Stellaris newbie, need tips

[Zeqs]

Hello all.

I've been playing Stellaris since Asimov, but even now I still can't really manage to get strong enough for endgame content. Where did I go wrong? Do you have any tips for my early game and planet/sector management? Some of my usual problems:

1. Research and teching. I try and build Research lab in my Capital World early, but they don't seem to help that much in teching up quickly, despite my Materialist Trait. Should I even build Research Labs in my capital world in the early game, or should I just leave researches to stations and gradually transition to dedicated research lab mid game?

2. Fleet Upkeep. Now this is the big one. Mid-late game, I usually have enough industrial base to quickly field a 400+ armada (mostly Battleships), which does make me the one with dominant fleet strength. Problem is, the moment I go to war and those ships go out of the docks, the upkeep immediately makes my energy and mineral income down into deficit. How many worlds / sectors should I dedicate to keep my fleet floating?

3. Core World / Sector balance. Related to question 1 & 2, I used to have 1 dedicated Research Core World and the rest goes to Energy, and Sectors go into Research production or Minerals. But even with these, I still get deficit on energy and especially mineral, the latter of which really cuts down into my capability to rebuild quickly.

4. Diplomacy. I don't usually go into Defensive Pacts as they tend to eat up my Influence, but late game I learned that I need allies to tackle the enemy and their allies. How many Allies / Influence would you suggest for me to keep?

 

[henzington]

I usually fill out all the other tiles first and save empty tiles for research or energy depending my needs. Early on research stations take a back seat to energy/mineral ones.

It helps to have an admiral with fleet logistician. Running an energy shortfall is common and an easy solution is to trade with other empires or trade enclaves. I rarely have mineral shortfall but yes it does sometimes take a while to rebuild.

 

[General Karthos]

Wars are expensive, even when you have an overwhelming fleet/army advantage, it takes time to win, and it costs energy and minerals. The good things is that you're not using the energy credits for anything else; they're essentially useless, you just don't want to run out. A mineral deficit can be a major problem, but if you wait six months and don't build anything in that time prior to declaring war, then you can afford a slight mineral deficit long enough to win a war.

 

[Seryss]

1. In the early game it usually isn't worth building labs until your homeworld mineral/energy slots are filled. You mainly focus on increasing mineral production followed by enough energy to keep everything going, and to allow you to go over fleet cap. After your first few core worlds are established you can start throwing down a few labs on science tiles, later in the game you may even devote entire worlds to research, and some power plants on the 4 tiles adjacent to your capitol building along with a few more on energy tiles.

2. You have to build power plants on every energy tile, and quite a few blanks (i'll even build over mineral tiles on a non slave world) to ever hope to come out low negative once your fleets get big enough. In some games i produce 1-2k energy/month and cap in just a few months, energy cap is just ridiculously low. If you have the leviathan dlc there are traders that trade minerals for energy, if you have high mineral production you can just trade forever (it's a pretty cheese solution to a really questionable fleet mechanic cap) but if you don't meet one, or they get blown up by a wraith it doesn't really matter so it's not really something you can count on. You can try to jiggle some sectors, and/or move some pops around to power plants on worlds that aren't fully developed. If you have well developed mineral focused worlds start blowing up the +2 mineral space mines they're a pretty big waste of energy ditto + 2 science.

2/3 you can't really trust the sectors to accurately build to take into account the future massive energy expenditures, but if you manually redevelop your worlds to be exactly what you want them to be, you get the over core energy debuff or your expansion grinds to a halt for 10+ years while you redevelop - it's a big circle of frustration.

3. Short answer - it's complicated. Longer answer - most people will not go through the trouble of evaluating a fleets current and future maintenance cost, while predicting their fleet growth to come up with anything better than a guess. Your maintenance costs will change, and the bigger your fleet gets the more your building ratio will trend toward power plants over everything else.

4. Dunno i usually only form defensive alliances at the start of the game, and largely abandon them by the mid game. I wouldn't let myself dip below 3/month for any reason, and would try to maintain at least 200 at any given time at the mid game and later.