Beginner's Guide to Ethics, Traits and Governments

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I've only had the game for a week now, so compared to your beta experience my experience is necessarily limited, but I've primarily been experimenting with different forms of Spiritualist and Fanatic Spiritualist governments (with a single Fanatic Materialist to provide comparison data) and so far they seem to work really well when focusing on growth to compensate for weaker tech than Materialists.

My favorite build is a Fanatic Spiritualist + Pacifist Happy Race (the happy birds in the guide). I prefer the empire-wide happiness of trait-related stuff because pops tend to flip pretty randomly with the +20% Divergence from Shelter. I also try to have like a 5-10% "buffer" to compensate for negative happy modifiers (be it planet mods, war or ethic shfits that cause policy unhappiness).

 

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Divine Mandate is a global effect, so it will affect every pop - even individualist ones.
However, Individualists will still be unhappy with your slavery laws and all that, so while it does compensate for the Slavery Tolerance stuff, it doesn't make them completely happy.

 

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That's mostly because it's a beginners guide. So explaining the concepts behind ethics was more important to me than number crunshing.

If you actually want to do a mathematical approach, you'll soon come to the conclusion that ethics do not matter very much - the deposits in your starting area, the size of the planets and placement of your neighbors are far more important for the success of your empire than the question between materialist and spiritualist.

Either way, an update for the upcoming patches is needed - and it is quite possible that Intelligent and/or Materialist gets downgraded, depending on the final changes.

 

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When I have enough time and experience with the changes - sure.

 

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First of all, these three posts are highly biased and inaccurate.
[...]
Making races and builds is one of the most fun things about the game for me, I currently have 40+ custom races.

Edit: Also I didn't even acknowledge that the new patches and updates make this guide even more horrible then before.

I don't think you fully understand the purpose of this guide. It's to give beginners an idea how to use the race creation options. Neither do I claim that it is objective, nor do I demand that you have to follow it to the bitter end.

The races given are examples to show how good combinations look like - you don't need a guide to build a "fluff" race. In fact, one of my favorite races is Fanatic Xenophile / Pacifist. But that one is way too unreliable for a beginner to handle. That's also why the Happy Birds are on top - they are very easy to play.

And I hope you understand that I can't just update the guide after playing with the new patch for a day or two. The original one was written with ~300 hours of gameplay experience.

Lifespan is very, very powerful. You keep Level 5 leaders for longer, rulers with decent stats for longer, it reduces turnover which means you have more influence to spend on edicts. While the OP is not a fan of Venerable, I swear by it.

Again to make that clear: I don't think Venerable is *bad*, I just think that it is sorta overpriced. Enduring is usually more than enough for a single point - especially once you unlock a few other lifespan boosters.

That being said, there are actually some situations where longer lifespans are bad. Most of the autocratic special buildings/ships/etc are "per ruler", so a long living race will make less use of that feature. Which isn't a game breaker most of the time, but something to keep in mind that might be useful once someone mods in a lifespan reduction drawback.

 

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Actually, it is a little biased, at least. Innacurate, maybe not. But I look at this guide (I am relatively new, being more of an RPG guy myself) and I see 'you should go Materialist (fanatic) with intelligent, and something else green, and sedentary, with a Despotic Hegemony for the best empire build cause science is king' not ' here ate the positives and negatives of each thing in each category'. Some people may look at this not as a beginner's guide, but a best race building guide.

Well, I try to point out the good and bad aspects for each of the items on the list and I try to put them into context to weight the importance of them (if possible with a short reason given). For example, a beginner will not really know that Industrious is a weak trait because you (a) get a ignificant % of your M income from offworlds and (b) can use Robots with a M yield bonus to get similiar results. Or we had the issue that everyone went crazy about Corvette spam, although properly designed BBs were actually way better.

But then again - if you just want to play the game casually, you don't have to take any of the power levels into account. Just ignore the colors and look at the bullet points so you can find out which ethics are best to create a Liberal Pluralistic Xeno Federation. Does it matter in that case that I gave Materialistic a green color code? Nah, not really. But maybe you could derive that it won't hold you back because you get more techs, so you can colonize other planet types for your Xeno friends earlier.

That's also why I used "Strong", "Situational" and "Weak" instead of "Good", "Mediocre", "Bad". I mean, I am pretty sure that I'd have gotten a lot of "So what is actually good/best?" question if I didn't include any ratings. And it's easier to ignore the rating system (= remove/ignore data) than to have the reader make up all the powerlevels himself (= adding data). I don't know, maybe I am at fault for not adding a big red disclaimer "THIS IS JUST MY OPINION YOU CAN DO WHATEVER YOU WANT" at the top - I (mistakenly?) took granted. I didn't have the feeling that my writeup implied "YOU MUST GET X OR ELSE...".

Not saying bias is bad. Just saying that coming from an RPG, non-Paradox game guy, this looks like an optimization guide, telling me what I should be going for in regards to ethics, traits and government for my race/empire.

The observation is pretty good. The color scheme is obviously based on all these D&D guides.

Wondering what your fanatic xenophile / pacifist build was since this was the first build I tried and found it extremely easy to play. [...]

The issue with Xenophile is that it hasn't a great early game (so you are vulnerable to early attacks, particularly in MP games) and you rely *a lot* on the AI ethics/personalities. In one of my games I managed to secure 2 Migration treaties out of 20 AI empires - and setting that up requires some advanced knowledge about Diplomacy, AI behaviour and all that. Which is certainly more difficult than a "here are your guys, just do whatever you want, they'll always be happy" race.

And, granted, in the end Stellaris is a very simple and easy game - at least in my eyes. So nothing is actually "hard", compared to RTS or MMOs where you actually need a lot of knowledge and skill. But then again - I have played Pardox games for over a decade, so my experience with their mechanics obviously makes things a lot easier - and at the same times makes it a lot harder to actually understand what a new player will find difficult.

 

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the thing is though that first of all, you only mentioned the points I made that you could answer and look good. You did not respond to all of the points mentioned. [...]

I didn't respond to everything in your post because it's fine that you see things differently. I am not here to convince you that this guide is the only way to weight these things/play the game. As you pointed out there is no need to waste our time with that.

You're lucky, then. I've played games where there's a whooping 4 minerals from space-based mining stations in my territory. Furthermore, I guarantee that you throttled your expansion so that you didn't starve yourself, which is having trouble. I can run three construction ships, four star ports, and develop five planets by the time you're getting to your third colony (exaggeration, but not by much).

In the end, luck is indeed far more important than any race setup. If you start with 10E 10M in your home system (yes, that can actually happen) it's pretty pointless wether you have picked Industrious or Adaptive or Venerable.

 

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If you want to go with a flexible, luck-independent race you should go for happiness. You get +20% for all yields on your homeworld and +10% for all yields on your colonies.

I'd actually argue that Thrifty is better in low-offworld situations than Industrious, since it allows you to run a more planet based mines due to higher tile efficiency (which is a big deal since you are mostly limited by the pop numbers early on)

 

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Detected a minor error, GAGA.

Plutocratic Oligarchy and Mega Corporation do not provide +5/+10% Mineral and Energy Tile Yield (as the guide states), but +5%/10% yield to both planetary POPs and mining stations, so your comment that it is weaker than it seems due to only applying to tiles does not hold. I have tested and verified this.

...It is still a boring government form, utterly lacking in any kind of flair, but a pretty useful one.

The code say otherwise:

modifier = {
     tile_resource_energy_mult = 0.05
     tile_resource_minerals_mult = 0.05
   }

...unless it has been changed recently to also affect offworlds despite the name.