What is the most fun playthrough you can imagine with stelaris without DLCs

[kmh42]

I do not own a single DLC for Stelaris and I don't plan on buying one in the near future. I am well informed about the DLCs and that they are on sale quite often. But I already play CK2 (~2700hours) too often and buy all of the DLCs regardless and I play EUIV (~700 hours) and have most of the DLCs of that game too. I have just too little time to fully enjoy all of the content of the Stelaris DLCs. Maybe the time will come but its not now.
What is the most interesting part of vannila Stelaris. What race, civics, gov types and so on should I choose in the beginning and what strategies should I persue to have a interesting and fullfilling playthrough.
Just conquer everything till I am the last empire is boring for me. Same goes for an peacfull Empire. I know PDX titles so warfare is too important to neglect.
I don't need help with mechanics like economy but please explane why you think your suggestion is interesting.

 

[Losttruppen]

I can't think of a whole lot to do in vanilla other than enjoy roleplaying different empires or painting the map; though honestly, I have no idea what 2.2.3 vanilla is like besides what I remember from 1.0.

I think you miss out on most late game stuff like leviathans, awakened FEs, marauders, most special worlds, and megastructures so anything beyond basic AI empires is out, which doesn't seem very fun if you read about all the issues the AI is having since 2.2 dropped. There are empires types that strictly do not work and I'm not sure you can force them not to spawn.

I suppose you could get into the empire and planet management side of things but you miss out on a lot of what you would be working towards. I don't find those very thrilling with no goals to put them towards though so I can't say why they would be interesting on their own.

 

[MinhowMinhow]

Good of Stellaris is because is the game that need the minimum numbers of DLCs to be good to play. In my opinion, the only good DLCs are Leviathans because of the space monsters and history, Distant Stars because of a crisis caused by a L-Cluster and the history and Apocalypse because of Colossus (I am lazy to siege planets) and Marauders and their Khans, but have low content compared to other main DLCs.
Lots of features of this game that can be unlocked by DLC are limited or you simply can't use because takes lot of time or is very expensive, like megastructures, I just repaired broken ones but didn't built any; Grid almagamation, even being the best type of purge/livestock, is limited only to machine empires.
And lots of DLC features are included in base game, like Ring Worlds (Cybrex, Sanctuary), Ecumenopolis (First League), just make sure to spawn in their areas to guarantee their event chain; many good civics are from base game, like Aristocratic Elite, Technocracy and Mining Guilds; Trade is in base game too and is very good.
I usually play a Fanatic Materialist/Militaristic Oligarchic (Agendas are much better than mandates) Human Empire, with Aristocratic Elite and Mining Guilds (played Technocracy but didn't liked too much), just restart until I get the position to start First League event chain. I prefer to play Tall and slowly expand and giving room to AI to grow early (AI is just weak, even in Admiral), I prefer to Displace (free and don't need xenophobic) the xenos, because current population growth mechanics is a pain, even slaving and purge is too weak for standard empires, the best is processing, but requires a DLC (problem in this case) and killing xenos gives lots of opinion maluses.
Even without DLCs this setup is very interesting to play.

 

[Mr0Santan]

I am enjoying Stellaris mightily, and only recently picked up the Leviathan DLC... I own no others. You can try out most sci-fi tropes; xenophile-authoritarian-spiritualist is pretty fun (I especially like playing this as space mushrooms), I also like fanatic egalitarian-militarists- only the strongest survive!

W/o DLC we miss out on Hive-minds and Machine-empires, as well as mega-corps, but unless you really-really want to play that empire style, there are still dozens of combinations to try.

We also lose out on Titans and other "wonders," but that's hardly game breaking.

Fallen Empires can most definitely still Awaken, even if the "war in heaven" doesn't spawn.

I also have many hours (and many DLC) in EU4 and CK2, and I feel that of the 3, Stellaris is the one that is the most functional w/o DLC.

 

[Evangeline]

Most improvements were made part of the base game with free patches, so only a few mid/late game features, machine empires and corporations will be missing. No need to buy DLC to have fun I'd say.
Most fun for me: imagine a cool background story to your alien race (check out Immanuel Can's intros to his Stellaris playthroughs for inspiration, e.g.

). Come up with a good idea of WHY they are the way they are, why they're obsessed with technology or spirituality, or why they're starting on a tomb world - what happened? What do they want, what is most important to them? Then start the game and roleplay your aliens!

Important for the fun to last: if you're playing a peaceful game and your neighbours aren't very strong, it's easy to think you don't need to maintain a strong fleet. But in the late game, a (random) crisis will appear that threatens the entire galaxy and needs to be overcome, so don't forget to be careful and a bit paranoid even if everyone loves you. And don't forget that the fallen empires will eventually awaken, as well!

That's all you need.

 

[ciurra]

I would advise doing a fanatic militarist egalitarian which goes around the galaxy spreading democracy bomb by bomb.

So you will have a nice goal during all of you game and you should find a nice balance between enemis and allies.

As civics I would choose distinguished admiralty and idealistic foundation to better rappresent the values of your nation .

For race I would advuse nomadic ( migration growth is king) and fast breeder ( same reason).

 

[ciurra]

Also you may be able to play with dlc content with a random start

 

[Surimi]

Honestly, when I first bought vanilla Stellaris 1.0 I played it for literally 30+ hours non-stop, and it was a very different (and much less interesting) game back then. As a new player, there's plenty to hold your interest in basic Stellaris, and the only piece of DLC I'd consider really "must have" even now is Utopia.

As for a "most fun" playstyle. Honestly, that depends on you. One thing which might be fun is to start as one of the human factions. There are two premade human factions, the United Nations of Earth or the Commonwealth of Man. Additionally, you can edit these factions or use humanoid portraits and namelists to create custom human factions (and even start in the Sol system).

With human names and portraits its a bit easier to keep track of characters which lends itself to roleplaying, and both the UNE and the COM represent very different playstyles.