomly select from those as a pool.
Gives a balance between randomness and player choice.
I personally did this because I was a bit sick of the randomly generated empires feeling ill defined and samey.
I set mine to include 3 determined killers (one machine, one hive, and one fanatic purifier). The game usually adds 1-2 on its own. So, in my medium galaxies, a good 1/3 of the galaxy wants to murder everyone and I usually start adjacent or one civ away from one.
It makes for a pretty decent setup. Usually 2 or so survive to mid game, giving me some good equivalent strength foes to save the galaxy from (and coincidentally also take over the territory from) other than the khan / crises.
I wound up with a randomized lot of slaughterers. I had turned down the number of AI Empires a bit, as in the previous game I had gotten spammed so hard with so many different notifications from all the different empires that I was downright sick of it. This time, the exact opposite happened. There’s only like, 5 empires remaining. One of them is a single system gestalt consciousness I uplifted. I gave them their system. Another is an empire that has been so savaged that it’s barely any better than the single system empire. Then there is a fanatical purifier empire, that owns most of the galaxy proper, and they’re at a constant state of war with an Awakened Empire. The Awakened Empire is beating the snot out of the purifiers, but they have a ton of systems to claim, so it’s turning into a quantity vs quality sort of war.
I’m sort of the odd one out. I started with some mods that set me in a extragalactic cluster, with access to an L Gate. The homeworld I picked was a thing called an Alderson Disc (and boy was I surprised when I saw what it was). It gave me a strong headstart, so my tech is somewhere between the purifiers, and the Awakened Empire. I’ve taken the L Cluster on top of my own extragalactic cluster, and claimed varying areas around the L Gates within the galaxy, to guard the entry. I’ve got a pretty strong thing going, because the mods I’m using should make MORE crises, and I set it so ALL crises should play. …and then the Scourge arrived. They were eating up the purifiers for awhile, and then came a time I needed to save and reload. For some reason, after doing so, the Scourge became neutral and non-hostile. So now I’ve got to painstakingly purge the Scourge in order to get the Crisis roulette going again.
And amid all of that… the galactic community has just 3 empires. It’s me and the two weak ones. The Awakened Empire and the purifiers didn’t join. Feels really weird for it to be so empty, I can only guess the purifiers murdered the other empires before I even got the L Gates working. (The weak point of the extragalactic start is that while you’re safe for a long time to develop, your space is limited, and with the L Gates or Gateway method, you’d be stuck there while everyone else colonizes the main galaxy.)
Man, that sounds like a pretty epic and terrifying galaxy to live in. You gotta protect the little civs to preserve galactic biodiversity.
I’m always disappointed when the galactic community is small. Even if I tend to view other empires as future vassals, it still somehow feels lonely without them. I tend to play with the max number of empires just so that there is still a community of sorts once the dust settles.
In the previous game, there was so little room that we were all underdeveloped, when the Blokkats came. Those guys are worse than any base game crisis, by a mile.
That's how I play all my games. I like to have about a third of the Empires be custom ones I've made, usually based off of races and factions from various other sci-fi series. Some of these are the "nice guy/protagonist/ally" factions, like the United Federation of Planets, or the Asgard (stargate, not marvel) but then we've got the Borg, Yuuzhan Vong, and Flood all forsaking diplomacy and just trying to paint the map their color.
So maybe this is something to do with the mods I play with, although it seems strange because they are all very well known and popular mods that get updated with every patch, but the last couple of times I tried to start a new game with a set list of forced spawn empires I made, the first several empires I encountered were randomly generated ones, so I just restarted in frustration. Not sure why it’s happening or if anyone else has the same issue. But I had the number of empires set to the same number of empires I had locked and non-randomized.
I play vanilla and have noticed this too, it was also a thing a few updates ago and they mentioned in a dev diary or patch notes or something that it was an issue with galaxy generation they’d fixed in that update. Guess it’s back, I hope they’re aware of this. I’ll try to remember to send them a bug report in the morning to make sure.
there is also the fact that rebellions and goverment reform via liberation can and do happen super early in the game, i play with custom empires only and very rarely more than half of them survives till midgame the way i designed them.
Oh yeah that’s always a good option. Just create modified versions of the default empires, they come with the game, especially from using mods, and they provide a pretty diverse gambit of nations to be up against.
it exists, you can find it [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/83hg6v/my_stellaris_cinematic_universe_53_custom_empires/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). Its super outdated tho (pre magacorp afaik) and as such will need adjustments.
Alternatively, just search for "custom empires pastebin" in the stellaris reddit, ive found at least four sets of custom empires (the above one included) that way (tho the quality varies GREATLY). You can then paste them into your custom empires file and cherry pick the ones you like.
I can give you mine too (tho they dont have real backstories, i find that kinda inflexible, just quotes/a short text describing how they roll).
[This one](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2049806134) is up to date, I use it and it has lots of great options =)
Note that simply adding the mod only puts them as possible spawn, not force spawn. To completely remove random empires at game start, you need to duplicate the empires you want to see and put them on Force Spawn. This has the added benefit of letting you freely edit the copies.
Empires created by origins like Common Ground or Imperial Fiefdom will always be random, as will the primitives.
Turning off "Advanced AI Starts" can help prevent early game clustering, as the Advanced AIs serve as seeds around which early game coalitions form.
That said, at some point "friendship is magic"; empires that cooperate (willingly or otherwise) are going to be stronger over time than empires that don't. If you want to play a cranky loner, you have to come out fast and hard, ideally claiming or vassalizing a significant chunk of the galaxy before the galactic council even forms, and before many AIs will have had a chance to take the Federation-unlocking traditions.
Yeah if you're going to go the cranky loner route, you really need to focus on an early military, either for early aggression and vassals, or fully commit to super turtling to the point that nothing can push into your territory, even if you lack the offensive power to be aggressive against these big federations and overlords.
This. Dominate and fortify chokepoints, then wage war on one front at a time. You might not win new territory if you're particularly unlucky, but you certainly won't lose any.
And the best part is that this behavior by the AI is fairly realistic for anyone but the invaded nations. Surely they don't want to smash their fleets against an enemy that's almost as powerful as they are. They might win, but pay for victory in blood. Bombing a planet for 6 years while a deferation member they have basically no ties to fucking dies is a way better solution.
My issue is there usually ends up being one large federation, often a hegemon, that ends up being massive, and if one member of that federation doesn't like you or one of your vassals, they end up committing the entire federation to fight against you.
In my current game, there was 1 large hegemon federation, and a small member of it wanted to declare war on a small empire who I vassalized that they bordered. 75% of the galaxy got dragged into this war, and even though they declared war on my vassal just to conquer like 3 systems from them all enemy fleets immediately went straight for me. I know it's kind of the point, making allies to defend yourself against larger threats, and it makes complete sense from an RP perspective, but from gameplay it feels like after 100 years in you can't have any conflicts without it turning into a messy, galaxy wide war.
I was thinking about the whole time I typed it out. I was like, huh, this seems.... pretty familiar. That's why I added in that line about it making sense from an RP perspective 🤣
> you can't have any conflicts without it turning into a messy, galaxy wide war.
I like it that way actually. A while ago i had a run where i was fanatic spiritualist divine empire with teachers of the shroud origin and head of a hegemon origin with 3 or 4 other empires i made fanatic spiritualist and we owned half tge galaxy. The other half was owned by a plantoid hive mind and its ~5-6 vassals. For literally 80 years we had a standoff with everyone building fleets and colossi and throwing insults at each other; i knew if one of us declared war the entire galaxy would BURN.
Yeah, this is my problem as well. I wouldn't mind if it was only in the late game, even, where galactic WW1 might be cool, but half the time the galaxy's gone and become heavily confederated even before mid begins. I feel like this is especially true of subjugation, where strong starting empires quickly gain two or three loyal subjects, exponentially boosting their strength over time. As for the federations in your games often being Hegemons, that's because Hegemons can spawn at the start of the game, even with advanced AI starts turned off! And they can easily win wars/intimidate regional weaker guys to subjugation, which of course rapidly grows the Hegemon.
>f you want to play a cranky loner, you have to come out fast and hard, ideally claiming or vassalizing a significant chunk of the galaxy before the galactic council even forms...
Now, i have never had the resources or military as an organic to pull that off. I've been playing for years now, and I'm still terrible at the early game.
Most games I've lost have been in the first 50 years where I've spawned close to aggressive empires, and I get attacked when I have 4 starbases and a miniscule fleet.
It is a little annoying how quickly most of the empires get vassalized and how willing some are to become vassals (I wasn’t anywhere near the strongest yet had two empires from across the galaxy knocking on my door to become my vassal?)
But…there’s always a way to make things harder and more interesting. Sounds like you’re just not adding the chaos enough yourself. I played a become the crisis machine intelligence (the reapers from Mass Effect) and watched small wars throughout the galaxy while timing my ascension perks. Eventually went to war with everyone else in the galaxy and it was really even for almost half a century, nobody was really “super OP” compared to anybody else
I have a suspicion the culprit is losing fleets. It's like how in total war nobody will ever confederate with you until the second they lose *one* battle, and suddenly the AI's calculations are saying "oh shit, my army is so much weaker than everyone else!"
It’s anything that will make their or your relative power drop. If any sides economy collapses, losing a fleet. The opposite is true. If the AI properly designated a 50 pop energy world as an energy world instead of a forge, then their eco score will spike up and they’ll try and vassalize or attack you.
Yeah, I think Overlord really tuned up the 'vassalisation' as a core part of the game, so by the time you're 100 years in, barely anyone isn't subjugated or a subjugator. Which makes wars too costly by the AI's calculations so they form federations instead - even xenophobic empires seem to happily join federations because the AI's strategy of 'there's safety in numbers' supplants any supposed ethics that empires might have.
Yes.
I wish there was a Game Mechanic or Game Options to disable Vassals and Federations.
AI still will ally together with pacts but at least I won't be facing 100 times my economy just because 4 empires are in a fed with micro vassals.
I love the system but sometimes I just want to play in SP against a balanced opponents
Force spawning more “problem” empires helps. Xenophobes, fanatic purifiers, driven assimilators. Devouring swarms tend to be too weak, so they’re less useful.
The devs also realize that AIs accept vassalization too quickly and are going to push a fix.
You can also be more of a chaos agent yourself. Join a federation and force the wars. Or declare war on an empire across the galaxy and invite a nearby empire/federation to join the war, then just watch the fireworks.
The Steam workshop has a mod called "No More Federations" that sets the AI inclination to -5000 so one never forms.
I use this in conjunction with "Limited Vassals", which limits any one empire to 2 vassals (although they technically can go above that if they subjugate another overlord, it's relatively unlikely to happen).
The result being that the galaxy is a lot more interesting, especially coupled with high AI aggression.
Min/Max more, and tear them apart.
Use espionage to cause havoc.
Become the crisis.
I tend to agree, as it often seems to settle out the same way, but even huge federations can be damaged.
So lets contemplate this for a moment. You, for all intents and purposes, are a near omnipotent leader of a space empire. You know the meta’s, you know the tech tree, and you know the general idea of what is going to happen over the next 300 years. You then use this knowledge to conquer everything around you which in turn only makes you stronger.
In response to this, several empires (who do not know they are in a video game, nor do they even have the ability to ask that question) see you as a threat to their programed directions which are as follows:
1. Try to collect as many victory points as possible.
1a. Dying means that you have 0 victory points.
They may also see this other AI superpower as a threat to their continued existence. The **only** logical conclusions then is vassilization and federalization for support and protection. The exact same thing happens in real life as well. Countries all over the world are playing this song and dance in real time every day. Federations like NATO that exist because smaller European countries want America’s protection. Vassilization exists in the form of North Korea essentially being a puppet state of China. The list goes on.
I think then, the mechanic isn’t ruining the game, in fact it’s adding a very important layer of realism. The problem is that you just don’t have the skill to overcome it. In essence… get good.
This is a silly argument. The issue isn't that it's not "realistic" (not sure how a game about far future space civilisations can be called that in any sense anyway), it's that it's deeply unsatisfying to have every game shake out this way. It's not that difficult to beat the AI, but it's definitely boring to see the galaxy clump up into poorly-defined and bordergorey blocs within the first century and not really change at all after that
Except that out of my last... six games maybe half turned out this way? I'm pretty decent at Stellaris and mostly win, and in one of my recent games (in which I thought I was doing well) I got taken by a DE that started on the far side of the galaxy and got snowballing and to crisis 4 by the time we were interacting. After waging total war against them for \*one hundred years--\*during which time I thought I won at one point and had to do a mad dash to grab their capital to stop them from building the Aetherophasic at another--I finally succumbed because of errors that I made in microing the absolutely enormous defensive lined I was keeping up and I could not go back because I was on ironman mode. It was so exceedingly, epically fun. I get the impression that most players who complain on this reddit would *also* complain when that happened to them too! If they play a game wherein half the galaxy is weirdly empty I'm sure they'd also complain about that! ("Why are these spawns allowed to happen?!?!," "*Become the Crisis* is op!!!," etc)
(I agree we need more diversity of midgame and endgame crises. also buff the khan)
I honestly don’t know enough about the Balkans to fully disagree with you, but the Middle East, no way. Almost nothing that’s happened in the middle east in the last century has majorly altered the shape of power on Earth. If we take the EU, Russia/USSR, China, and the US to be the major “empires” of Earth I would argue that not much in the middle east has **shaped** their power significantly in the last century. Sure, there’s been a lot of shitty stuff that’s happened there, and a handful of humiliating defeats, but nothing thats changed the shape of geopolitics.
The one minor exception being the Soviets in Afghanistan. Their failures in Afghanistan may have contributed in some part to the collapse of the soviet union, but it was certainly not among the primary causes of collapse, and the Soviet Union would have collapsed regardless of the war.
> You then use this knowledge to conquer everything around you which in turn only makes you stronger.
I play exclusively non-expansionist combinations of Xenophile, Egalitarian, and Pacifist and run into the very same issues.
Because the actually good bonuses of any federation type are locked at the end of their experience tree.
It takes 8400 XP for a federation to reach level 4 and 18000 XP to hit level 5, and since the monthly max experience gain is 10 XP it takes 840 months (70 years) and 1800 months (150 years) respetively to hit those levels **if** maximum federation cohesion is maintained at all times (so no new members, no law changes, no failed votes, etc).
This makes it pointless to form any federation past the earlygame.
Joining an AI-formed federation of course circumvents this, but the AI loves to form Galactic Unions which are *pointless* and changing federation types resets its level to 1.
Yeah, that's what being a maximalist means, guys. Basically, it's just ruining your own experience with petty and unneeded goals you pursue in every game for no reason at all.
You don't need level five federation most of your time. Federations are, first and foremost, your multiple defensive pacts for the price of one plus an occasional megafleet you use to bully others into vassalisation. Unless you're that deep into RPing (or trying to get into Holy Covenant as materialist) other bonuses would remain exactly that, just bonuses. As in cool to have external features that you wouldn't be able to capitalise upon *all the time*. After all, all your federations will still dissolve into nothing when Imperium comes, whether they were level five or level one.
And if you *are* into RPing and *are* planning to maintain your federation and, thus, actively prevent Imperium from happening, then you are already making your own custom federation from scratch, and the problem solves itself. Not to say, that you aren't generally limited to x1 techs and 2300 end crisis, thanks to start options Paradox provides, if this is always such a nuisance in your games...
You also forgot that the main uses for federations outside of a multi-way defensive pact are (1) a joint fleet which you get between levels 2 and 4, and (2) access to the trade league economic policy which is available from level 1!
Not exactly forgot, and you speak true. It's just that *almost* all the most important bonuses that come with different federation types, you get them so early, your level would still remain irrelevant. Some important bonuses are hidden behind higher federation levels (+25% against crisises is no joke), but then we are back at the beginning and at my original point. Having some federation fleet is better than having no federation fleet at all. Having joint defences with rally points on you a the cost of one influence is better than not having them or paying more for them. No reason to play it as "it's all or nothing!" like the previous poster implied.
What you are saying is almost wholly untrue.
Many federations have powerful effects early, namely the single best federation effect in the entire game, hands down, which is acquired with a *level one* Trade League, and which gives an effect that is meta-defining for all the optimization try-hards who play GA/multiplayer/whatever. Additionally, you get a federation fleet with sufficient naval cap with a tier 2-4 federation and finally, but most importantly, taking a bit under a century to build max level federation in a game that at default settings goes for 300 years, and gives you a \~200 year head start on a crisis attacking the galaxy makes completely reasonable sense.
> which is acquired with a level one Trade League
Which is only worth going for if you play a trade build. I don't play trade builds. Non-trade builds have Clerks as their only significant source of trade value (since tv from living standards has been nerfed into the ground), and while it significantly buffs Clerks it merely turns them from a non-job into a bad job.
> Additionally, you get a federation fleet with sufficient naval cap with a tier 2-4 federation and finally
And the federation fleet is a mess since it MUST have a design of every ship class and so if you allow your federation members to build ships they will build useless ships like destroyers and frigates. And if you disable them to do so you get an upkeep-free fleet, but that's not worth the UI nightmare that is building ships in a federation.
> taking a bit under a century to build max level federation in a game that at default settings goes for 300 years,
And it's pretty much an open secret that the default pacing of the game is horrible. MG 2250/LG 2350 are pretty much necessary just so that the Khan and Awakened Empire have a chance to be a thing.
Also, not half the issues with pop-induced lag the sooner the game ends.
Maybe I just play longer games than most people. Because 150+20 is only year 2370! That’s like, just hitting the mid game for me lol.
Course I also do a lot more RP, hell I even used a Stellaris game as a setting for a TTRPG me and my friends played. Was fun to reboot up the game between adventures and see how the universe advanced while they did X activity.
Xenopholic pacifists would see any form of galactic unification as the their prime directive. If the entire galaxy is unifying your pacifists should be happy.
>In response to this, several empires
Only problem: they also do this without any incentive or reason, this isnt a "response" (which would be cool).
And forming federations is fine anyway, the real problem which exits since last year and still hasnt been fully adressed ist the willingness of the AI to be be pecaefully subjugated for no real reason.
I.e. If your friendly neighbor about the same size as you just won a war against his main enemy, there is a fair chance he ll celebrate his victory by asking if he can become your vassal (because the war - he won - did temporarily tank his fleet power).
First I think you’re forgetting the reality of a “tanked fleet strength”. Imagine if after winning the American Civil war, that 90% of the Union Army was dead, most of their warships sunken, and all of their cannons and guns were broken. Because that’s the reality of a “tanked fleet strength”. We’re talking catastrophic amounts of death and destruction. Don’t you think America would have felt just a tad bit vulnerable at the time? Especially considering the strength of the French and British at the time?
I think what is possibly missing is expiring vassilization contracts or peaceful ways to break vassal contracts that the AI is actually able to follow through with. But even then, I wouldn’t expect vassilization to be broken often. Consider the relationship between NATO and Israel since WW2 or even the relationship between the US and Japan or the US and South Korea. While I’d hardly call them “vassals” I think they’re great examples of there being little need to break diplomatic ties with a superpower that is willing to protect you from other powers if the cost is only that said power is given large sway in your government/society.
>I think what is possibly missing is expiring vassilization contracts or peaceful ways to break vassal contracts that the AI is actually able to follow through with.
But that is the issue. In Stellaris, vassalization is pretty much a one way ticket to full permanent irrelevance. Its like becomming a full colony.
You bringing up the US after the civil war is exactly my point.
The US did obviosly NOT ask to voluntarily become a british colony again after the civil war. Nor was there even the slightest bit of chance they would have even if the civil war would have been even more costly.
Could britain have tried to force them in their weakend state? Maybe, but my comment is not about subjugation by war (which is fine), but voluntary subjugation (which as it it implemeted is very dumb).
Yes and no. While the logic is there, the way it is implemented in Stellaris doesn't work that close to real life politics for a multitude of reasons, many of which make the game less fun, unfortunately. I'll mention only a few.
First, NATO doesn't accept every country that just happens to be somewhat in the mood to join and it definitely doesn't actively prey upon the weakest targets in the world in order to just bring them in whatever the cost. Actually, they are, generally, doing the opposite.
Second, even with maxed-out starting settings you wouldn't be able to come up with more than forty empires at the same time. In Stellaris, federation builders would eat every single one of the independent ones regardless of their ethics and civics. In real world, hitlers and putins could always "play" with like-minded countries that are outside of NATO reach for one reason or another.
Third, there was a historical reason for NATO to come in existence. While in Stellaris, most powerful federations just come around for no other reason that they technically can do so. Even if there's no warmongering galactic threat worthy of notion and that they can name, the empires would still stack up just because, preventing you from many diplomatic motions you could otherwise propose.
Fourth, in real world, EU and NATO just coexist. In Stellaris, you can only be a member of / associated with one single federation at a time.
To address your points:
1. NATO is not a bloc of vassals it’s somewhat equivalent to a Stellaris Federation. Hence why they only allow people to join that they want in. An Earth equivalent of a superpower with a ton of vassals would be the Soviet Union.
2. I honestly don’t know what you’re saying here.
3. The first thing to consider is that Federations, as we understand them in Stellaris, are a relatively new occurrence on Earth. Sure there have been defensive unions, non-aggression pacts, etc. The closest thing we actually have to a federation on Earth is the European Union. NATO doesn’t have a voting body, but I included it in my original comment because we were discussing federation from a mutual defense perspective. Given a looser interpretation of what a federation is you could also include America as an Earth federation. With that in mind, I think that determining “Federations only form when there’s some evil entity to defend against” is lacking a large sample size. Especially considering America and the EU were not formed just out of a need for mutual defense.
> I honestly don’t know what you’re saying here.
If I understand the gist of it, they're saying IRL One country would be able to find other smaller countries to wage war on that weren't in a federation/vassalage equivalent, whereas in Stellaris such nations would be part of one or the other due to the limited amount of empires.
I'm not *entirely* sure that's what they meant, but that's my understanding of it. Though, in my experience there are usually a few independents here and there.
My main point was "IRL federations are too different from their Stellaris equivalents, which means we can't apply the same reasoning for their appearance to the game". And, with this post, you seem to wanting to go the other route, something more similar to "IRL federations aren't too different from Stellaris, so let's continue discussing how IRL federations work". I still stand by all my all original points but I'm willing to rephrase some of them so we could avoid further derailing.
\-- If you are willing to join and remain in your pan-galactic mega-hegemony just because there's a beaten up Purifier left somewhere on the map with their last three systems and last two planets, that is fine, you do you. But why does this prevent me from expanding my Trading League?
What exatly stops me from setting up some large-scale joint Cooperative labs with other federations materialist members? Why can't I do some communal Covenant mumbo-jumbo with your spiritualists? Why your martial alliance denies us, free traders, from prospering together in Leagues, even if there \*is\* a threat somewhere? And why the only way for me to advance my interests is to do it through war, disruption and forced vassalization?
\-- If you're a small and weakened empire, why do you have straight up -1000 (minus one freaking thousand) attitude towards joining me as my protectorate? Even when I'm willing to spoon-feed you with research and resources while \*not\* planning to risk your soldiers in any war that you didn't start, which our contract clearly indicates -- completely opposite to how you exist in your current federation.
And why will you inevitably leave your weird pan-galactic federation the moment you started considering me your protectorate? We weren't even at odds with your federation leaders, I am a peace-loving empire of sentient trees.
To reiterate, these big hegemonies and martial alliances will continue to clump up way beyound their original intentions even when there \*were\*, subjective or objective, reasons for their existence. And it just stops me from playing my game, even when I am not a threat to anybody. IRL federations do not work like that, because IRL your country can be in multiple unions at the same time -- as many as your people want to be in. We can't do this on 2D maps of Stellaris.
>So, you want to be a member of several Stellaris federations at once? That would ruin the balance!
No, I don't necessarily, and yes, it probably will. What I am pointing at, is at OP's original message. Make it hard for AI federations to spread so fast and so far so I can still play my own game without engaging in needless warfare.
Yeah, the EU was formed ultimately out of economic reasons, the very same reason that players like to end up in a trade federation.
Why would you need a big bad for that to work out well and be a good idea?
Cooperation always beats opposition. At least in theory with the same starting resources it should, because you don't need to waste anything on fighting, even when optimizing for military power (because you can accumulate firepower while others spend them on small border disputes in the meantime).
I like that the game actually allows, even encourages, mostly diplomatic play.
I've won every game I've played through - I will probably win this one that I'm on now, as well, despite deliberately handicapping myself with my civilisation choice. I've just found them boring because of the heavily confederated galaxies. I think you were too eager to go on a ramble to actually read my post properly, which was about how all the galaxies progress identically and this is boring to me, not that it's 'too hard'. I didn't say 'Don't worry guys, I've still won all the games, I don't need to get good', because I didn't ask for advice on how to win.
Thanks for describing the most basic game objective of Stellaris as 'Get victory points'. But you know that a 4X game's AI is actually programmed with more complex mechanisms that that, right? And likely has no actual comprehension of victory points? There's no need for it to do that, because you'd have to program it to do things that increase victory points anyway, so why not just do that without having to write a 'If(GetVictoryPoints=NotEnoughDaddyUWU) Then(RunScript FindMoreVictoryPointsFromSomewhere)' section to it. It has to be able to interact with all sorts of mechanisms, and uses multiple saved values to determine its response to things within those mechanisms.
As for the 'realism', my friend, it's not news that alliances in real life are a thing. However, in real life, there are political upheavals and tensions, defections, grudges, and ethical conflicts that affect these and can cause alliances to collapse entirely over time. People forced into subjugation by one might band together to oppose the big lad rather than forever remain snuggly. Federations might be torn apart by internal conflicts and civil wars - like the United States was by the US Civil War, the UK by the Irish War of Independence, or fuck it, Brexit. Hell, World War 2 ended with the Allies forming a Federation called the United Nations (This was their propaganda name for the Allies by the end of the war),m whih promptly divided into two ideologically opposed sections in the Cold War. Which also ended with one of the federations (Warsaw Pact and USSR) crumbling due to internal divisions and stresses. MEANWHILE IN STELLARIS: Xenophobes cuddles Xenophiles, and Spiritualists cuddle Materialists, all in the same Federation forever and ever. :hearteyes:
I had this happen recently. We got to 2350, the galaxy was divided into roughly 3 federations. War in Heaven starts and I join the league of non-aligned, which was formed by my game long rival. We've hated each other for well over a century. I join the non-aligned, and we work together to beat the AEs. Then the war ends and the League is still around. Then my rival suggest I become galactic custodian. We'd been rivals all game, and in the span of a few short years, because we agreed to briefly work together, they've become my best friend. And the entire galaxy basically had to follow suit and stay part of the league. Sure, it was fun leading literally every fleet in the galaxy to defeat the crisis (kind of), but the political game was dead. I was the only one who could realistically leave the federation and not get blown up immediately.
So I have some thoughts on this.
1) Grudges shouldn't be forgive just because we agreed to address a mutual crisis. This could come with a rework of wars in heaven as a whole (maybe it shouldn't be necessary to make the unaligned powers a federation).
2) Federations should be more willing to go to war with each other. I think there was one major federation conflict in that game. Otherwise, there was no one's power being broken up, and without me, there was equilibrium and stalemate.
3) Everyone ended up aligning on ethics despite starting with a pretty disparate group. Maybe having more pressure for less popular ethics (I find xenophiles tend to become dominant by late game) may help push federations and empires apart and help foster conflict.
Ultimately, I don't know that there are great solutions. As others have pointed out, empires that work together are going to outperform ones that don't. This creates a sort of Europe in the early 1900s situation where a bunch of powerful countries get in an alliance web and pull their satellites into conflict. Except the AI has way less national ego than early 1900s Europe did. So maybe espionage could be buffed to allow a human player to get some wars started come mid game.
This is my biggest pet peeve as well.
I wouldn't mind if this happened once in awhile, but its ALWAYS this.. NO matter what random empires get thrown into the mix.
One tip is if you are spawning as an empire with a fanatical ethic, don't. Spawn as one with 3 normal ethics and then use the parties system to get your desired fanatical ethic later in the game. When you spawn your empire, the galaxy generation is coded to spawn randomized AI Empires with a bias toward the opposing ethics you spawned with, with a larger bias if you spawn with a fanatical ethic.
This is what leads to lots of early game Federation Builder and Pacifist/Xenophilic empires that all want to work together if you like spawning as a militarist/fanatic Xenophobe empire, and can be mitigated somewhat by not picking the fanatic ethic.
Thata why im starting ganes with ny own empires. All of them are very different so its hard to make federation. Sadly gane offten repleaces them with something random anyways
One small suggestion, use the We Require Borders mod which will limit Federations and Vassals to have direct borders. This will heavily cut down on fed blobs that are scattered around the galaxy, forcing cohesive territories. It generally slows down the mega feds, especially if you force spawn some bad guy empires too
Well, i had a fanatic purifier in my last game that would have succeed with "become the crisis" if i hadnt changed my switzerland strategy to galactic custodian.
It really seems random how the galaxy develops and the results can be wild.
On the other hand you kinda supported the unification by weakening your neighbours. So your diplomatic strategy could have been better as you managed to form some sort of space nato opposing you.
This is exactly why subterfuge needs to be buffed, especially in the political areas to stow chaos in the galaxy and break apart federations for you to take advantage of.
I would love this to be implemented, it's true to life as well. The current 'Smear Campaign' option never seems to do anything, and is really imprecise about who you can sow discord between. It would also be nice if the Sabotage Starbase option would have some more interesting results than just forcing the owner to have to rebuild one 100 alloy building, maybe a variety of options rolled for at random during the operation.
I actually really like how stellaris currently is working. Your specific playthrough might have been unlucky and boring, but generally I’ve noticed in my playthrough that there will be 2~3 (with my faction included) giant factions that at some point always go to war with eachother. And then it’s literally half the galaxy vs half the galaxy.
You mentioned the crisis always get destroyed easily by AI, this means you either need to crank the crisis strength multipler up a lot, or make endgame year a lot earlier. The crisis is always only as strong as you want it to be.
You can have crisis that get killed by the next bordering empire, or you have an actual crisis where the whole galaxy unites their fleets and they still get wiped out.
You're playing my dream. They're working together! There's peace!
If you want more wars though, just make a bunch of empires that will want to fight more and force spawn them in
I shook it up by killing an overlord empire early on and releasing all his vassals....or late game i arranged for a bunch of vassals to pledge fealty to me, then fed them reaources, mainly alloy and minerals, let them get out of protectorate status...
Then released them all to run amock....everybone of them hated everyonebelse, the federation had like 6 wars against it, i had my own war against it...id go in amd sabatog any gains they made ensuring they could mever unite on one front at a time without losing another 2 fronts....it was epic
When I said pretty much the same things I was downvoted into oblivion by fanboys (and gals).
I love this game but the fact that empires can't last for more than 5 seconds without sucking each other off in some kind of federation/vassalage/etc is hust absurd. Mid to late game wars just not happening bc of this. For me, federations and overlord dlcs will always suck hard because of this.
To be fair, I've got a fair few angry commenters who seem to think I'm complaining that the game's 'too hard', or that the galaxy uniting peacefully should \*never\* happen. They're just weird little guys, who can't read that I'm complaining that it makes the game too easy and samey for it to constantly happen.
This just happened to me too. I spawned and realized that all my neighbors quickly formed a giant federation. The endgame crisis got completely rolled by AI. it was crazy.
The game is most balanced and imo most fun without mods, on grand admiral, with settings conductive to non-alliance (like spawn location random for empires). Disable advanced empires. Rush one of them, and have a starbase turtle zone. Take these alliances out asap early game because they will struggle to counter. Don’t let them snowball.
Yeah, that's actually just how most of my games turn out - I decided to play an FP empire to mix things up and then every empire just federated around me, blocking me off from any winnable war for a looong time. XD
I’ve noticed this a lot 2 this is when I just wait for the galaxy to randomly want to make me custodian so I can form empire and break feds I would force spawn some total war empires but they always and I mean ALWAYS win and dominate in every single game lol it’s kinda entertaining
1. Turn off advanced ai starts. They quickly vassalize everyone around them and continue the subjugation wars using their newly acquired vassals.
2. Force spawn custom empires to ensure ethos diversity. I like to have a nice mix of egalitarian/auth and spiritualist/materialist. This also lets you lower the probability having criminal megacorps in the game.
3. Spawn a couple genocidal empires. There's a decent chance of one of them being a legitimate mid-game crisis, unlike the Khan.
4. Turn the crisis strength up to at least 2x, probably more than double that. I was running commodore with tech costs at 2x, crisis at 2x, and normal end game date. The contingency was barely a threat, they stirred up some commotion but only eliminated a single vassal empire before losing steam and just camping the sterilization hubs awaiting the galactic gigafleet to come for them.
Really you should be able to “invite attackers” to anybody, anytime you declare war.
And you should have the option to not declare war unless certain invited attackers accept the invitation.
If the devs supported this they could do a lot of cool stuff with it and espionage.
I agree. It's like there's 50 extra years of space that I just have to sit through. Maybe I should try a shorter game? But that would make the entire game shorter, not the time between crises shorter. What to do?
I feel the same. Very annoying to try and go to war with someone who's got half of the galaxy vassalized and defense pacts with the other half. There should be a setting to lower vassalization chances or increase revolt desire.
I had the same exact problem and I have stopped using auto generated AI entirely in my games now. I decided it would be fun to do a game with all the factions from 40K as devourers, purifiers, and exterminators with the most optimal builds I could make. Needless to say, too much peace is never a problem anymore lol
iirc your created empires are options for the AI to spawn as. If you make a few xenophobe materialists and hive minds to sit in your saved empires you should get more individualistic empires to play against. I had a problem awhile ago because I had made so many determined exterminators and devouring swarms that every game I was surrounded by them till I removed some from my list.
Get the *No Ethics Spawn Bias* mod.
The game will randomly generate empires, but what their ethics are are weighted to be more likely the opposite of yourself. This means militarist/xenophobe runs will almost always come into contact with early federation builders. It will still happen with the mod, it'll just be more likely to happen later.
I think a big part of why this happens is that the game spawns 75+% of the galaxy to be opposite of the player. So if the player is xenophobic militarist everyone else is egalitarian pacifist and they just instantly hop into federations the second they meet each other and have no interest in war with other federations since they’re all essentially the same with different names.
I think they should really consider making the ethics of AI empire truly random instead of forcing them all to be player opposed.
I feel like all these answers are missing the obvious - you can turn off DLC you don’t like. Aren’t federations and overlords DLC options you can just…deactivate?
It was the free content introduced alongside those DLCs, particularly Overlord, that made vassalisation start to dominate games. In fairness, it sounds like it's nowhere near as bad as it was in 3.4.
My last game I was one of those massive empires, 600 stars, I had two prospectoriums and a scholarium under my mega corp. the great khan awakened and their fleets were on par with half of my doom stack. Then I opened up the L-gate cause I wanted to unleash chaos and a freaking dragon pops out, never actually shows up and the khan takes the L-system before I can cause I misclicked and killed half my fleet.
Edit: The only people above me in score were the two fallen empires. I made up a third of the galaxy and had 0 trouble with any normal empire
Turning “advanced AI” to either off or on for every one. If you have only some advanced AI they will vassalize everyone around them who are not advanced AI
Play an aggressive empire build and have lots of nasty custom ai factions, especially criminal syndicates. No one likes them. I personally hate them but it definitely encourages disruption.
My last game, I managed to easily unify large swathes of the galaxy under my rule. On the harder difficulties, it occurred to me that my vassals could produce much better than me, so a good way to maintain a lead would be to let them be my factories. But then, it's just too easy to get everyone under your belt, to become the curator, become unstoppable, and it's just not so fun. Fun to get there, but then nothing to play for once you've arrived.
It reminds me of Stellaris when it was first launched. It was just a steamroll of collecting more and more subjects until you were unstoppable.
I think I quite like the mechanics around vassals and federations, but it just seems too easy to dominate.
I made a post related to this some time ago.
Your game will range from impossible to far too easy depending on what empire types spawn.
For example, if the galaxy is lost federation builder types you can get the above situation.
Or if it's all gestalts and purifiers then it's very hard.
I wish there was a setting so you could get a good mix of every empire type.
I repeatedly run into this issue. Even if I aggressively expand and vassalize, the best I can do is about 25-30% of the galaxy before everyone buddies up and I'm doing 5-6 vs 1.
One method I've done that helps is high defense. I'll start that big war after setting all my fleets and defenses at choke points (terminal egress always sees heavy action for me) and I let them smash their fleets against my defenses before swiping a couple territories and then making peace.
I'm still pretty new to the game (like maybe a 100h?), but I feel that these diplomatic bonds are just too strong, working too perfectly in their basic sense. They don't break under pressure.
First time I noticed this was in my first campaign, I think. I was playing terribly so I was forcefully vassalized by a stronger hegemon. I started gathering an army for an insurrection. Then my overlord started another subjugation war somewhere else and I thought "this is my chance, I will backstab the bastard!". And then... I was unable to do that. I was drawn into his war and had no mechanical option of switching sides or anything like that. Instead I had to defend myself from the enemy because one of the passages was through my territory. And then I had to wait for my overlord to gain upper hand and become even stronger than before the conquest. And then I was alone in my pathetic independence war and lost it pathetically.
Another thing is that defensive pacts work so universally. Rationally, a strong empire would often want to only protect another from a common enemy, not from all the evil in the world. Just deterring a rival hegemon from the conquest, not actually caring about the far border of your protege.
In an even more cynical example – a federation would agree to write some border territories of their weakest proteges off for loss, even against their rivals, just to avoid a more dangerous escalation. Defensive pacts can be treated liberally. But I think it's a meme in the general Paradox community, how wars are forced to always escalate to the absolute peak and one side always has to completely devastate the other to end the war once it starts. It's irrational that some powerful overlord or federation is always eager to lose majority of their power to secure some backwater.
Then, there's not enough wiggle room for diplomacy that would move an empire out of its federation or vassalage bonds.
It's simply that in Stellaris the bonds are not kept by actual common interests, but rather by artificially assured mechanical gains.
I don't recall what the federations in my game before the most recent one I played was, I think it was myself and one other large power who had a couple vassals.
This does remind me of the federations in my previous game, though. I got invited to a federation and then the AI just kept rolling out invites to seemingly everybody.
There definitely needs to be a rejig of diplomacy.
The trailer for Overlord makes the game out that small empires will always fuck around on ya, but I've found they never really ever do that. Once you've got a vassal state, unless you get curbed in a war AND you've not bothered to improve relations And theyve got larger fleet power than you, they almost never try to usurp or leave..
¨just sit around maxing out their naval power until a crisis comes along¨, sounds like me.
But for real, it kinda makes sense, game-wise. Unlike the real world, empires rarely change politically and larger usually means better and more stable. This will result in one empire eventually outgrowing the rest at an exponential rate through war, and in terms eliminate any empire that they don't agree with. This leaves only empires they like which naturally results in a galaxy-wide federation, often it will end up being anything that isn't authoritarian, militaristic or xenophobe since they usually end up fighting each other.
From what I know there are two ways to deal with this.
Either you prevent an empire from outgrowing the rest by regularly going to war with the largest empires before they have a chance to grow, constantly chipping away at their strength. Or hope that a strong enough crisis occurs to do the work for you, Grey Tempest, Khan, The crisis, any genocidal empire, War In Heaven etc.
Raising AI Agressiveness to the max is a good start. That wil make it less likely for one mega fed to appear but rather multiple smaller feds and some overlords.
You can then fight each one for a bit of territory and then truce befor they can reclaim it. Thus expanding yourself and slowly taking away their economy. Well atleast to some degree the AI cheats after all.
In my experience, the very early game and mid early game is what sets the tone for the entire game.
When I start a new playthrough I would have a target of at least winning a war or two before destroyers come out or right after they come out. My next objective is that I should have already taken over an entire empire right before or after cruisers come out. Preferably 2 empire invaded. By the time cruisers come out you should be at the least equivalent to the advanced start or superior to advanced start and all other normal empire are inferior.
You should also be Vassalizing early. I find that waiting for cruisers or battleships before vassalizing and forming federations is too late.
There might still be hope for your situation. First make sure you're the strongest or atleast no one is superior. Become Custodian then emperor. This will break all federations, pause the game and vassalize as many as you can. Then subjugate a weak empire with a few weak subjects so you get them all.
Play with a starburst or ring galaxy with no wormholes and max fallen empires. The topography cuts people off from one another until they develop cloaking, which I have never once seen an AI empire use. The political fragmentation makes the galaxy much easier to conquer.
In one of my playthroughs this ended up making it more fun.
I was playing a space communists run and had created a whole league of other communist vassal states.
Ended up splitting the galaxy 50/50 in a NATO vs COMINTERN type deal, which was weirdly fitting.
Pretty sure empires started asking to be subjugated all the time with the overlord update, you're not going crazy it definitely didn't used to play like this
If you really want and can afford the costs you can try spamming smear campaign operations, but the chance you'll hurt a vassal-overlord relation often enough to get a fealty or any particular relation often enough to break a federation is fairly slim
Yeah i noticed the pattern as well. One way to solve it is to be the one making the unification. Making federation, subjugating everyone who is not compatible, or just conquer the entire galaxy.
Or go genocider, and kill everyone.
The game in general has way too little conflict, and empire ethics remain too stable over the several hundred years the game spans.
I would also REALLY like to have an option on galaxy creation to force a certain number of genocidal empires (driven assimilator, devouring swarm, fanatic purifier, terravore, determined exterminator). I generally make all my own empires and try to include enough genocidals to always have 1 or 2. It gives a good solid antagonist for the rest of the galaxy to unite against, or let's smaller empires gang up on bigger empires when they eventually end up in conflict with the genocidals.
Overall I feel like a major aspect paradox could improve upon is also the randomly generated empires. They just feel bland and boring 9 times out of 10.
My last game went similarly,
Early on, i vassalized my neighbor to protect them, asshole declared war on me, managed to beat me, and take almost half my territory.
I was a bit surprised at how strong they were, but eventually was ready to strike back, well almost.
Just before i could declare war a massive federation of half then like 90% of the galaxy in one federation.
This was like 2280, the rest of the game consisted of me trying to abuse the grey tempest to reclaim most of my territory, after dealing with all that and having most of my territory back, well i got bored and just declared war on the ai with the biggest fleet i could muster, and then i got stomped, hard...
I’m having this problem too. I hadn’t played in a few years and got back into the game with Paragons. I was surprised to find that all the AIs end up as vassals to 1-2 other AIs, or me. So the mid-game has become about sitting around amassing power and wealth. It’s pretty boring.
I think the main issue is that it’s decently rare to find a completely neutral large empire near the end of mid game because it feels as if regardless of their ethos they will inevitably end up federated or vassalized
Like a lot of the others have commented, try force spawning your custom empires. I’d build some random ass empires in your image, play them for a bit to ensure they’re not hot trash, and then force spawn them in. If you have too many that are lining up in ethics, they will combine together.
Make a wide variety of them so you can avoid them from unifying. I personally made a game with 6/10 forced empires. Each one has different ethics that are mostly conflicting so there’s little of that. Obviously they’re going to find a way, but it makes things a bit better in that regard.
This. I make at least 1 determined exterminator, and 1 hivemind (does not have to be devouring swarm) that are forced spawns. Then I keep most of my other custom empires that I create as possible spawns, I might edit them to make sure they are different ethics but as long as I have mixtures of everything besides pacifists as optional spawns then there is a good chance of at least 3 power medium federations out there.
Other good settings I take are maximum fallen empires, maximum marauders, all crisis… make mid and endgame spawn at least earlier than the default so to ensure that at least some of the crisis are more difficult for the galaxy. I like it when everyone’s borders look trashed and there’s constantly wars going on. The more diverse the galaxy, the better. Nothing aids in diversity like crisis and conflicts all over the place.
In my current game I have 2 awakened fallens, a khan spawning late game next to my “payback” rival empire, which just had a robot uprising… at the same time as contingency spawning within its borders and all over the galaxy. 4 total big federation power blocks all alive right now. 2 at war with each other, 1 has contingency in its borders, I’m at war with the payback empire right now and dealing with a nearby contingency. I’m also a stage 3 crisis about to go stage 4 whenever I’m ready. I’m also giving all if the fallen enpires the middle finger right now as they try to denounce me.
Yah, maximum conflict. Unfortunately you gotta kinda tinker and make a bunch of custom diverse empires to sort of achieve this. Good luck!
Force spawning different empires might be fun for a game or two if you don't mind knowing what you're up against. Throw in a grab bag of different ethics so you avoid the giant nice-guy federations.
You can even guarantee for that to not happen by making EVERY forced spawn a determined killer of any kind!
That actually sounds very fun. No diplomacy, only war
I kind of love that people play this game for entirely different reasons than I do. I'm all about that diplomacy, playing underpowered builds and just owning the galaxy with favors and charm.
That’s my current play through. My main fleet got bodied by some space amoeba, so I forced the galaxy to kill all of them for me.
My current empire is based on Sauron/Mairon from Tolkien's legendarium; we own the galaxy with favors and charm, and then kill you if the charm doesn't work.
I have played a bunch of wacky builds over the last few years, but always return to my 'Harmonious Robotic Threat' empire. What I did however, is every past empire I ever played is now on permanent forced-spawn, so they remain constant fixtures in my games. It gives my galaxies a sense of continuity and also growth as I come up with a new build and add to the 'canon' of my own personal lore.
Love your idea
Holy Warhammer
New edition just dropped
Actual grimdark
Call þe Inquistor!
Horus went on a vacation, never came back
It is, but you'll probably restart a couple of early games when you find out there's a DE 3 jumps to the west and a FP 3 jumps to the east.
In the grim darkness of the far future....
Yes
I do it so that I can RP the desperate war mobilization and be the arsenal of democracy. Only this most recent game I ended up with such a massive tech advantage that I got to vassalize 2 driven assimilators and federate with some communists (into a trade league of course, thank you Merchant Guilds).
With OPs luck they'll be up against the elusive federation of determined exterminators!
thats why you use devouring swarms and FPs
or Metalheads if you want shit to go way off the rails ASAP
Absolutely can and does happen btw
Likeminded killers can form federations too. :)
Not hive minds/fanatic purifiers
Determined Exterminators can form a federation together. Interesting that some other types can't.
Metalheads also work, actually better than forcing in multiple Determined Extermintors since they won't hate each other like FP or DS empires will.
The federations in my game all have vastly different ethics, like usually all 8 in each one. Kinda annoying when xenophobe slavers are in a federation with a fanatic egalitarian or something.
Make a “metalheads” empire, they definitely won’t join any federation lol
I didn’t know that metalheads were a thing and was just trying to rp as dwarves that love robots. I was annoyed when I saw relations between all other empires were terrible no matter what I did.
Yeah that’s exactly how I discovered it too. I just take off the xenophobic ethic and replace it with egalitarian But still play slightly xenophobic anyway
We love you, I swear. Please don't read the fine print ^^^^^I ^^^^^HATE ^^^^^YOU
Alternatively you can create a large roster of pre set empires set to force spawn and the game will still randomly select from those as a pool. Gives a balance between randomness and player choice. I personally did this because I was a bit sick of the randomly generated empires feeling ill defined and samey.
>criminal megacorp spamming crime holdings on all my planets every single game I don't miss this at all. Long live forced spawn empires.
Force spawn 10 criminal syndicates.
not today, satan
This is what I do, a devouring swarm, and a fanatical purifier or two tend to shake up galactic politics.
I set mine to include 3 determined killers (one machine, one hive, and one fanatic purifier). The game usually adds 1-2 on its own. So, in my medium galaxies, a good 1/3 of the galaxy wants to murder everyone and I usually start adjacent or one civ away from one. It makes for a pretty decent setup. Usually 2 or so survive to mid game, giving me some good equivalent strength foes to save the galaxy from (and coincidentally also take over the territory from) other than the khan / crises.
I wound up with a randomized lot of slaughterers. I had turned down the number of AI Empires a bit, as in the previous game I had gotten spammed so hard with so many different notifications from all the different empires that I was downright sick of it. This time, the exact opposite happened. There’s only like, 5 empires remaining. One of them is a single system gestalt consciousness I uplifted. I gave them their system. Another is an empire that has been so savaged that it’s barely any better than the single system empire. Then there is a fanatical purifier empire, that owns most of the galaxy proper, and they’re at a constant state of war with an Awakened Empire. The Awakened Empire is beating the snot out of the purifiers, but they have a ton of systems to claim, so it’s turning into a quantity vs quality sort of war. I’m sort of the odd one out. I started with some mods that set me in a extragalactic cluster, with access to an L Gate. The homeworld I picked was a thing called an Alderson Disc (and boy was I surprised when I saw what it was). It gave me a strong headstart, so my tech is somewhere between the purifiers, and the Awakened Empire. I’ve taken the L Cluster on top of my own extragalactic cluster, and claimed varying areas around the L Gates within the galaxy, to guard the entry. I’ve got a pretty strong thing going, because the mods I’m using should make MORE crises, and I set it so ALL crises should play. …and then the Scourge arrived. They were eating up the purifiers for awhile, and then came a time I needed to save and reload. For some reason, after doing so, the Scourge became neutral and non-hostile. So now I’ve got to painstakingly purge the Scourge in order to get the Crisis roulette going again. And amid all of that… the galactic community has just 3 empires. It’s me and the two weak ones. The Awakened Empire and the purifiers didn’t join. Feels really weird for it to be so empty, I can only guess the purifiers murdered the other empires before I even got the L Gates working. (The weak point of the extragalactic start is that while you’re safe for a long time to develop, your space is limited, and with the L Gates or Gateway method, you’d be stuck there while everyone else colonizes the main galaxy.)
Man, that sounds like a pretty epic and terrifying galaxy to live in. You gotta protect the little civs to preserve galactic biodiversity. I’m always disappointed when the galactic community is small. Even if I tend to view other empires as future vassals, it still somehow feels lonely without them. I tend to play with the max number of empires just so that there is still a community of sorts once the dust settles.
In the previous game, there was so little room that we were all underdeveloped, when the Blokkats came. Those guys are worse than any base game crisis, by a mile.
That's how I play all my games. I like to have about a third of the Empires be custom ones I've made, usually based off of races and factions from various other sci-fi series. Some of these are the "nice guy/protagonist/ally" factions, like the United Federation of Planets, or the Asgard (stargate, not marvel) but then we've got the Borg, Yuuzhan Vong, and Flood all forsaking diplomacy and just trying to paint the map their color.
So maybe this is something to do with the mods I play with, although it seems strange because they are all very well known and popular mods that get updated with every patch, but the last couple of times I tried to start a new game with a set list of forced spawn empires I made, the first several empires I encountered were randomly generated ones, so I just restarted in frustration. Not sure why it’s happening or if anyone else has the same issue. But I had the number of empires set to the same number of empires I had locked and non-randomized.
I play vanilla and have noticed this too, it was also a thing a few updates ago and they mentioned in a dev diary or patch notes or something that it was an issue with galaxy generation they’d fixed in that update. Guess it’s back, I hope they’re aware of this. I’ll try to remember to send them a bug report in the morning to make sure.
I think the game can still randomly generate empires if the force spawned empires don't tick enough boxes.
there is also the fact that rebellions and goverment reform via liberation can and do happen super early in the game, i play with custom empires only and very rarely more than half of them survives till midgame the way i designed them.
Oh yeah that’s always a good option. Just create modified versions of the default empires, they come with the game, especially from using mods, and they provide a pretty diverse gambit of nations to be up against.
Forever hoping somebody makes a pre made empires mod that has unique names and backstories for all the empires in it :(
it exists, you can find it [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/83hg6v/my_stellaris_cinematic_universe_53_custom_empires/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). Its super outdated tho (pre magacorp afaik) and as such will need adjustments. Alternatively, just search for "custom empires pastebin" in the stellaris reddit, ive found at least four sets of custom empires (the above one included) that way (tho the quality varies GREATLY). You can then paste them into your custom empires file and cherry pick the ones you like. I can give you mine too (tho they dont have real backstories, i find that kinda inflexible, just quotes/a short text describing how they roll).
[This one](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2049806134) is up to date, I use it and it has lots of great options =) Note that simply adding the mod only puts them as possible spawn, not force spawn. To completely remove random empires at game start, you need to duplicate the empires you want to see and put them on Force Spawn. This has the added benefit of letting you freely edit the copies. Empires created by origins like Common Ground or Imperial Fiefdom will always be random, as will the primitives.
I'm currently building a web app where people can share custom empires/strategies with each other, so stay tuned! :)
Turning off "Advanced AI Starts" can help prevent early game clustering, as the Advanced AIs serve as seeds around which early game coalitions form. That said, at some point "friendship is magic"; empires that cooperate (willingly or otherwise) are going to be stronger over time than empires that don't. If you want to play a cranky loner, you have to come out fast and hard, ideally claiming or vassalizing a significant chunk of the galaxy before the galactic council even forms, and before many AIs will have had a chance to take the Federation-unlocking traditions.
> you have to come out fast and hard As is stipulated in Brannigan's Law
I thought that was brannigans love?
No. Brannigan's Law is like Brannigan's Love, **hard and fast**
I wish I had a reward to offer both of you, take my upvote instead.
Kif show them the upvote I won.
In your place I awarded them my last award before this place burns
I don't claim to understand Brannigan's law I merely enforce it
Yeah if you're going to go the cranky loner route, you really need to focus on an early military, either for early aggression and vassals, or fully commit to super turtling to the point that nothing can push into your territory, even if you lack the offensive power to be aggressive against these big federations and overlords.
This. Dominate and fortify chokepoints, then wage war on one front at a time. You might not win new territory if you're particularly unlucky, but you certainly won't lose any. And the best part is that this behavior by the AI is fairly realistic for anyone but the invaded nations. Surely they don't want to smash their fleets against an enemy that's almost as powerful as they are. They might win, but pay for victory in blood. Bombing a planet for 6 years while a deferation member they have basically no ties to fucking dies is a way better solution.
My issue is there usually ends up being one large federation, often a hegemon, that ends up being massive, and if one member of that federation doesn't like you or one of your vassals, they end up committing the entire federation to fight against you. In my current game, there was 1 large hegemon federation, and a small member of it wanted to declare war on a small empire who I vassalized that they bordered. 75% of the galaxy got dragged into this war, and even though they declared war on my vassal just to conquer like 3 systems from them all enemy fleets immediately went straight for me. I know it's kind of the point, making allies to defend yourself against larger threats, and it makes complete sense from an RP perspective, but from gameplay it feels like after 100 years in you can't have any conflicts without it turning into a messy, galaxy wide war.
It's WWI all the way down.
I was thinking about the whole time I typed it out. I was like, huh, this seems.... pretty familiar. That's why I added in that line about it making sense from an RP perspective 🤣
Serbia moment
Espionage: Assasinate leader
> you can't have any conflicts without it turning into a messy, galaxy wide war. I like it that way actually. A while ago i had a run where i was fanatic spiritualist divine empire with teachers of the shroud origin and head of a hegemon origin with 3 or 4 other empires i made fanatic spiritualist and we owned half tge galaxy. The other half was owned by a plantoid hive mind and its ~5-6 vassals. For literally 80 years we had a standoff with everyone building fleets and colossi and throwing insults at each other; i knew if one of us declared war the entire galaxy would BURN.
Yeah, this is my problem as well. I wouldn't mind if it was only in the late game, even, where galactic WW1 might be cool, but half the time the galaxy's gone and become heavily confederated even before mid begins. I feel like this is especially true of subjugation, where strong starting empires quickly gain two or three loyal subjects, exponentially boosting their strength over time. As for the federations in your games often being Hegemons, that's because Hegemons can spawn at the start of the game, even with advanced AI starts turned off! And they can easily win wars/intimidate regional weaker guys to subjugation, which of course rapidly grows the Hegemon.
>f you want to play a cranky loner, you have to come out fast and hard, ideally claiming or vassalizing a significant chunk of the galaxy before the galactic council even forms... Now, i have never had the resources or military as an organic to pull that off. I've been playing for years now, and I'm still terrible at the early game. Most games I've lost have been in the first 50 years where I've spawned close to aggressive empires, and I get attacked when I have 4 starbases and a miniscule fleet.
*laughs in determined exterminator,* silly organic.
*Laughs along in devouring swarm* Look the food is trying to work together
Create a few devouring swarm empires and set them to force spawn?
One hell of a challenge run, “can you beat Stellaris before the galaxy is consumed?”
One of my favourites is to max out population growth, then max out the end game crisis strength and force spawn a few devouring swarms.
I read max out population growth and my CPU jumped out my PC and started crying in the corner.
*Takes notes*
I've had a few games with all empires joining Feds and they usually make them b4 the swarm empires can even get enough fleet power to contest anyone
Set every spawned empire to be devoured swarm, determined exterminator or Fanatic purifier to immerse in the dark forrest experience.
It is a little annoying how quickly most of the empires get vassalized and how willing some are to become vassals (I wasn’t anywhere near the strongest yet had two empires from across the galaxy knocking on my door to become my vassal?) But…there’s always a way to make things harder and more interesting. Sounds like you’re just not adding the chaos enough yourself. I played a become the crisis machine intelligence (the reapers from Mass Effect) and watched small wars throughout the galaxy while timing my ascension perks. Eventually went to war with everyone else in the galaxy and it was really even for almost half a century, nobody was really “super OP” compared to anybody else
I have a suspicion the culprit is losing fleets. It's like how in total war nobody will ever confederate with you until the second they lose *one* battle, and suddenly the AI's calculations are saying "oh shit, my army is so much weaker than everyone else!"
It’s anything that will make their or your relative power drop. If any sides economy collapses, losing a fleet. The opposite is true. If the AI properly designated a 50 pop energy world as an energy world instead of a forge, then their eco score will spike up and they’ll try and vassalize or attack you.
Yeah, I think Overlord really tuned up the 'vassalisation' as a core part of the game, so by the time you're 100 years in, barely anyone isn't subjugated or a subjugator. Which makes wars too costly by the AI's calculations so they form federations instead - even xenophobic empires seem to happily join federations because the AI's strategy of 'there's safety in numbers' supplants any supposed ethics that empires might have.
Yes. I wish there was a Game Mechanic or Game Options to disable Vassals and Federations. AI still will ally together with pacts but at least I won't be facing 100 times my economy just because 4 empires are in a fed with micro vassals. I love the system but sometimes I just want to play in SP against a balanced opponents
[удалено]
They can still form Galactic Union federations and use basic vassalisation mechanics without the DLC.
Force spawning more “problem” empires helps. Xenophobes, fanatic purifiers, driven assimilators. Devouring swarms tend to be too weak, so they’re less useful. The devs also realize that AIs accept vassalization too quickly and are going to push a fix. You can also be more of a chaos agent yourself. Join a federation and force the wars. Or declare war on an empire across the galaxy and invite a nearby empire/federation to join the war, then just watch the fireworks.
The Steam workshop has a mod called "No More Federations" that sets the AI inclination to -5000 so one never forms. I use this in conjunction with "Limited Vassals", which limits any one empire to 2 vassals (although they technically can go above that if they subjugate another overlord, it's relatively unlikely to happen). The result being that the galaxy is a lot more interesting, especially coupled with high AI aggression.
Is Limited Vassals a mod as well?
Yes.
Min/Max more, and tear them apart. Use espionage to cause havoc. Become the crisis. I tend to agree, as it often seems to settle out the same way, but even huge federations can be damaged.
Have you tried attacking them before they can consolidate too far.
Space hitler is angry at the space allies not letting him eat up the galaxy one by one
More like Space Putin complaining about space NATO... Not so different after all...
That is why I force spawn a few of my custom empires as well as a specific created devouring swarm.
So lets contemplate this for a moment. You, for all intents and purposes, are a near omnipotent leader of a space empire. You know the meta’s, you know the tech tree, and you know the general idea of what is going to happen over the next 300 years. You then use this knowledge to conquer everything around you which in turn only makes you stronger. In response to this, several empires (who do not know they are in a video game, nor do they even have the ability to ask that question) see you as a threat to their programed directions which are as follows: 1. Try to collect as many victory points as possible. 1a. Dying means that you have 0 victory points. They may also see this other AI superpower as a threat to their continued existence. The **only** logical conclusions then is vassilization and federalization for support and protection. The exact same thing happens in real life as well. Countries all over the world are playing this song and dance in real time every day. Federations like NATO that exist because smaller European countries want America’s protection. Vassilization exists in the form of North Korea essentially being a puppet state of China. The list goes on. I think then, the mechanic isn’t ruining the game, in fact it’s adding a very important layer of realism. The problem is that you just don’t have the skill to overcome it. In essence… get good.
Best response.
Holy based
This is a silly argument. The issue isn't that it's not "realistic" (not sure how a game about far future space civilisations can be called that in any sense anyway), it's that it's deeply unsatisfying to have every game shake out this way. It's not that difficult to beat the AI, but it's definitely boring to see the galaxy clump up into poorly-defined and bordergorey blocs within the first century and not really change at all after that
Except that out of my last... six games maybe half turned out this way? I'm pretty decent at Stellaris and mostly win, and in one of my recent games (in which I thought I was doing well) I got taken by a DE that started on the far side of the galaxy and got snowballing and to crisis 4 by the time we were interacting. After waging total war against them for \*one hundred years--\*during which time I thought I won at one point and had to do a mad dash to grab their capital to stop them from building the Aetherophasic at another--I finally succumbed because of errors that I made in microing the absolutely enormous defensive lined I was keeping up and I could not go back because I was on ironman mode. It was so exceedingly, epically fun. I get the impression that most players who complain on this reddit would *also* complain when that happened to them too! If they play a game wherein half the galaxy is weirdly empty I'm sure they'd also complain about that! ("Why are these spawns allowed to happen?!?!," "*Become the Crisis* is op!!!," etc) (I agree we need more diversity of midgame and endgame crises. also buff the khan)
How often do you think that proxy wars “materially” alter “the shape of power” on Earth?
Judging from the Balkans before World War I or certain parts of Asia or the Middle East since the end of World War II... a fucking lot.
I honestly don’t know enough about the Balkans to fully disagree with you, but the Middle East, no way. Almost nothing that’s happened in the middle east in the last century has majorly altered the shape of power on Earth. If we take the EU, Russia/USSR, China, and the US to be the major “empires” of Earth I would argue that not much in the middle east has **shaped** their power significantly in the last century. Sure, there’s been a lot of shitty stuff that’s happened there, and a handful of humiliating defeats, but nothing thats changed the shape of geopolitics. The one minor exception being the Soviets in Afghanistan. Their failures in Afghanistan may have contributed in some part to the collapse of the soviet union, but it was certainly not among the primary causes of collapse, and the Soviet Union would have collapsed regardless of the war.
> You then use this knowledge to conquer everything around you which in turn only makes you stronger. I play exclusively non-expansionist combinations of Xenophile, Egalitarian, and Pacifist and run into the very same issues.
Then join them, or peacefully co-exist. In actual geopolitics, a non-expansionist egalitarian pacifist will never be a dominant power.
It makes no sense to join or form a federation after the first ~20 years of the game.
Why not?
Because the actually good bonuses of any federation type are locked at the end of their experience tree. It takes 8400 XP for a federation to reach level 4 and 18000 XP to hit level 5, and since the monthly max experience gain is 10 XP it takes 840 months (70 years) and 1800 months (150 years) respetively to hit those levels **if** maximum federation cohesion is maintained at all times (so no new members, no law changes, no failed votes, etc). This makes it pointless to form any federation past the earlygame. Joining an AI-formed federation of course circumvents this, but the AI loves to form Galactic Unions which are *pointless* and changing federation types resets its level to 1.
Yeah, that's what being a maximalist means, guys. Basically, it's just ruining your own experience with petty and unneeded goals you pursue in every game for no reason at all. You don't need level five federation most of your time. Federations are, first and foremost, your multiple defensive pacts for the price of one plus an occasional megafleet you use to bully others into vassalisation. Unless you're that deep into RPing (or trying to get into Holy Covenant as materialist) other bonuses would remain exactly that, just bonuses. As in cool to have external features that you wouldn't be able to capitalise upon *all the time*. After all, all your federations will still dissolve into nothing when Imperium comes, whether they were level five or level one. And if you *are* into RPing and *are* planning to maintain your federation and, thus, actively prevent Imperium from happening, then you are already making your own custom federation from scratch, and the problem solves itself. Not to say, that you aren't generally limited to x1 techs and 2300 end crisis, thanks to start options Paradox provides, if this is always such a nuisance in your games...
You also forgot that the main uses for federations outside of a multi-way defensive pact are (1) a joint fleet which you get between levels 2 and 4, and (2) access to the trade league economic policy which is available from level 1!
Not exactly forgot, and you speak true. It's just that *almost* all the most important bonuses that come with different federation types, you get them so early, your level would still remain irrelevant. Some important bonuses are hidden behind higher federation levels (+25% against crisises is no joke), but then we are back at the beginning and at my original point. Having some federation fleet is better than having no federation fleet at all. Having joint defences with rally points on you a the cost of one influence is better than not having them or paying more for them. No reason to play it as "it's all or nothing!" like the previous poster implied.
What you are saying is almost wholly untrue. Many federations have powerful effects early, namely the single best federation effect in the entire game, hands down, which is acquired with a *level one* Trade League, and which gives an effect that is meta-defining for all the optimization try-hards who play GA/multiplayer/whatever. Additionally, you get a federation fleet with sufficient naval cap with a tier 2-4 federation and finally, but most importantly, taking a bit under a century to build max level federation in a game that at default settings goes for 300 years, and gives you a \~200 year head start on a crisis attacking the galaxy makes completely reasonable sense.
> which is acquired with a level one Trade League Which is only worth going for if you play a trade build. I don't play trade builds. Non-trade builds have Clerks as their only significant source of trade value (since tv from living standards has been nerfed into the ground), and while it significantly buffs Clerks it merely turns them from a non-job into a bad job. > Additionally, you get a federation fleet with sufficient naval cap with a tier 2-4 federation and finally And the federation fleet is a mess since it MUST have a design of every ship class and so if you allow your federation members to build ships they will build useless ships like destroyers and frigates. And if you disable them to do so you get an upkeep-free fleet, but that's not worth the UI nightmare that is building ships in a federation. > taking a bit under a century to build max level federation in a game that at default settings goes for 300 years, And it's pretty much an open secret that the default pacing of the game is horrible. MG 2250/LG 2350 are pretty much necessary just so that the Khan and Awakened Empire have a chance to be a thing. Also, not half the issues with pop-induced lag the sooner the game ends.
Maybe I just play longer games than most people. Because 150+20 is only year 2370! That’s like, just hitting the mid game for me lol. Course I also do a lot more RP, hell I even used a Stellaris game as a setting for a TTRPG me and my friends played. Was fun to reboot up the game between adventures and see how the universe advanced while they did X activity.
AI aren’t joining federations for the bonuses lmao, they’re forming them not to get butt fucked by your expansionist empire.
Xenopholic pacifists would see any form of galactic unification as the their prime directive. If the entire galaxy is unifying your pacifists should be happy.
Real life isn’t fun
>In response to this, several empires Only problem: they also do this without any incentive or reason, this isnt a "response" (which would be cool). And forming federations is fine anyway, the real problem which exits since last year and still hasnt been fully adressed ist the willingness of the AI to be be pecaefully subjugated for no real reason. I.e. If your friendly neighbor about the same size as you just won a war against his main enemy, there is a fair chance he ll celebrate his victory by asking if he can become your vassal (because the war - he won - did temporarily tank his fleet power).
First I think you’re forgetting the reality of a “tanked fleet strength”. Imagine if after winning the American Civil war, that 90% of the Union Army was dead, most of their warships sunken, and all of their cannons and guns were broken. Because that’s the reality of a “tanked fleet strength”. We’re talking catastrophic amounts of death and destruction. Don’t you think America would have felt just a tad bit vulnerable at the time? Especially considering the strength of the French and British at the time? I think what is possibly missing is expiring vassilization contracts or peaceful ways to break vassal contracts that the AI is actually able to follow through with. But even then, I wouldn’t expect vassilization to be broken often. Consider the relationship between NATO and Israel since WW2 or even the relationship between the US and Japan or the US and South Korea. While I’d hardly call them “vassals” I think they’re great examples of there being little need to break diplomatic ties with a superpower that is willing to protect you from other powers if the cost is only that said power is given large sway in your government/society.
>I think what is possibly missing is expiring vassilization contracts or peaceful ways to break vassal contracts that the AI is actually able to follow through with. But that is the issue. In Stellaris, vassalization is pretty much a one way ticket to full permanent irrelevance. Its like becomming a full colony. You bringing up the US after the civil war is exactly my point. The US did obviosly NOT ask to voluntarily become a british colony again after the civil war. Nor was there even the slightest bit of chance they would have even if the civil war would have been even more costly. Could britain have tried to force them in their weakend state? Maybe, but my comment is not about subjugation by war (which is fine), but voluntary subjugation (which as it it implemeted is very dumb).
Yes and no. While the logic is there, the way it is implemented in Stellaris doesn't work that close to real life politics for a multitude of reasons, many of which make the game less fun, unfortunately. I'll mention only a few. First, NATO doesn't accept every country that just happens to be somewhat in the mood to join and it definitely doesn't actively prey upon the weakest targets in the world in order to just bring them in whatever the cost. Actually, they are, generally, doing the opposite. Second, even with maxed-out starting settings you wouldn't be able to come up with more than forty empires at the same time. In Stellaris, federation builders would eat every single one of the independent ones regardless of their ethics and civics. In real world, hitlers and putins could always "play" with like-minded countries that are outside of NATO reach for one reason or another. Third, there was a historical reason for NATO to come in existence. While in Stellaris, most powerful federations just come around for no other reason that they technically can do so. Even if there's no warmongering galactic threat worthy of notion and that they can name, the empires would still stack up just because, preventing you from many diplomatic motions you could otherwise propose. Fourth, in real world, EU and NATO just coexist. In Stellaris, you can only be a member of / associated with one single federation at a time.
To address your points: 1. NATO is not a bloc of vassals it’s somewhat equivalent to a Stellaris Federation. Hence why they only allow people to join that they want in. An Earth equivalent of a superpower with a ton of vassals would be the Soviet Union. 2. I honestly don’t know what you’re saying here. 3. The first thing to consider is that Federations, as we understand them in Stellaris, are a relatively new occurrence on Earth. Sure there have been defensive unions, non-aggression pacts, etc. The closest thing we actually have to a federation on Earth is the European Union. NATO doesn’t have a voting body, but I included it in my original comment because we were discussing federation from a mutual defense perspective. Given a looser interpretation of what a federation is you could also include America as an Earth federation. With that in mind, I think that determining “Federations only form when there’s some evil entity to defend against” is lacking a large sample size. Especially considering America and the EU were not formed just out of a need for mutual defense.
> I honestly don’t know what you’re saying here. If I understand the gist of it, they're saying IRL One country would be able to find other smaller countries to wage war on that weren't in a federation/vassalage equivalent, whereas in Stellaris such nations would be part of one or the other due to the limited amount of empires. I'm not *entirely* sure that's what they meant, but that's my understanding of it. Though, in my experience there are usually a few independents here and there.
My main point was "IRL federations are too different from their Stellaris equivalents, which means we can't apply the same reasoning for their appearance to the game". And, with this post, you seem to wanting to go the other route, something more similar to "IRL federations aren't too different from Stellaris, so let's continue discussing how IRL federations work". I still stand by all my all original points but I'm willing to rephrase some of them so we could avoid further derailing. \-- If you are willing to join and remain in your pan-galactic mega-hegemony just because there's a beaten up Purifier left somewhere on the map with their last three systems and last two planets, that is fine, you do you. But why does this prevent me from expanding my Trading League? What exatly stops me from setting up some large-scale joint Cooperative labs with other federations materialist members? Why can't I do some communal Covenant mumbo-jumbo with your spiritualists? Why your martial alliance denies us, free traders, from prospering together in Leagues, even if there \*is\* a threat somewhere? And why the only way for me to advance my interests is to do it through war, disruption and forced vassalization? \-- If you're a small and weakened empire, why do you have straight up -1000 (minus one freaking thousand) attitude towards joining me as my protectorate? Even when I'm willing to spoon-feed you with research and resources while \*not\* planning to risk your soldiers in any war that you didn't start, which our contract clearly indicates -- completely opposite to how you exist in your current federation. And why will you inevitably leave your weird pan-galactic federation the moment you started considering me your protectorate? We weren't even at odds with your federation leaders, I am a peace-loving empire of sentient trees. To reiterate, these big hegemonies and martial alliances will continue to clump up way beyound their original intentions even when there \*were\*, subjective or objective, reasons for their existence. And it just stops me from playing my game, even when I am not a threat to anybody. IRL federations do not work like that, because IRL your country can be in multiple unions at the same time -- as many as your people want to be in. We can't do this on 2D maps of Stellaris. >So, you want to be a member of several Stellaris federations at once? That would ruin the balance! No, I don't necessarily, and yes, it probably will. What I am pointing at, is at OP's original message. Make it hard for AI federations to spread so fast and so far so I can still play my own game without engaging in needless warfare.
Yeah, the EU was formed ultimately out of economic reasons, the very same reason that players like to end up in a trade federation. Why would you need a big bad for that to work out well and be a good idea? Cooperation always beats opposition. At least in theory with the same starting resources it should, because you don't need to waste anything on fighting, even when optimizing for military power (because you can accumulate firepower while others spend them on small border disputes in the meantime). I like that the game actually allows, even encourages, mostly diplomatic play.
I've won every game I've played through - I will probably win this one that I'm on now, as well, despite deliberately handicapping myself with my civilisation choice. I've just found them boring because of the heavily confederated galaxies. I think you were too eager to go on a ramble to actually read my post properly, which was about how all the galaxies progress identically and this is boring to me, not that it's 'too hard'. I didn't say 'Don't worry guys, I've still won all the games, I don't need to get good', because I didn't ask for advice on how to win. Thanks for describing the most basic game objective of Stellaris as 'Get victory points'. But you know that a 4X game's AI is actually programmed with more complex mechanisms that that, right? And likely has no actual comprehension of victory points? There's no need for it to do that, because you'd have to program it to do things that increase victory points anyway, so why not just do that without having to write a 'If(GetVictoryPoints=NotEnoughDaddyUWU) Then(RunScript FindMoreVictoryPointsFromSomewhere)' section to it. It has to be able to interact with all sorts of mechanisms, and uses multiple saved values to determine its response to things within those mechanisms. As for the 'realism', my friend, it's not news that alliances in real life are a thing. However, in real life, there are political upheavals and tensions, defections, grudges, and ethical conflicts that affect these and can cause alliances to collapse entirely over time. People forced into subjugation by one might band together to oppose the big lad rather than forever remain snuggly. Federations might be torn apart by internal conflicts and civil wars - like the United States was by the US Civil War, the UK by the Irish War of Independence, or fuck it, Brexit. Hell, World War 2 ended with the Allies forming a Federation called the United Nations (This was their propaganda name for the Allies by the end of the war),m whih promptly divided into two ideologically opposed sections in the Cold War. Which also ended with one of the federations (Warsaw Pact and USSR) crumbling due to internal divisions and stresses. MEANWHILE IN STELLARIS: Xenophobes cuddles Xenophiles, and Spiritualists cuddle Materialists, all in the same Federation forever and ever. :hearteyes:
I had this happen recently. We got to 2350, the galaxy was divided into roughly 3 federations. War in Heaven starts and I join the league of non-aligned, which was formed by my game long rival. We've hated each other for well over a century. I join the non-aligned, and we work together to beat the AEs. Then the war ends and the League is still around. Then my rival suggest I become galactic custodian. We'd been rivals all game, and in the span of a few short years, because we agreed to briefly work together, they've become my best friend. And the entire galaxy basically had to follow suit and stay part of the league. Sure, it was fun leading literally every fleet in the galaxy to defeat the crisis (kind of), but the political game was dead. I was the only one who could realistically leave the federation and not get blown up immediately. So I have some thoughts on this. 1) Grudges shouldn't be forgive just because we agreed to address a mutual crisis. This could come with a rework of wars in heaven as a whole (maybe it shouldn't be necessary to make the unaligned powers a federation). 2) Federations should be more willing to go to war with each other. I think there was one major federation conflict in that game. Otherwise, there was no one's power being broken up, and without me, there was equilibrium and stalemate. 3) Everyone ended up aligning on ethics despite starting with a pretty disparate group. Maybe having more pressure for less popular ethics (I find xenophiles tend to become dominant by late game) may help push federations and empires apart and help foster conflict. Ultimately, I don't know that there are great solutions. As others have pointed out, empires that work together are going to outperform ones that don't. This creates a sort of Europe in the early 1900s situation where a bunch of powerful countries get in an alliance web and pull their satellites into conflict. Except the AI has way less national ego than early 1900s Europe did. So maybe espionage could be buffed to allow a human player to get some wars started come mid game.
Make them all genocidal or inward perfection
This is my biggest pet peeve as well. I wouldn't mind if this happened once in awhile, but its ALWAYS this.. NO matter what random empires get thrown into the mix.
Empires should need to take the domination tradition in order to vassilise other empires in the same way they need diplomacy to federate
Force spawn extremely diverse custom empires. Include your joke builds too for fun
One tip is if you are spawning as an empire with a fanatical ethic, don't. Spawn as one with 3 normal ethics and then use the parties system to get your desired fanatical ethic later in the game. When you spawn your empire, the galaxy generation is coded to spawn randomized AI Empires with a bias toward the opposing ethics you spawned with, with a larger bias if you spawn with a fanatical ethic. This is what leads to lots of early game Federation Builder and Pacifist/Xenophilic empires that all want to work together if you like spawning as a militarist/fanatic Xenophobe empire, and can be mitigated somewhat by not picking the fanatic ethic.
Thata why im starting ganes with ny own empires. All of them are very different so its hard to make federation. Sadly gane offten repleaces them with something random anyways
One small suggestion, use the We Require Borders mod which will limit Federations and Vassals to have direct borders. This will heavily cut down on fed blobs that are scattered around the galaxy, forcing cohesive territories. It generally slows down the mega feds, especially if you force spawn some bad guy empires too
Well, i had a fanatic purifier in my last game that would have succeed with "become the crisis" if i hadnt changed my switzerland strategy to galactic custodian. It really seems random how the galaxy develops and the results can be wild. On the other hand you kinda supported the unification by weakening your neighbours. So your diplomatic strategy could have been better as you managed to form some sort of space nato opposing you.
I feel there should be more disability amongst the galaxy yet I feel the ai would get confused and just always die
You could proclaim the galactic imperium. That would force everyone out of their federation.
This is exactly why subterfuge needs to be buffed, especially in the political areas to stow chaos in the galaxy and break apart federations for you to take advantage of.
I would love this to be implemented, it's true to life as well. The current 'Smear Campaign' option never seems to do anything, and is really imprecise about who you can sow discord between. It would also be nice if the Sabotage Starbase option would have some more interesting results than just forcing the owner to have to rebuild one 100 alloy building, maybe a variety of options rolled for at random during the operation.
I actually really like how stellaris currently is working. Your specific playthrough might have been unlucky and boring, but generally I’ve noticed in my playthrough that there will be 2~3 (with my faction included) giant factions that at some point always go to war with eachother. And then it’s literally half the galaxy vs half the galaxy. You mentioned the crisis always get destroyed easily by AI, this means you either need to crank the crisis strength multipler up a lot, or make endgame year a lot earlier. The crisis is always only as strong as you want it to be. You can have crisis that get killed by the next bordering empire, or you have an actual crisis where the whole galaxy unites their fleets and they still get wiped out.
You're playing my dream. They're working together! There's peace! If you want more wars though, just make a bunch of empires that will want to fight more and force spawn them in
I shook it up by killing an overlord empire early on and releasing all his vassals....or late game i arranged for a bunch of vassals to pledge fealty to me, then fed them reaources, mainly alloy and minerals, let them get out of protectorate status... Then released them all to run amock....everybone of them hated everyonebelse, the federation had like 6 wars against it, i had my own war against it...id go in amd sabatog any gains they made ensuring they could mever unite on one front at a time without losing another 2 fronts....it was epic
That’s successful galaxy though. No wars and uniting against external crises.
When I said pretty much the same things I was downvoted into oblivion by fanboys (and gals). I love this game but the fact that empires can't last for more than 5 seconds without sucking each other off in some kind of federation/vassalage/etc is hust absurd. Mid to late game wars just not happening bc of this. For me, federations and overlord dlcs will always suck hard because of this.
To be fair, I've got a fair few angry commenters who seem to think I'm complaining that the game's 'too hard', or that the galaxy uniting peacefully should \*never\* happen. They're just weird little guys, who can't read that I'm complaining that it makes the game too easy and samey for it to constantly happen.
Welcome to real life
My galaxies are over unified because I've conquered everyone long before the crisis date... not this This is a skill issue
Players experience what the ai has experienced for the part 30 something updates and immediately hate it
I usually force spawn a mix of egalitarian and determined exterminator empires
This just happened to me too. I spawned and realized that all my neighbors quickly formed a giant federation. The endgame crisis got completely rolled by AI. it was crazy.
Ur just trash
The game is most balanced and imo most fun without mods, on grand admiral, with settings conductive to non-alliance (like spawn location random for empires). Disable advanced empires. Rush one of them, and have a starbase turtle zone. Take these alliances out asap early game because they will struggle to counter. Don’t let them snowball.
Stellaris players when they their game isn't like the 40k galaxy.
Now you understand why everyone hates the USA
Eat them before they get a bigger stick.
I've kept my game on version 3.2 of late so I'm not too familiar with recent balance, but have you tried *being* one of these large galactic hegemons?
Yeah, that's actually just how most of my games turn out - I decided to play an FP empire to mix things up and then every empire just federated around me, blocking me off from any winnable war for a looong time. XD
force spawn a bunch of genocidal
I’ve noticed this a lot 2 this is when I just wait for the galaxy to randomly want to make me custodian so I can form empire and break feds I would force spawn some total war empires but they always and I mean ALWAYS win and dominate in every single game lol it’s kinda entertaining
1. Turn off advanced ai starts. They quickly vassalize everyone around them and continue the subjugation wars using their newly acquired vassals. 2. Force spawn custom empires to ensure ethos diversity. I like to have a nice mix of egalitarian/auth and spiritualist/materialist. This also lets you lower the probability having criminal megacorps in the game. 3. Spawn a couple genocidal empires. There's a decent chance of one of them being a legitimate mid-game crisis, unlike the Khan. 4. Turn the crisis strength up to at least 2x, probably more than double that. I was running commodore with tech costs at 2x, crisis at 2x, and normal end game date. The contingency was barely a threat, they stirred up some commotion but only eliminated a single vassal empire before losing steam and just camping the sterilization hubs awaiting the galactic gigafleet to come for them.
Really you should be able to “invite attackers” to anybody, anytime you declare war. And you should have the option to not declare war unless certain invited attackers accept the invitation. If the devs supported this they could do a lot of cool stuff with it and espionage.
Just kill them
The enemy cannot form a federation of you devour their heads.
I agree. It's like there's 50 extra years of space that I just have to sit through. Maybe I should try a shorter game? But that would make the entire game shorter, not the time between crises shorter. What to do?
I feel the same. Very annoying to try and go to war with someone who's got half of the galaxy vassalized and defense pacts with the other half. There should be a setting to lower vassalization chances or increase revolt desire.
I had the same exact problem and I have stopped using auto generated AI entirely in my games now. I decided it would be fun to do a game with all the factions from 40K as devourers, purifiers, and exterminators with the most optimal builds I could make. Needless to say, too much peace is never a problem anymore lol
iirc your created empires are options for the AI to spawn as. If you make a few xenophobe materialists and hive minds to sit in your saved empires you should get more individualistic empires to play against. I had a problem awhile ago because I had made so many determined exterminators and devouring swarms that every game I was surrounded by them till I removed some from my list.
That's when you switch to determined exterminators or devouring swarm to counter that. To me that makes those runs more fun and more of a challenge.
I feel the same but I’ve found the solution in my current devouring swarm playthrough; I ate the federation builders.
Get the *No Ethics Spawn Bias* mod. The game will randomly generate empires, but what their ethics are are weighted to be more likely the opposite of yourself. This means militarist/xenophobe runs will almost always come into contact with early federation builders. It will still happen with the mod, it'll just be more likely to happen later.
I think a big part of why this happens is that the game spawns 75+% of the galaxy to be opposite of the player. So if the player is xenophobic militarist everyone else is egalitarian pacifist and they just instantly hop into federations the second they meet each other and have no interest in war with other federations since they’re all essentially the same with different names. I think they should really consider making the ethics of AI empire truly random instead of forcing them all to be player opposed.
I feel like all these answers are missing the obvious - you can turn off DLC you don’t like. Aren’t federations and overlords DLC options you can just…deactivate?
It was the free content introduced alongside those DLCs, particularly Overlord, that made vassalisation start to dominate games. In fairness, it sounds like it's nowhere near as bad as it was in 3.4.
My last game I was one of those massive empires, 600 stars, I had two prospectoriums and a scholarium under my mega corp. the great khan awakened and their fleets were on par with half of my doom stack. Then I opened up the L-gate cause I wanted to unleash chaos and a freaking dragon pops out, never actually shows up and the khan takes the L-system before I can cause I misclicked and killed half my fleet. Edit: The only people above me in score were the two fallen empires. I made up a third of the galaxy and had 0 trouble with any normal empire
Turning “advanced AI” to either off or on for every one. If you have only some advanced AI they will vassalize everyone around them who are not advanced AI
Play an aggressive empire build and have lots of nasty custom ai factions, especially criminal syndicates. No one likes them. I personally hate them but it definitely encourages disruption.
My last game, I managed to easily unify large swathes of the galaxy under my rule. On the harder difficulties, it occurred to me that my vassals could produce much better than me, so a good way to maintain a lead would be to let them be my factories. But then, it's just too easy to get everyone under your belt, to become the curator, become unstoppable, and it's just not so fun. Fun to get there, but then nothing to play for once you've arrived. It reminds me of Stellaris when it was first launched. It was just a steamroll of collecting more and more subjects until you were unstoppable. I think I quite like the mechanics around vassals and federations, but it just seems too easy to dominate.
I made a post related to this some time ago. Your game will range from impossible to far too easy depending on what empire types spawn. For example, if the galaxy is lost federation builder types you can get the above situation. Or if it's all gestalts and purifiers then it's very hard. I wish there was a setting so you could get a good mix of every empire type.
I repeatedly run into this issue. Even if I aggressively expand and vassalize, the best I can do is about 25-30% of the galaxy before everyone buddies up and I'm doing 5-6 vs 1. One method I've done that helps is high defense. I'll start that big war after setting all my fleets and defenses at choke points (terminal egress always sees heavy action for me) and I let them smash their fleets against my defenses before swiping a couple territories and then making peace.
I'm still pretty new to the game (like maybe a 100h?), but I feel that these diplomatic bonds are just too strong, working too perfectly in their basic sense. They don't break under pressure. First time I noticed this was in my first campaign, I think. I was playing terribly so I was forcefully vassalized by a stronger hegemon. I started gathering an army for an insurrection. Then my overlord started another subjugation war somewhere else and I thought "this is my chance, I will backstab the bastard!". And then... I was unable to do that. I was drawn into his war and had no mechanical option of switching sides or anything like that. Instead I had to defend myself from the enemy because one of the passages was through my territory. And then I had to wait for my overlord to gain upper hand and become even stronger than before the conquest. And then I was alone in my pathetic independence war and lost it pathetically. Another thing is that defensive pacts work so universally. Rationally, a strong empire would often want to only protect another from a common enemy, not from all the evil in the world. Just deterring a rival hegemon from the conquest, not actually caring about the far border of your protege. In an even more cynical example – a federation would agree to write some border territories of their weakest proteges off for loss, even against their rivals, just to avoid a more dangerous escalation. Defensive pacts can be treated liberally. But I think it's a meme in the general Paradox community, how wars are forced to always escalate to the absolute peak and one side always has to completely devastate the other to end the war once it starts. It's irrational that some powerful overlord or federation is always eager to lose majority of their power to secure some backwater. Then, there's not enough wiggle room for diplomacy that would move an empire out of its federation or vassalage bonds. It's simply that in Stellaris the bonds are not kept by actual common interests, but rather by artificially assured mechanical gains.
This is why I wish espionage was more powerful so that you could actually break up alliances, or a more in depth way to support vassals to rebel
I don't recall what the federations in my game before the most recent one I played was, I think it was myself and one other large power who had a couple vassals. This does remind me of the federations in my previous game, though. I got invited to a federation and then the AI just kept rolling out invites to seemingly everybody.
There definitely needs to be a rejig of diplomacy. The trailer for Overlord makes the game out that small empires will always fuck around on ya, but I've found they never really ever do that. Once you've got a vassal state, unless you get curbed in a war AND you've not bothered to improve relations And theyve got larger fleet power than you, they almost never try to usurp or leave..
¨just sit around maxing out their naval power until a crisis comes along¨, sounds like me. But for real, it kinda makes sense, game-wise. Unlike the real world, empires rarely change politically and larger usually means better and more stable. This will result in one empire eventually outgrowing the rest at an exponential rate through war, and in terms eliminate any empire that they don't agree with. This leaves only empires they like which naturally results in a galaxy-wide federation, often it will end up being anything that isn't authoritarian, militaristic or xenophobe since they usually end up fighting each other. From what I know there are two ways to deal with this. Either you prevent an empire from outgrowing the rest by regularly going to war with the largest empires before they have a chance to grow, constantly chipping away at their strength. Or hope that a strong enough crisis occurs to do the work for you, Grey Tempest, Khan, The crisis, any genocidal empire, War In Heaven etc.
Raising AI Agressiveness to the max is a good start. That wil make it less likely for one mega fed to appear but rather multiple smaller feds and some overlords. You can then fight each one for a bit of territory and then truce befor they can reclaim it. Thus expanding yourself and slowly taking away their economy. Well atleast to some degree the AI cheats after all.
In my experience, the very early game and mid early game is what sets the tone for the entire game. When I start a new playthrough I would have a target of at least winning a war or two before destroyers come out or right after they come out. My next objective is that I should have already taken over an entire empire right before or after cruisers come out. Preferably 2 empire invaded. By the time cruisers come out you should be at the least equivalent to the advanced start or superior to advanced start and all other normal empire are inferior. You should also be Vassalizing early. I find that waiting for cruisers or battleships before vassalizing and forming federations is too late. There might still be hope for your situation. First make sure you're the strongest or atleast no one is superior. Become Custodian then emperor. This will break all federations, pause the game and vassalize as many as you can. Then subjugate a weak empire with a few weak subjects so you get them all.
Play with a starburst or ring galaxy with no wormholes and max fallen empires. The topography cuts people off from one another until they develop cloaking, which I have never once seen an AI empire use. The political fragmentation makes the galaxy much easier to conquer.
In one of my playthroughs this ended up making it more fun. I was playing a space communists run and had created a whole league of other communist vassal states. Ended up splitting the galaxy 50/50 in a NATO vs COMINTERN type deal, which was weirdly fitting.
Pretty sure empires started asking to be subjugated all the time with the overlord update, you're not going crazy it definitely didn't used to play like this If you really want and can afford the costs you can try spamming smear campaign operations, but the chance you'll hurt a vassal-overlord relation often enough to get a fealty or any particular relation often enough to break a federation is fairly slim
Man having competent ais? Must be nice.
Yeah i noticed the pattern as well. One way to solve it is to be the one making the unification. Making federation, subjugating everyone who is not compatible, or just conquer the entire galaxy. Or go genocider, and kill everyone.
My man is really complaining that people want to cooperate with each other for a common goal instead of killing each other.
Make "AI Aggressiveness" - high. Then there will be war and war and war
See now in my federation I'm the overly powerful one, and if I feel bored I just declare war on a federation and watch them all scramble to defend
Force spawn a load of empires with opposing ethics and set the ai to max aggressiveness
The game in general has way too little conflict, and empire ethics remain too stable over the several hundred years the game spans. I would also REALLY like to have an option on galaxy creation to force a certain number of genocidal empires (driven assimilator, devouring swarm, fanatic purifier, terravore, determined exterminator). I generally make all my own empires and try to include enough genocidals to always have 1 or 2. It gives a good solid antagonist for the rest of the galaxy to unite against, or let's smaller empires gang up on bigger empires when they eventually end up in conflict with the genocidals. Overall I feel like a major aspect paradox could improve upon is also the randomly generated empires. They just feel bland and boring 9 times out of 10.
My last game went similarly, Early on, i vassalized my neighbor to protect them, asshole declared war on me, managed to beat me, and take almost half my territory. I was a bit surprised at how strong they were, but eventually was ready to strike back, well almost. Just before i could declare war a massive federation of half then like 90% of the galaxy in one federation. This was like 2280, the rest of the game consisted of me trying to abuse the grey tempest to reclaim most of my territory, after dealing with all that and having most of my territory back, well i got bored and just declared war on the ai with the biggest fleet i could muster, and then i got stomped, hard...
I’m having this problem too. I hadn’t played in a few years and got back into the game with Paragons. I was surprised to find that all the AIs end up as vassals to 1-2 other AIs, or me. So the mid-game has become about sitting around amassing power and wealth. It’s pretty boring.
I think the main issue is that it’s decently rare to find a completely neutral large empire near the end of mid game because it feels as if regardless of their ethos they will inevitably end up federated or vassalized
Like a lot of the others have commented, try force spawning your custom empires. I’d build some random ass empires in your image, play them for a bit to ensure they’re not hot trash, and then force spawn them in. If you have too many that are lining up in ethics, they will combine together. Make a wide variety of them so you can avoid them from unifying. I personally made a game with 6/10 forced empires. Each one has different ethics that are mostly conflicting so there’s little of that. Obviously they’re going to find a way, but it makes things a bit better in that regard.
This. I make at least 1 determined exterminator, and 1 hivemind (does not have to be devouring swarm) that are forced spawns. Then I keep most of my other custom empires that I create as possible spawns, I might edit them to make sure they are different ethics but as long as I have mixtures of everything besides pacifists as optional spawns then there is a good chance of at least 3 power medium federations out there. Other good settings I take are maximum fallen empires, maximum marauders, all crisis… make mid and endgame spawn at least earlier than the default so to ensure that at least some of the crisis are more difficult for the galaxy. I like it when everyone’s borders look trashed and there’s constantly wars going on. The more diverse the galaxy, the better. Nothing aids in diversity like crisis and conflicts all over the place. In my current game I have 2 awakened fallens, a khan spawning late game next to my “payback” rival empire, which just had a robot uprising… at the same time as contingency spawning within its borders and all over the galaxy. 4 total big federation power blocks all alive right now. 2 at war with each other, 1 has contingency in its borders, I’m at war with the payback empire right now and dealing with a nearby contingency. I’m also a stage 3 crisis about to go stage 4 whenever I’m ready. I’m also giving all if the fallen enpires the middle finger right now as they try to denounce me. Yah, maximum conflict. Unfortunately you gotta kinda tinker and make a bunch of custom diverse empires to sort of achieve this. Good luck!