Alright, that is long. lets try going through this point by point.
There is a shit ton of guides and tips out there but its hard to tell whats applicable anymore and isnt in light of all these updates and DLCs over the past year.
I mostly rely on the 5Core strategy but here are some of the questions I have
1. Resource generation:
- Prioritize minerals or energy in the beginning? i go for minerals. I keep energy generation at a bare minimum to facilitate maintenance
Minerals are king early on for any strategy. Energy will become annoying it produce in a sufficient quantity later on when you are trying to expand your fleet size as much as possible but thats a late game problem and with enough minerals it doesnt really matter. Along the way make sure to build mineral silos so you can keep a bigger store of minerals and build a fleet back up quicker.
Whats the optimial and most cost efficient way to generate minerals? I dont build mineral/energy stations on anything in beginning that isnt a 3+ resource. My thought is that spending 90 minerals to build a mining station over a 2 mineral resource is kinda wasteful in beginning because it takes you 45 months (almost 4 years to start break even on that mineral investment)
I dont build a LVL 2 mineral mine unless i got minerals to blow because thats a +1 mineral increase for like a 150 mineral investment, so that takes you 150 months to get back. Is there even a point in building a LVL 2 for mines and energy plants at all?
These kind of fit together. The reality of it is you wont find enough +3 deposits to make it worthwhile to skip +2s. When the opportunity presents itself, sure go nuts and micromanage the shit out of it, but the goal is just to get as big a mineral income as possible as quickly as possible and these small optimizations wont end up adding up to anything.
I dont mine any research resources at all until I got my 5Core built out and got surplus minerals coming in. I lag significantly in research behind everyone for pretty much all early game. Is this a bad thing? Is this normal? Should I be doing it differently?
Early research is great and everything but not at the cost of your economy. If you happen to have the excess energy and mineral income early on Ill put a few stations up on +3 or higher research nodes but its very much a low priority.
2. Ships and Fleets
- I build a couple corvettes in beginning just to keep fuckers at bay but I dont significantly start gearing up my fleets until 5Core is built out - how about you guys?
This depends on the game and your empire. If you want to early invade AIs obviously youll need more and this can be profitable. If you want to build up your own empire first, its hard coded somewhere that AIs wont attack you before 20 years into the game without provication of some sort. Before that the only thing you need to worry about are the pirates that spawn 10-15 years into the game. 5-6 corvettes as your fine until you have to start worrying about AIs. Playing against other players changes this entirely and youll need to keep a close eye on what your neighbours are doing but in general they will be much more aggressive games.[/quote]
Whats the optimal fleet mix? I use to just beeline for battleships a year ago and just crank out like 40 of those into a 40K stomper stack - is that still a viable strategy cause im seeing Iannis posting about variable mix fleets being better
Ship weapons/armor/shields? I never paid attention to these, I just researched everything and then let the computer auto-generate the best ship template but clearly im wasting a fuckton of time and research doing this. I'm seeing a lot of chatter about differences between lasers, missiles, kinetics, - which are the best weapons I should be researching for? What should I avoid? Also, same thing for shields, etc.
Any kind of really good weapons research that really amplifies your fleet effectiveness? battlship computers, shields, regenrative hulls or anything like that I should keep an eye out for?
Theres no clean answer to this one either. Your fleet mix depends on what your facing. If the opponent is corvette heavy, youll do very well being destroyer/cruiser heavy. If hes battleship heavy youll do well being corvette heavy, etc. Same thing for which is best weapon/armor/shields/etc, where here youll notice lasers pierce armor but do less damage vs shields, kinetics just do damage so armor shines against them and missiles do more damage to everything but you shoot out before they ever hit you so it becomes a missiles vs point defense discussion. If you arnt really sure what youre doing and are playing against AI just pick up lasers or kinetics and research through them, it wont matter which one you take in the end.
3. Diplomacy
- Does anyone even bother with this? This shit is always so broken in 4x games, the only talking I do to CPU opponents is basically Borg-like "Submit or Die" propositions
A friendly AI or 2 will go a long way. Research agreements will make up a lot of ground with your slow early research. Also its just nice having someone who can trade you minerals/energy/food/whatever when you are in need.
4. Sectors.
- How do you use them? Do you hire governors for them? Mine always build dumb fucking shit like cultural building to generate unity instead of pumping out minerals and energy. I dont know what to do, its retarded sometimes but I dont want to micromanage every pop especially since the CPU always switches them back to harvesting 2 FOOD instead of 4 MINERALS or similarly dumb shit. I feel like there is a lot of tweaking and min maxing I do here without micromanaging every single square on every planet. I feel like I'm fucking this up or not understanding it
Paradox has been putting less and less pressure on sectors because their AI just isnt good. As of 1.8.0 you can actually build buildings on your sectors planets. Ive changed to giving my sectors as little freedom as possible in the sector settings and making them use what I build on their planets.
Also, on planet squares, do you always build a building that is correspondent to the resource it offers on the square, or do you just build whatever you wanna build? Lets say I colonize a nice planet early on and Im desperate for minerals, but the planet offers bonuses mostly for food and science. Should I just follow what the planet offers and build it into a food/science hub or say fuck it and jut plop a bunch of mineral stations regardless of what the resources icons on the planets are?
Focused planets will end up producing more than just following the tile resources (within reason). That is a late game thing though as you need some deep research before they really start to shine.
5. Internal Political Factions
- No fucking idea whats going on here. I just throw influence points at them to shut them the fuck up. Is that how its supposed to be?
Its not a very good system and was only added 2 or 3 big patches ago. A couple things to note about them though. You can see what the various factions likes/dislikes are in the factions menu and which one your populations belong to. The goal ends up being to just try to make as many people happy as possible. Other than that you can actually use the factions to change your governing ethics using the Embrace Faction option. If you start as a pacifist and want to change out of it to start declaring unrestricted wars for example.
In the end I wouldnt even throw influence at them. Promote ones you want to embrace into, suppress ones you want to change out of, or just leave em alone.
6. Research
- Whats the more efficient way to do research? Build labs on planets or harvest resources with mining stations? Is there another way I'm not aware of that lets you jack up your research? What should be the #1 priority? Do any of the branches take more priority than others amongst Physics, Society and Engineering?
Efficiency wise a planets tiles will always be more efficient for any resource but honestly why not do all of the above. Once you have the energy income just max out. Ways to jack up your research...research treaties. Use them, they are awesome.
For priorities, each branch has advantages to it. Youll need Engineering for higher level space stations, mining tiers, machines/droids, kinetic weapons if youre using them. Physics for lasers, ship mods, energy. Bio for food, leaders, influence and all sorts of random shit. Which one is best will depends on what your playing just like everything else. You have an end game goal of a big fleet and an economy to sustain/rebuild it, theres any hundred ways to get there and priorities to get there will shift depending on how you are going to do it.
Well thats kinda all the initial questions I have. Like I said - my big thing right now is figuring out how to min-max the fuck outta minerals and energy. I feel like half of that is tied into making educated decisions about what to mine/upgrade and what NOT to mine/upgrade, when to use resource generating edicts (+10% minerals or energy, etc.), etc. And the other half is how to min-max your sectors and planets and optimize your pop allocation
THOUGHTS?
Quick thought is you mine literally everything, expand to as many planets as possible, push your space out to cover as much as possible and optimize it all later.
A lot of your questions seem to focus on the best way to do stuff but in Stellaris the best way will shift every game. Find the way that you can make work well and enjoy doing and go for it....unless your playing against other players, then machine Determined Exterminators are best.
