Questions from a returning player

[Martynios]

Hello, I have picked up Stellaris again after having not played it since early 2018, and obviously a lot has been changed, reworked and overhauled. First of all, the changes seem to have been significant improvements. Thank you developers for trying to make this game the best it can be! A nice change from some other games I'm familiar with.

Of course, I had to relearn a lot of gameplay aspects. Many of my questions have been answered by googling and the tutorial robot, but there are a few of them remaining to which I could not find conclusive answers. I would appreciate it if some of the forum residents could help with these (I'm mostly looking for strategies and information on how to play "optimally").

- Apart from upkeep buildings to make sure you have the required level of amenities, consumer goods and administrative capacity, research labs and alloy foundries seem to be the most important buildings to maximise and increase the strength of your empire. How do monuments fit into this? Are they worth building, and if so, how high is their priority? Are there any "bad" buildings that I don't know of (aka other than gene labs)?

- What is the effect of the migration controls species right, and what are the benefits and drawbacks of using it?

- Is there a point in the game after which it's no longer beneficial to continue founding new colonies?

- Is one of the ascension paths clearly stronger or weaker than the others, like it was when I last played? Is it a viable strategy to not pick either of them?

- Have there been any recent balance changes that have changed the meta a lot from 2.6 or before? (I couldn't really find much advice from younger versions)

Thanks in advance.

 

[Tamwin5]

Alloys and Science are the two main end resources for planets, so basically the rest of your economy is just trying to funnel as much resources as possible toward there. Because administrators and entertainers generate unity, you really don't need to build any monuments. You can if you feel like you want to speed up your unity progress, but generally passive unity is enough to get all the trees by end game.

Migration controls prevent species from moving between planets. Say you have a gaia preference main species, and some other species with various planetary preferences. If you leave migration enabled, all those other species will want to come and live on your gaia planets, crowding out your main species. Generally species tend to stick to planets they have decent habitability on, so leaving it on won't cause problems, but if you want to min-max or do some specific RPs it can be worth turning it off.

I mean if the game is going to "end" before the colony finishes then yes, technically? But realistically a colony will be net positive in under 20 years, so it's basically always worth it.

Robots is the most stronk, by far. Robots as a whole are very powerful, because they give you massive pop growth and pops are king. Psionic is weakest currently, but they are looking to get some major espionage bonuses next patch. Totally viable to not pick any perk, but maybe not optimal.

Not recently, but the next update will be making a bunch of changes to the way the economy works, and a number of balance tweaks. If you want to get ahead of the curve you can read some of the dev diaries (the ones before they started talking about espionage).