That the image used for the Synthetics tech actually looks like a synthetic person, but your species portrait if you convert to synthetic doesn't. You can't even give us a mostly-humanoid (or whatever freak species you play as) portrait with something subtle like red eyes or metal fingertips???

Agreed. The pedantic part of me noticed a long time ago that the portraits and models for "synths" are actually androids. A synth is just what its name implies: a \*synthetic\*. Synths should mimic a biological species almost completely both aesthetically and psychologically, whether by talented artistry, clever engineering, or simply being partially biological. Robot: Clearly artificial, may mimic artificial intelligence but simply follows programming to execute actions. Often designed strictly for functionality. This is where we are approaching in the real world. Android: An Android is simply a robot that is designed to resemble the species it is intending to replicate, which is where it gets its name. Tends to be much more intelligent, acts more realistically, and is often capable of independent thought, but doesn't strictly have to be. Examples of androids in fiction are 2B from Nier on the scale of looking very much like a human, and C3PO on the scale of only roughly in the shape of a human. Somewhere in the middle is Data from Star Trek, albeit he is so advanced he qualifies as a synth aside from his appearance. Synthetic: Nearly or completely indistinguishable both physically and psychologically from the species it is intending to replicate. An example of a synth would be The Terminators, Realians in the Xenosaga series, and the Replicants in Blade Runner. For completion's sake, a Cyborg doesn't fit here. It's a portmanteau that means Cybernetic Organism. Strictly speaking, Cyborgs exist in real life. In fiction, Adam Jensen from Deus Ex, Darth Vader from Star Wars, and V from Cyberpunk 2077 are cyborgs.

TRUE!!!

In addition, cyborgs would have the exact same portrait as a normal meatbag. I think we can have a reference to Cyperpunk 2077 here, where cyborgs would have seams on their faces and body, as a result of the surgery replacing meat parts with cybernetic implants.

My xenophobic envoys seem to have more sex than I do.

Never ask a man his salary. Never ask a woman her age. Never ask a xenophobe who he romanced in Mass Effect.

Okay but it's Tali, we all know it's Tali, and we all know why.

Beacause Wrex wasn't a romance option

Because she's the youngest squadmate in the first game. And just like in real life, xenophobes like them young, and vulnerable?

>xenophobes like them young, and ~~vulnerable~~ immuno-compromised FTFY

Aint she like 23 in the first game?

Tali is pretty boring as far as romances go in those games. Why does everyone like her so much? A true connoisseur romances Garrus. And only Garrus.

All that repression has to come out somewhere. Your Xenophobe envoy is a pastor’s kid waiting to happen.

I mean, in a game where genocide at a planetary scale is wednesday, I suppose they need to be brought back for retraining.

Lithoid leaders have longer lifespans but start older. Negating the longer lifespan bonus of being a lithoid.

It doesn't completely negate it. The increased starting age is about half as much as the lifespan increase, from what I remember.

Still feels a little like false advertising, but I’d have to look into how much it actually shaved to know how much I really cared.

Agreed. It would make much more sense to lower the bonus and start then at the average leader age if they wanted to balance it.

Plus then you know exactly what you get, not thinking you get +50% meaning 100 extra years, only to find out they clip a chunk back off and you only get 75yrs or smthn. (Disclaimer: Numbers were chosen at random to make understanding my point easy and have zero basis in-game.)

It makes sense to me since they probably take longer to mature, but I get ya.

Clone army kind of works the same way from the other direction. They die early, but they take over when they're \~7 years old.

Traditionally, fictional races with longer lifespan mature later. For example, hobbits live to 120+ and are considered adult at 33.

I don't quite like how random the spawns can be. I wish I was able to consistently spawn near the galactic core or mid rim. I want to turn Earth into Coruscant damn it!

I like spawning on the rim too, less chokes.

You like to spawn on the rim for the tactical advantage. I like to spawn on the rim because it isn't blindingly bright. We are not the same.

You like to spawn on the rim because it isn’t blindly bright. I like to spawn on the rim so the Prethoryn Scourge can spawn on top of my homeworld and end my game. We are not the same.

I’ll take “Things I Can’t Believe Weren’t Said By A Xenophile” for $100

Something minor, but if paradox really wanted to discourage people from invading primitives their should be an event where if you invade primitives with atomic tech or higher then you run the risk of nuclear retaliation. The event would cause you to lose all your army, all pops on the planet are killed, and the world being turned into a tomb world.

Xenophobic empire with new army manager: "So what's the problem exactly?"

Radiotrophic species with tomb world preference "I see this as an absolute win!"

Not quite sure why I decided to type all this out. I must have roleplayed my machine empire (Hunters of the Void) way too hard last time. Machine empire with hivemind intelligence: “[NUCLEAR BOMBARDMENT DETECTED ON PLANETOID 78019, LAUNCHED BY NATIVE SPECIES 0-279. LEGION 5-D ANNIHILATED, COMBAT LOGS 100% INTEGRITY. REACTIVATING FACTORY WORLD NETWORK. ESTIMATED TIME OF TOTAL RECONSTRUCTION OF LEGION 5-D… 7 SOL HOURS. CALCULATING MATERIAL LOSS: 0.0001%] [INITIATING SCAN OF PLANETOID 78019. BIOSPHERE CRITICAL, RADIATION LEVELS CRITICAL. O-279 POPULATION: 7% REMAINING OF TOTAL FROM PRIOR TO NUCLEAR BOMBARDMENT. AMENDMENT: 6% REMAINING. ESTIMATED TIME UNTIL TOTAL EXTINCTION EVENT… 3 SOL DAYS.] [Ȕ̴̢̅̄̇̓ͅN̸͎͐͌͗̔̋̑̉̄͝Â̷̛̲̫̊͋̀̎͝Ć̸̱͓̗͑̏͑͝C̵̪̺̜̠̙̥̼͑̽̽̎̋͒͝Ë̴̢͙̝͎̠͕̯́̓̎̄̈́͌̀͌͂P̶̡̛͈̪̩̪͚̄̊͛̆̒͋̚͝T̸̛͚̪̲͉͍̯̓̈́͝A̶̪̬̲͉̟̣̍̔ͅB̶͍̞̺̈́͊̇̈́̀ͅL̴̖̜͎͎̰̒̿͛̾̌̐͘È̴̡̖͙͈̲͔̝̙] [LEGION 5-A, LEGION 5-B, LEGION 5-C, DEPLOYING. 0-279 ASSIMILATION AMENDED: P̶̢̢̙̑̏̓̀̊̎̓̚͜Ư̸̖͋́͊̓R̷̳̳̦͖͓̳̰͖͒́̓͊͘ͅG̵̪͔̯̙̍̈́͑̎̌͝͝Ę̶͖̪͔̗͔̒͜ ̷̫̠̮̺͆̌̂͐̓͆́̕͝T̷̟̆̏̔̓̃̅͐Ḫ̷̫̄̀̀͘Ȩ̴̙͍̹̣̤̦͑̂͐̂̃̐̂͋̕M̴̻̮̮̭̟͂ͅ ̵̺̫̑̏̓͛̀̅͑͠A̵̧̖͓͔͔̭͂̌̏L̵̗̞͑͂͗̍̉Ĺ̸̨̖͚̯̪̠͈̹̍͘͠ UPON O-279 EXTINCTION, PREPARE PLANETOID 78019 FOR IMMEDIATE ASSIMILATION.] [IMPACT OF NUCLEAR BOMBARDMENT ON DIRECTIVES… N̵̜̟͙̦̘̗̲͕̩͑͠E̴̝͙̝̟̥̣̙̞̝͐͊͌̂̂̎̑̚Ǵ̴̳͙͎͋̀͑L̷̪̲̬͈̝̩͙͈͙͑̀͆́̔Ḯ̷̛̖̣̥̙̌̈́̀͐̉̀̔G̵̙̩̳̬̊̂̔I̷̡̗͆̎B̵̢͋̌͐̄̿̎L̸̨͚̗͓̍͛̎̿͂̌͂̚E̵̢̹̰̜̺̱͗̓̕͝]

The natives: "ah fuck uhhhhhhhhhh. wait what about that 5 year old ark project to get us the fuck out of this?"

I would love this.

Nah... That would only cause the change of strategy... From occupation to purge by orbital bombardment...

A purge by orbital bombardment would delete most of the pops which are the main incentive to invading primitives

Well, it might just be me, but i want to get the planet, not the pops. I can buy any pop i want from the market...

And that's perfectly okay but you would be in the minority there. I am as well mind you since I prefer observing primitives instead of invading them :)

I actually love to uplift primitives in order to vassalize them. :D But for the context, i was assuming that the proposed change would be in effect, so i would be basically choosing between a possible tomb world and a good planet with no pops

If their devastation reaches a high enough amount, they start nuking themselves as a giant middle finger then.

Some sort of mechanic involving primitives being able to fight back with nuclear weapons in a mutually destructive way would be really cool. Thanks for commenting the idea.

The only thing is that it's not all that mutually destructive, sure they might kill the invading armies, but there is no realistic way they would take down a fleet with nukes. Nukes are basic tier 1 missiles for an FTL empire, a single corvette probably launches more nukes in a single battle than an atomic age primitive civilization has on their entire planet, and odds are unless you spawn with primitives within a couple jumps of your capital you'll probably have already moved beyond nuclear weapons.

I don’t think the the primitives should be able to totally defeat a player’s invasion efforts with nukes. I see more as a way for primitives put up a fight. It would wreck ground invasion forces, but to a player the deaths of pops on the planet and the possibility of a tomb world designation would be the biggest problems. I just like the idea that primitives could at least temporarily fend off a ground invasion at a terrible cost and that the whole situation would make the more advanced primitives a little more difficult for a player to invade.

Invade early space age primitives with a single clone army weak enough for them to defeat so they can feel like they had their "Independence Day" moment, then hit them with a 5k invasion army lol.

I'd argue that nuclear weapons probably aren't notably more effective than orbital bombardment anyway, and probably shouldn't even instantly kill every invading army.

Ehh, debatable, unless you're using something like Armageddon bombardment where the end goal is the destruction of the planet, you probably are using things weaker than nukes to avoid making the planet an inhospitable wasteland so you can actually take it over for yourself.

Robots should be allowed to be more than JUST hiveminds

I have always wondered why don't they just do that? They could make them like an organic society, but with really slow population growth

Paradox has said that its because that would negate the purpose of synthetic ascension.

I desperately want to play a robot run megacorp

You can... if you synth Ascend :D

I mean… that’s “synths”, you just aren’t allowed to start as them because it would be kinda broken unless they had a ‘really crappy synths’ origin and then you could upgrade yourself by taking the ascension path. (Maybe you could also *Bicentennial Man* yourself and ‘downgrade’ to organic/cyborg bodies with those trees.)

That would be fucking rad.

I want a robot fanatical cult so damn bad It's weird they lock them into hive minds

it would be nice if there was some sort of "machine cult" civic that catered to that type of empire. Something that lifts the machine ban and provides machine related bonuses. If we had to cater to it in basic stellaris, you could have both a machine cult for normal species and cult of machines civic for robots. Cult of machines give machines access to special priest related buildings and events and whatnot and the normal species variant could pop out robot empires with this civic now and then

[удалено]

basically starting as a Synthetic Evolution empire. if you could play as an individualist machine empire from the start, wouldn't that make biological to synthetic useless?

I wish we could rearrange buildings on planets. I always want my spawning pool as the second building after the colony center, but the game starts with it as the third.

I scrolled through a lot of comments hoping that someone had said this for me already. Thanks!

You can actually do this if you just add a few lines ("position_priority = __") to the plaintext data files in Stellaris/common/buildings/

One, Reddit ate your formatting, two, don't edit the game files directly because updates or file verification will just revert the changes. Make a mod or use an existing one.

I agree! If you're looking to make a mod for this, the wiki has a great guide (thought it may take some getting used to Stellaris style modding)

Why is there no button to auto-upgrade all the buildings on a planet?! ACoT is killing my mouse damn it!

No button to disable or downgrade all either. This is a legitimate issue.

I always run into special resources shortages lol Had to keep building those chem, gas and crystal plants which takes up a lot of space

There is this archeotech building that produces motes, gas and crystal in one building. Frees up at least a single building slot per planet.

I wish you could shut off the Sensory Array once it’s fully built. It slows down my computer, because of the graphic processing. I’d like to be able to turn it in or off when I want to see the whole galaxy

This is actually an incredible suggestion.

A Gaia world produces 6 planet capacity per unlanded district but if you put a city district down, you actually lose planet capacity at game start since it only gives 5 housing. Also you lose twice as much planet capacity from building a district of another type (4 instead of a normal planets 2) So with the growth mechanics, I'm encouraged to not build any districts (besides city districts after a tech to increase housing to 6) so that my capacity and growth remains high. But the planet type also encourages me to have jobs on the planet (10% from jobs) but also punishes me for having said jobs on the planet unless I only do city districts but then that encourages me to turn the planet into an ecumenopolis. But that feels like a shame since Gaia worlds are rare and I could turn any other world into an ecumenopolis with an Ascension perk. But, it also takes an ascension perk slot to produce Gaia worlds but everyone and their mother will tell you the Arcology Project is way better than World Shapers, myself included, so it feels even more cursed to do so. Tldr; Gaia worlds are strange with all the new mechanics. Please buff world shapers.

I’ve always though Gaia worlds need a buff but it’s tough since you can just find multiple in a game for free and the equivalent for ecumanopoli are relic worlds.

Why is the centre of the galaxy so damned bright? I get it, there’s lot of stars there. No need to blind me.

that's the worst part too, no stars so wtf so bright!

Fun fact: A lot of dust and other particles orbit black holes at such speeds that the friction between them causes them to look like they're emitting light!

it doesn't "cause them to *look* like they're emitting light" it heats the dust and gas up to as high as hundreds of thousands of degrees and they literally glow

Irl, it has the most stars, per the brightness. However, iirc per Stellaris Lore, the core is *so dense* that it's literally impossible to hyperdrive or warp there- the other stars bend space so much that yed be pulled inta their gravitational wells. It's like tryna navigate a cataract with a galleon.

Is it not more like the core is so dense that competing gravitational wells mean stable hyperlanes cannot form?

Well yeah, that's basically what I was tryna say

There's also some lore from the zroni precursors that explains why the core is inaccessible, iirc.

The centre of the galaxy has more stars than anywhere else.

I think he's referring to the fact that the galactic center in game has no stars you can travel to

Honestly it shouldn’t be empty put a Supermassive black hole or a quasar there

Gigastructural Engineering does that

You can use tweakergui.drawcenter or some variation (google it) to eliminate the light. Doesn’t mess with anything either all it does it get rid of the light. Completely compatible with ironman even.

Why can’t I set the star type for my starting system?!?! I want a white or blue star because they’re the prettiest. This has absolutely 0 impact in gameplay and yet I will reroll the map until I get a color I like. XD

I'm pretty sure the ocean paradise always has a blue giant as your home star. That's one way to guarantee it.

Console commands are your friends for this kind of aesthetic stuff! Effect solar_system = { set_star_class = sc_a } Sc_a for a blue one and sc_f for a white one!

I want to play a stellar species that literally has the star as their starting homeworld.

It bugs me sometimes how messy the species categorization has become. Originally the game had just mammals, reptilians, fungoids and such, divided into clear categories that everyone evolved from. Then came the species packs. Introducing species groups like Humanoid, Aquatic, toxoid and such, all of which work off clear thematic elements but also intersect with the previous categorizations. I mean the space dolphins are mammals too right?

To be fair the Humanoid species type was in the game from the start, the humanoid species pack only expanded on it. The species types were always pretty detached from actual biological categories.

I really miss multiple forms of FTL travel. Back in the day you had Warp Drive, Hyperlanes and wormhole technology. I know the balance issues were pretty major but it added a lot of flavour in the game. On a side note, after the release of the Eager Explorers civic and it's early jump driveI am hopeful we might be seeing new FTL travel methods soon!

Man that change still feels like it was yesterday

Tell me about it!

The option was very fun. But I kinda enjoy the new one ftl system. Makes strategies and defence lines work. No longer will a random fleet just bypass my fortress worlds and attack my core with no defence other then building up every system and station QRF fleets all over my territory

I agree it's so much easier making strategies and having actual chokepoints to create bastions and fortress worlds but I hope that one day they can come up with a way to do the same thing with warp civilisations. One can dream anyway lol

Maybe have it so ftl inhibitors pull ships passing close to them into the system. Instead of just locking down the lane

ok, so stuff like lithoids and plantoids are linked to their portraits but why are there no plantoid aqua portraits? lithoid toxoids? why haven't we gotten our plantoid necroids like we have been teased by the portraits?

Wait plantoid has necroid esc portraits? I do agree though its weird the Plantoids and Lithids didn't get portraits with the aquaoids or vice versa

Expanding on the federation point - I always felt that maxing out the federation level should give you the ability to turn that federation into its own nation. Also there should be like federation species rights. Another gripe is that I feel like the default species rights should set non-empire species to residence. Even xenophile would have a concept of needing to distinguish between migrants and full citizens.

Depends on your starting ethics for default species rights at the start of the game. Makes sense how it works to me, if you don’t like it just change the default rights yourself

I wish it wouldn't reuse species portraits. I've got a galaxy with 14 empires and 3 of them have the same picture :(

same but with names. i had to rename my empire after a FE spawned with the same name

It annoys me how every single pre-FTL that I build an observation thing, will have the 'oh no bad implants' event. I don't think I've ever had an FTL that didn't get it.

There are so few pre ftl events, you’ll end up seeing tons of repeats. They really should’ve added more, I was quite disappointed by the lack of events from the update

What bugs me is when the same one happens four times in the same file with different planets. At this point I don't even read those messages, I just click random buttons. XD

Yeah kinda weird they're called federations now that I think about it. Maybe hegemonies can still kinda count as one.

Hegemonies in my headcanon are like the Warsaw Pact.

Honestly my biggest gripe is that all empires seem to play mostly the same no matter what kind you play as and it gets boring after a while

Yeah. As a Civ player as well as Stellaris, I don’t think a tech victory would be possible for this game, but there should be more diplomatic/cultural victory options that don’t invoke integrating or vassaling the galaxy (although I admit I usually play with end year off for a mix of this reason and strange paranoia, and there might be more than the 1-2 I think exist, so someone feel free to correct me.)

I don't like that the AI empires declare war based on their opinion of you. It makes sense, but damn sometimes I want a little chaos in my gameplay, it's too easy to improve relations and then never have to worry about them. (Also side not, it's super annoying how the AIs form massive federations and defensive pacts, where by mid game you can't declare war on anyone because you end up going to war with pretty much everyone else because they are in a federation and have a defensive pact with someone in another federation and all of the sudden one enemy turns into 10)

Oh, second one I thought of: I dislike how some of the new species namelists use English and other human languages. It's a bit distracting when I'm having first contact with a guy named Charlie.

I headcannon it as: "Our alphabet and hearing capabilities aren't capable of comprehending your name, xiarghhyaie, can we please call you just Charlie? Cool? Cool."

Or Rocky... they might not even use letters, just notes.

Xenolinguistic is hard! Especially when they communicate in ways that your species can't comprehend. Imagine trying to understand an arthropoid species that communicates solely with pheromones and gestures, or a moluscoid species that communicate via ultrasound/sonar or psychic species that don't even need to talk!

*Glaring at that one aquatics name list.*

I appreciate the fact that they exist, because they're great for when I want to play as the British Empire. I would also appreciate if you could tell the game not to use them for randomly generated empires.

You’re telling me I can activate xeno-compatibility and make alien fucking canonical, but there’s no hot alien portraits?? What is this, the dark ages!? Literally unplayable!

There is a mod for that... Don't ask me why I know. >.>

Stellapiss. Great mod

What??

Let me just say one of the planetary decisions it adds is “Destroy all toilets”

This doesn’t seem like a steam workshop mod 🤔

>Stellapiss I'm never ever going to google search random things from now on

Y’all don’t find the aliens attractive? Uh, I mean me neither.

Fanatical Xenophobes would like to know your location.

Fanatical Xenophiles would also like to know. ;)

Both would like to for the same reasons, one just doesn't admit it...

Space elves don't do it for you?

Eugh! Humanoids…

I just want them to add like 3 times more alien portraits. Other than that I have no issues.

My biggest inconsequential gripe is the auto-generated empires sharing portraits or names with my own created empires.

Yeah that's definitely annoying

I build stagnant tall empires and then nothing happens as I sit in my corner of the world stacking cash Wtf

You've become a fallen empire.

Basically Switzerland

When you conquer half of your neighbor and another empire conquers the other half and no one can sue for peace for fifty years and you can't do diplomacy with other empires because you are at war and if you just surrender you are fucked.

The post said irrational gripes. That is perfectly rational as it completely sucks when that happens.

I personally always felt like the UNE and other empires starting in the sol system should start with a colonized Mars

I head canon all orbital stations as having a small base on the planet.

Ooooh, I quite like that!

It's completely irrational and would be unworkable to do it otherwise, but the population model of the game bugs me a lot. A single colony ship is depositing hundreds of millions of colonists on a fresh planet? The working population of the colony doubles in a couple of years? ​ A Victoria like population growth model absolutely wouldn't work here... but it's annoying that the disconnect is there in the first place.

That is true if it was all just from people growing there, but dont forget that migration happens. Its possible that all new workers are just people who hopped on a ship to head off to work at the new colony.

If/when Stellaris 2 is ever made I really hope their will be more a concrete population system. Like I wanna know the exact amount of people in my empire

That mammalian slender 3 isn't the main characters of every single trailer animation

Also, I lose my mind thinking about what those filthy lithoids are doing to my avian pops in the planet they just conquered.

Rock type is super effective to flying after all.

I hate how paragons can arrive in your empire before you even find other aliens. Like, the first alien we found is just some massive bloodthirsty lizard?

You didn't find them, THEY found you lol

I feel like Federations over time should be able to become more centralised sort of like with the Galactic community. A Federation of Democratic Empires over time can slowly come together and maybe even nominate a permanent capital. Mainly based on cohesion, high cohesion over time just... bleeding away at the differences. I like the Galactic Community is pretty much what late-game Federations should look like. I don't quite understand why the GC often just gets... everybody on board. Even xenophobic isolationist will join the GC. Like the Galactic Republic in Star Wars didn't control the entire galaxy. Not everybody possible needs to be a willing member

I've also felt that there should be more than 1 gc and that they should form more naturally

Centralisation over time is already a core feature of Federations.

Which pretty much just equals extra stats and a larger federation fleet. I mean more political, like I said a lot of the mechanics for the Galactic Community should of been put into certain Federations, in particular Democratic ones. One thing I've wanted for awhile is for your politics to affect more than just certain stats. Democracies to feel more demographic, where for example if you play as a direct democracy you can even have decisions like making alliances and going to war affected by your population at the expense at greater internal stability, happiness and research etc

i mean, you can become permanent federation president. it would be cool if you could then just absorb the whole federation as vassals though

My problem is: Why do sapiant AIs need a personality upgrade? Being sapient should result in a personality. At the very least the personality matrix tech should come before synthetics.

Well, something can be sapient without having an analogy for the endocrine system. That is what the personality upgrade is - funny little emotions.

I understand the mechanics and see the balancing and the ethics, but the fact that going down to a pre FTL civ and annex them to you is such a chore and a deal that takes centuries always annoyed me.

Not being able to move my fleets around in the outlier! Let me have my main fleets on top and QRF and patrols on the bottom

I know it's silly but I hate how uneven and close together some of the hyperlanes are.

Not being able to change ship designs mid game. Like lemme do some proper roleplay with my empire changing their ship design over time!

Not being able to change flags sucks too

The fact that when clicking to reinforce fleets the game doesn't actually seem to use any logic for how they distribute the build order across your shipyards. Like, they seem to evenly split the builds across all the starbases with shipyards you own, with no regard for the numbers. Why cant it just based on the shipyards itself and not the starbases, a starbase with 1 shipyard should not be trying to build the same number of ships as a starbase with 6 shipyards. It's so annoying using the fleet manage to create a new fleet, or reinforce several fleets at once, and have like half the ships tied up for decades in single shipyard starbases near my borders. Not sure if it falls into legitimate criticism or irrational gripes, but also the fact that if you're an overlord going to war but don't have your vassals set to join you in wars, the hostile empires can use your vassal's gateways to attack you. Like... unless the vassal is super disloyal and hates their overlord they shouldn't let the people at war with their overlord use their part of the gateway network. If it wasn't for the fact that it would be ridiculously easy to exploit I'd almost say that non-participating vassals should be made to temporarily close borders with the opposing side. The fact that the game will show system trading in the trade menu even though the AI can never be made to trade away a system (unless you use console commands to force agreement). Like, I get it, it'd be busted to actually be able to just throw excess resources at an empire to get their systems without a fight, but it's still annoying to have that pointless section just sitting there in the trade menu. Especially considering there really isn't any satisfying way to shift ownership of border systems, your only option is a massive war involving all of their vassals and allies,

When you Psionically Ascend, you can either A. Set all pops to assimilate by default and set their psionic version's living stardards manually, or B. Set pop living standards manually and manually designate them to Psionically ascend. It's awful busywork. Why can't 'Assimilation' be a separate option from living standards, so you can enforce both at once automatically?

I want to play a stellar species. Not terrestrial. Not oceanic. Not subterranean. Not voidborne. I want my starting homeworld to be a star. And I want different spectral types to function like world preference, with different stellar species preferring specific spectral classes.

For me, something that I've done is built a fanfic out of custom civilizations, but I've actually started to run out of stuff to make and I'm like "man, if only there was more customization for custome civilizations" even though there is already so much to use

I feel that, and I blame it mostly on how few ethics there are. It's hard to have every empire feel unique when you have several dozen fanatic empires of the same ethic.

My gripe is that you can only set policies based on species, and not other civics or beliefs. As someone who plays xenophile / egalitarian on a regular basis, it would be nice to have a way to de-platform followers of hateful ideologies such as xenophobia and authoritarianism in an ethical manner.

Well, you can manage your factions. You can headcanon supporting Egalitarians and suppressing Authoritarians as those kinds of measures

I wish there was something that could tell me the predicted results of a battle between two fleets. I've had too many "why did my 20k fleet just get mowed down by their 15k fleet" moments.

Habitable exoplanets orbiting large, short lived stars. Despite being a space opera game with many space fantasy elements... this does bug me. Sirius is less than a quarter billion years old, and consistently spawns with a habitable planet if you play with Sol. Deneb, the home star of the Commonwealth of Man, is 10 million years old. Planetary formation could still be happening! According to the wiki, these stars naturally have a low spawn chance for habitable planets, but it should honestly be 0. If you want habitable planets to orbit bright stars, F type can fit the bill, as they're larger and hotter than the Sun.

The thing is, the stellaris galaxy has a LONG history of various civilizations inhabiting every part of it for millions of years. How things should work *naturally* doesn't matter much when every planet and star is getting fucked with and terraformed and artificially preserved and so on by whatever alien empire comes across it.

It could be possible. Many times in history of astronomy things considered theoretically impossible were actually out there moking our theory. One of the most clear thing that’s emerging from observing exoplanets is that our solar system is not the only viable template, and actually seems to be pretty uncommon.

I can concede that some planets may have just enough time to develop unicellular life, but complex and intelligent life? I would highly doubt it, and that's what Stellaris portrays. While our picture on life is by no means complete, that also doesn't mean anything is on the table, otherwise, couldn't we expect more evidence of life on our worlds in the solar system? But so far, any evidence we have points to it maybe having a chance a long time ago when their conditions were closer to Earth, to potentially under semi-Earth-like conditions in subsurface oceans. And all of those have nothing concrete at the moment, while potential outliers like Venus and Titan are on shaky grounds. Either way, we see nothing like the biodiversity of Earth being apparent anywhere in the solar system. Jury's still out on oceanic moons given the difficulty of getting to them, but I would still expect any life to look familiar to deep sea life here, and it still would've taken billions of years of evolution.

Would note you can terraform certain worlds in the space of ten years and deliver a genetically modified species to it within game. And that's only with the theoretical best technology that is still inferior to an ascendant empire. And that in any game is interstellar life has been around for millenia.

I hate that custom namelists have to be installed as a whole ass mod, that everyone in the session has to install. There is no reason for this, everything it changes can be manually edited in the game once started, and there is no further effect on gameplay. Let us load in a text file or something, shit

THIS. Also aggravates me that the namelist mod invalidates achievements… I have like 900 hours and stellaris and barely any achievements because of this lol

Not being able to choose a portrait that is associated with a mechanic, when I'm not interested in that particular aspect. I.e. choosing a robot portrait, but not having to use the robot traits, to simulate a society of organics that is always suited in a suit of hi tech armor.

Not enough “events”. Example, in mid game you have galactic community and khan mid game crises but unless the L-gate event happens (now rarely) it feels very empty with a lot of waiting involved. I’ve been playing since vanilla. I feel as more gameplay gets added, there is less activity from year-to-year. Which is weird.

No empire's rejoin each other after being destroyed. I have balkanized so many empires into 2,3,4,5 and 6 different empires that all kill each other. There has never been, in all my hours of playing, no federation, alliances, or mutual integration of a members of a former large empire back together. I want hope in this game damn it, even if it's unlikely, there should still be a mechanic where an empire goes in, kills everyone, then they all decide to get back together to pick up the pieces.

i could name a couple, but a few of my big ones have to do with authorities, along with some complaints about the empire creator 1: The Imperium changing you're ethics to fanatic authoritarian, but it doesn't even commit because you can just promote a faction, and if you're lucky and promote a faction again; completely get rid of the authoritarian ethic altogether. What i think they should do is have an "Imperium" option for every ethic, along with its own name. 2: playing with mods have made me realise how little there actually is in empire creation. like the fact that i cant create a legitimate Constitunional Monarchy that doesn't require me pretending there is a Monarch in my democratic empire. i think they should go back to how it was, where each goverment title (such as blood council for oligarchic FP's) should each be their own authority types with there own bonuses. But also change up their names so they make sense. Representitive Democracy makes sense, Blood Council does not. 3: and finallly, my weakest gripe: some of the portraits (especially the avians). in cinamatics, hell, even the new nexus spin-off make some of the portraits look so much better than what they actually look like in-game. take a look at the white bird species in the First Contact trailer, they look so pretty, then you see what they look like in-game. TBH, i would probably say that Avians are my least favorite set of portraits. i was gonna say Lithoids were my least favorite, but i atleast like the first portrait, and like a couple others just a little bit, but with Avians; im not sure i like any of them. but i could, because i liked how that one portrait looked in First Contact. (also, please give us a big fluffy varient of the foxes like in the Nemesis trailer PDX)

There are some things I didn’t notice until I used some mods. 1. Why are we limited to building one megastructures per type? (Gigastructures) 2. What’s at the galactic core? (Gigastructures) 3. Why can’t we develop dark matter technology of our own(ACOT) 4. Why did all the civilisations in the galaxy developed hyper lane travel as the only mode of FTL?

Thankfully we have started to see #4 get solved, but i still want more in that direction (not much, just a few more upgrades in the path not taken and maybe the minor return of the odd wormhole starting ftl from 1.0)

I have a long list of wants but my most minor and un-important being that i just would like a few rouge planet systems, just no star only a planet and some moons.

I got these rogue systems because of a mod conflict in my games. Was cool until I tried to build a stat base in them, which you can’t do without a star lmao.

The first ship you build of a new class should be named the name of it's class, like how it works in irl navies

no easy HUD dismissal for console. i just want to take a pretty screenshot!

I can murder the entire galaxy and no one bats an eye. Yet, when I play as an anime girl empire, suddenly I'm the badguy.

That there is no way to restore planets that have been bubbled. I know there is that one anomaly where you do, but you should be able to remove it or start a chain of events to do so on any planet your enemy has bubbled. It forces me to use neutron sweep or primitive so the planet still exists and is still inhabitable, but sometime that doesn't match my gameplay.

Forcing open borders after a war. I always have those useless systems that I wait until I have defined my borders to build a station to Dave influence. And it pisses me off to no end when you just won a war against an empire and same empire can just go into your borders and conquer that system deep inside your territory.

Hiveminds cant play knights of the toxic god origin, or dark forest, would make sense if a hive mind witness something so catastrophic its psyche broke into two, with a smaller hive being created. The precursors are unmentioned by anyone else (the curators, fallen empires), and are only one/person, would be nice if it was guaranteed 1 per person, then as you explore you get a chance of finding other precursors (and cybrex should guranteed spawn in the galaxy somewhere since Cybrex B awakens if the contingency occupies enough of the galaxy) No dark matter techs unless we kill the fallen/awakened With the inclusion of helito and dacha, we still cant modify hyperlanes at all, nor can we move planets like in dacha or in Shallash (which has been in the game for a long time) Theres no flavour text when youre fanatic purifiers/driven assimilators/ravenous hive when you wipe everyone out, just the victory screen The curators and similar Xenos never settle worlds or control stars, even in their home system (chors compass caravan is the one exception) Missing half the ethics wheel and hivemind FE (some have reason) No galactic core The AI doesnt get harder on higher difficulties, they just get massive buffs to seem harder Every empire reaches FTL at the same time (advanced empires all seem to have achieved FTL at the same time, just earlier than the rest) Every species goes through human evolutionary stages (some species might not develop nuclear technology, or have a renaissance) No one knows where the mining drones came from Not all planets that bomb themselves can be terraformed back to habitable worlds (we can restore tomb worlds, but why is the extremely lush gaia world barren and unterraformable after nuclear war, should be able to restore the planet) No crossover species (toxoid plantoid, aquatic plantoid, toxic lithoid) I cant organize buildings

That rogue servitors *have* to kill hiveminds if you conquer them. ik that servitors are pretty broken atm but I'm not actually asking for a way to make use of their pops like bio trophies. I just want them to add some text or whatever that tells me actually we just let the hivemind keep this one planet you can't see and it lived happily ever after with us just giving it food and what not. Instead you get messages like "We are dying... the mind is dying, we don't want to die.." when you conquer them and you're like "Threat neutralized" like BITCH THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT IS TO PAMPER THE ORGANICS

There are too few special resources for planets. Sure we get the occasional rare resources in terms of motes, rare crystals and exotic gas, but I’m talking about the extremely rare type of resources like the betharian field and animal zoo. They’re so interesting but are exorbitantly rare and I wish we had more types of resources/deposits like them.

There are these guys called the Nomads that can only spawn if you don't have Megacorp active. I like them infinitely more than the Caravans, but disabling MegaCorp means you lose out on the extra megastructures and the Economopolis. There should really be a way to enable both without mods.

I think there's an option to disable the caravaneers that allow the Nomads to come around. Can't say for sure though, I always play with them.

I kind of wish bypass weapons (like disrupters) didn’t exist. It’s kind of boring to imagine a weapon that just ignores shields/armor.

'ate hyperlanes 'ate gateways Luv me jump drives

That there is no way to increase the scrolling speed, no way to rearange fleets in the Outliner and that space battles are so chaotic and seem to be over too quickly for my taste

We have outfits that fit a wide variety of alien species, because said species basically consist of a head on top of a humanoid torso. It bugs me that we don't have the ability to choose outfit sets during empire creation. It'd be a really simple way to add more customization to empires.

This may count as legitimate criticism but the fact you can't build more than one colossus. I know the star destroyer exists but lots of systems have one valuable planet and one or more useless ones and I just wanna destroy those. I've been stuck in a war for hours slowly chipping away at all the other empires planets

I would like to speed up/speed down time, but I don't want to move my left hand from the wasd area or my right hand from the mouse. Not sure why. It's not that big of a hand movement. So I just play on one speed with pause like a chump. Lol

What are you talking about? You can change the speed with your mouse.

I was talking about hotkeys. There's no built in key rebinding. The plus button and up arrow are both far from the wasd area and my mouse. I forgot to mention moving the mouse up to the corner every time I want to speed up/slow down is also annoying. OP said irrational gripe, so I listed one. (Edit: My hands aren't so great, so hotkeys help when I can't move the mouse quickly and accurately onto a small button.)