Ahhhh, this makes sense, thanks for clearing this up. The wiki needs constant editing it seems, I'm a winter sale Le Guin scrub and the past versions seem radically different.
You have absolutely no idea how different they are. Anything before 2.0 is going to be unrecognizable to folks like you.
And the original release version? Oh boy.
Planets had their own food stocks rather than an empire food stock. Starbases could only be built over colonized planets and were just powerful shipyards. There was no "Empire Sprawl" and Admin Cap, there was "Core Systems limit", which meant you got insanely penalized for having colonized systems above said cap and had to put them into sectors, which back then auto-ate 25% of your energy and minerals from said sector. Planets had tiles, and 1 tile could hold 1 pop and 1 building, and that was it for the entire planet. Pops didn't have any "jobs" either, you could just drag and drop them between buildings to optimize based on traits. This is what I miss the most (and a lot of us), even if it was stupid tedious
An Empire's borders was this weird, dynamic circular blob that grew out of a colonized system and expanded to include non-colonized systems with how many pops that system had. This would cause weird "blobbing contests", where empires would try to stack "border size" modifiers to peacefully blob into other empire's territory.
Civics just didn't exist: we had 15 (I think)different "authorities" that had built-in bonuses; 5 democracies, 5 oligarchs, 4 monarchs, and a single dictator authority (for militarists). For example, if I recall the spiritual democracy gave +20 leader lifespan and +2 core system cap. The pacific oligarch gave +5 core system cap. They all had different terms as well. And instead of researching a third civic slot, you get a technology that doubles the bonuses provided by your government.
Most controversial to this day was patch 2.0, which removed the other FTL options from empire creation. Before that patch in addition to hyperlanes you could have warp drives, which had a set radius they could travel and was the slowest but basically free-traveled between stars. And wormholes stations, which interestingly your ships had no FTL ability by themselves, and instead had to use cheap wormhole stations to travel to any systems in range of said station's radius. The speed of hyperlanes with the freedom of warp drives, but you couldn't travel between two stars directly; you had to go back to the wormhole station to travel to a new system. Also they were tempting targets to fly some throw-away corvettes at and obliterate an empire's ability to FTL anywhere. Jump drives still existed as a late-game tech, and functioned more or less as they currently do.
I could go on, but honestly, it's mostly fun nostalgia. I greatly enjoy the direction stellaris has gone with it's vicy style of economics, and current hive minds are probably my favorite thing to play in stellaris so far.
