Lets add some EU/CK style depth

[FireSight]

Alright, so playing Stellaris for several days has me a bit disappointed. Sectors don't build their own ships and defenses, you have no way to steal enemy tech without hostilities, you can't take the stealth-invasion tech used for infiltrating an pre-space industrial world and apply it to putting spies in an enemy empire...

So lets see what suggestions we can make to make this more interesting.

1) Sectors should act similar to landed titles in CK2 - they are little (or big) personal feifs that pay taxes to you, have to respond to a call to arms, but otherwise do their own thing. Maybe even start their own little border wars against other sectors.

2) Espionage actions to steal tech, gain more detailed information on an empire, or sabotage things. Again, we can have people disguise themselves as another race for taking control of a pre-spacefaring people, so this is a logical extension.

3) Spend resources to spawn pirates in or near an enemy empire. Privateering is a good way to put pressure on an opponent without declaring all out war.

4) Local system militia. Auto-produced weak designs that deploy from a populated planet based on population size and planetary capital building level.

5) Trade ships and trade routes. Where are the goods flowing? If we have rare resources and friendly terms with other empires, why not trade with them?

*edit*

And then there are the basic "ease of life" suggestions.

1) Be able to set a science ship to automatically do a certain thing every turn. Either survey the nearest unsurveyed system, or automatically find special projects that it can complete and complete them.

2) Set fleets to patrol systems in a repeated loop.

 

[Plague109]

I think giving each sector a small defense force would be quite interesting, especially if they revolt, but the current doom stack meta kinda defeats it. Having small internal border wars would also be cool in a large enough empire but would also seem out of place in such an advanced society.

Espionage is something the devs have been looking into since before launch.

Harassing an enemy with a mechanic like pirates or bounty hunters would be cool but I don't think it would have much affect. Destroying a few mining stations is irrelevant later in the game unless the threat destroying them goes unchecked. Also if bounty hunters were employed to kill leaders I doubt this would give any meaningful impact as governors and admirals are little more than buffs in this game.

This already exists in the form of Potential Defense for ground battles. If you are talking about a naval militia the idea is cool but would be incapable of warding off anything larger that a pirate ship or two without considerable funding.

This I entirely agree with but I don't think it would work well with current strategic resources as they are so limited and consumed monthly. Some form of luxury resources would need to be implemented and this trade would likely function like caravans in Civ 5 just giving you income.

 

[atredies]

I agree with OP, but I feel like a lot of these things might end up being behind the DLC paywall, coming from CK/EU4 with every DLC I too find Stellaris to be fairly empty, I even chuckled at the tiny download size!