Top 10 Stellaris Tips for Advanced Players

We welcome MaxTheCatfish back to the Stellaris Channel! Today Max is going through our Top 10 Tips for Advanced Players. So, you've probably completed your first few games, and think there's nothing left to learn? Whether you have ten hours or a hundred hours, there might just be something in this video for you!
Want to see more of MaxTheCatfish's content? Check him out here: / maxthecatfish
00:00:00 - Intro
00:00:39 - Track Your Ships
00:01:24 - Weapon Size Matters
00:02:51 - Say no to piracy
00:03:27 - Forward Base
00:04:03 - Auto Ground Assault
00:04:34 - Defensive Armies
00:05:19 - Complete the Precursor
00:06:15 - Species Management
00:08:25 - Greater Defense
00:09:13 - Tech Tree Tricks
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#Stellaris #top10 #2022 #tutorial #developer #stellarisgameplay #gaming #multiplayer #space #spacegames #grandstrategy #strategygames #pcgames

[@StellarisOfficial]

Did we miss any? Let us know your top advanced tips!

[@grzesiekfrk]

Trading for resources with AI instead of using market.

[@thealien2411]

@@grzesiekfrk I felt I was scamming the ai using the trade deals. Food for alloys Lol

[@Dahaka27]

Tips: Running a any surplus of food above +1 does not carry any benefit. Most empires apart from rare exceptions spend food as a resources other than for pop upkeep, so sell your excess food if you need money and sell a monthly amount either to other empires for other more useful resources like minerals or sell it to the market. Gestalt empires benefit enormously from a lot of early starbases. They have a special starbase building called Solar Panels. This replaces the trade building normal empires have and makes an excellent way to gather energy credits in the early game. Organic gestalt empires that need food for pops can also build the hydroponic farm building on their many starbases to feed their entire population without needing to use agriculture districts on planets until MUCH later. This also applies to Rogue servitors who require food to feed their bio trophies. You can combine this idea of producing food on starbases even for normal machine empires with the catalytic processing civic that allows you to turn alloys into food. You can in theory produce enough food on starbases and dedicate all your early pops to turning that food into alloys.

[@roblaquiere8220]

If a system is blocked by hostiles and your fleet is not strong enough (like Mining Drones or Amoebas), you can continue to expand past the blocked system by setting your Science/Construction Vessel to Passive Stance. You then micro the vessel through the blocked system manually around the edge (avoiding the hostiles in the system) and pay the bit of extra Influence to build a star-base beyond the offensive system. I have used this trick to expand early and often without the need for strong early fleets. Just don't forget to go around and mop up once your choke-points are setup because these types of hostiles like to expand themselves!

[@kaijuking5971]

Hello I'm a hungry hive mind now give me your food

[@iloldirl]

If you have a science ship queued up to survey systems, you can Ctrl+Shift+Right Click to queue a new task in front of all the previously queued tasks. This is helpful if you have a special project spawn in the middle of surveying.

[@davidpitrone39]

My G-d thank you for that. I hate having to reset everything because I didn't get to the science ship fast enough and need to go back for something.

[@DEADGAMESINC]

Useful one, thx

[@schwibz]

Can you do this on console edition?

[@masonnotjason8214]

This is huge, thanks so much! I was wondering if there was a way to do something like this.

[@IainG10]

Two extra-advanced tips to these advanced tips: 1: Small weapons are good against corvettes, but fighters are excellent. Sprinkle carriers (either cruisers for cost or other battleships for power) into your battleship fleets instead of small-weapon craft. Just remember that unlike gun shots, strike craft have travel times. 2: FTL inhibitors are the cornerstone of any good defensive line, but beings from other dimensions may know more about the science than us. The Unbidden end-game crisis can ignore FTL inhibitors, bypassing what you though was an impregnible defense. All other Crisis factions are from this reality and are bound by inhibitors.

[@ez_theta_z9317]

contingency also aren't affected by ftl inhibitors

[@jameshenry8956]

I have been playing for thousands of hours, but didn't know about the auto armies thing. Just goes to show you can always learn something. Very cool thanks!

[@orchard1990]

Yeah thats the only one of these tips I didn't know either haha, that will make a nice difference

[@El_Presidente_5337]

I also only learned it relatively recently hehe

[@troyscribner4342]

Same here, i never would have even thought about that.

[@allibababoo]

Yeah that was news to me too

[@Illuminat-ve5ue]

4:04, actually pressing invade and watching the assault armies fall is for me the most exciting part of ground combat

[@paulwilliams8525]

Fun fact: when starting a bombardment on an enemy planet, put a transport fleet in orbit. View the plant being bombarded. You will see the fleet in orbit plus its fleet strength. You can then easily tell when it is safe to land your armies. With armies in orbit, there is even a button available on the planet screen to start the invasion.

[@Apollysis]

If you have a fleet hotkeyed you can actually change its homebase while they are MIA. You can use that to make them return closer to the front line or away from the fight to rebuild depending on your needs.

[@roblaquiere8220]

Can you also set homebase for MIA fleets in the Fleet Manager Tab?

[@Fiscotte]

That's an actual advanced tip

[@Apollysis]

Yeah it is super useful when you retreat a fleet so you can have them come back at the closest starbase to the front line.

[@hatemf23]

Good one.

[@Belhun]

The Auto Ground Assault things was something i was not aware of. thats so nice

[@chrisdutoit4526]

The dev teams (and the fact that Stellaris even has _2_ dev teams speaks volumes) really really care about Stellaris, and it shows. Like, the love they pour into this game is astounding and it's just fun lil stuff like this where it really shines. Keep up the great work guys! I mean, I buy all the expansions so... that's probably already enough incentive but regardless!

[@JohnSmith-bs9ym]

It's probably because they split the team into frontend and backend. Not really usually in bigger companies, and Paradox is getting pretty big at this point (and bloated, some might argue)

[@schwingedeshaehers]

@@JohnSmith-bs9ym which stellaris team is backend?

[@ka1ock]

You you can assist research without zooming and clicking on a planet. Clicking in the planets tab will also work. Release single planets as vassals in the early game if you are a megacorp. You get basic resources and influence without having to spend consumer goods that now you can used for tech or unity. You can reabsorb them later when your economy gets better.

[@Niekieboyz]

You can repair your fleets at captured starbases during a war but only after the station starts regenerating its HP.

[@michaelrogus4485]

In the early game - scientists on ships advance in level by exploring far faster than your core research scientists. Add new scientists with a focus and send them to the stars - when they get to level 3 or so, rotate them back to be a researcher, especially in their chosen skill

[@rasmuswhittembury6350]

Battleship fleets are excellent against corvettes as long as they have strike craft. Having some battleships with carrier cores mixed in with your artillery ships really helps to bring some versitility while still retaining most of the power (and all of the X-slots) of an all-battleship fleet.

[@swapertxking]

my one tip to offer is consider the value of what you're putting on your ships. armor is more expensive than shields, shields come back up faster, but armor cannot be mitigated by certain station modules, or by galactic phenomena.

[@Itharl]

The layers to this game never ceases to amaze me; I've been playing for thousands of hours and never thought to change fleet stance on my armies. (also didn't realize there were secret modifiers affecting how likely a tech would show up) Mind blown.

[@dragonnsv9710]

To any slaver empires. When you start the game select species default right to migration control. It will save you a lot of headache when it comes to editing species later as you can maintain some semblance of control of what species goes on which planet.

[@adrianofelix6728]

I needed that. Now i have a massive slave empire with a lot of random 1 to 10 "useless" pop and my hand ached going on all of them to do something.

[@Tim_van_de_Leur]

Tip: Don't waste unity on ascending a resort planet. It only increases the housing and not the empire wide bonuses. Same probably goes for penal colony.

[@thilomuller2497]

I have a great tip: when chosing traditions, people try to complete a tree in order to obtain the ascension perks as soon as possible. But, I noticed that these ascension perks are not very useful at the beginning, so I am now chosing the best options of different trees without completing them. This is very important at the beginning. I usually start with some options of the expansion tree in order to be able to capture as many systems as possible, then I use some of the economy tree to improve the economy. Then, as year 30 approaches, I use some of the supremacy options to create a better fleet, and if I notice that I have some good neighbors to establish a good federation, I go for the federation, all this without completing any trees. This gives me a clear advantage during the first decades of the game.

[@DeleriousOdyssey]

Interesting...

[@calebblevins6415]

I "accidentally" became the crisis because of this tactic.

[@Dreamer-kf2pn]

Today I Learned: Defeated fleets retreat to their home base. (How did I not notice this before now...) Setting troop transport fleets to aggressive causes them to follow your navy and intelligently auto-invade.

[@infusedj9498]

fantastic work! ty for collaborating with him paradox!

[@Soletestament]

With population controls / AI servitude enabled you can forcibly grow or assemble a pop from a template without having to modify every pop on the planet. This is especially useful as once a planet has a single pop of a given template you can build a colony ship using that pop. This allows you to establish a specialized world using the pop template you want without having to sacrifice a research tree. Once the new pops have their world you can then forcibly relocate the single pop you assembled / grew to the new world boosting that colony's population.

[@StarBoundFables]

Thanks for the advice! Great video 😄I'm still fairly new to the game & it's nice hearing that even the experts learn new tricks with each play-through 🌌🖖🏽

[@TheDestinyGamez]

This was actually a really incredible video. I learned a ton!

[@manwithaporpoiseYTsucksD]

I'm coming back after a year without playing and finding that so much has changed. Industrial districts, building slot mechanic on planets has changed, spy networks, and many other things. Been playing about six hours as Lokken Mechanist to learn new dynamics because they're a simplistic empire. Finding it's a lot more balanced and challenging. it's been interesting to see how this game has evolved through the updates these years. Getting better and better. Appreciate the video. Didn't want to have to watch basics again just for the new features.

[@ldxtr9050]

after a year? sure it was only a year and not a decade? :D

[@specknik356]

Rogue servitor tip: If you have hundreds of bio-trophies on an ecumenopolis, handling amenities is extremely hard. Just go compliance protocols (robot martial law) and use just a few soldiers to get stability to 100. It’s insanely pop efficient even with the debuffs. Btw. Thx for the aggressive armies tip!

[@vincentdowning4612]

Max thanks for such high quality work.

[@XellithUS]

Stack megastructure in the same system since the triggers are broken.

[@davidpitrone39]

What can go in one system?

[@XellithUS]

@@davidpitrone39 If it goes around a planet, you can stack them. So you can have a science nexus, a strategic coordination center, sentry array, mega art installation, interstellar assembly all around 1 single planet if you wanted do, so you dont have to spread your stuff around. Good for tall builds when you dont have much space. Though you can get graphical glitches if you build it on a captured one as far as I can tell since they will stack on top of each other.

[@SgtFlynn-ve7zn]

Loved this!

[@sharifabdelal4149]

Instead of doing a 2nd project for pop modification, for Robots you can go to the pop assembly tab on each planet and select the desired unit to produce. This doesn’t require any engineering research or another special project and saves some time.

[@TheApeiros]

ctrl-shift-click to queue tasks *before* the other tasks (e.g. science ship researching special project it just discovered before continuing its survey-journey). Huge quality-of-life improvement.

[@cirolino1200]

little trick, I pause the game to switch scientists around without moving them long distances or changing their orders (moving, research or assisting... doesn't work for scientists involved in a project/anomaly)

[@robertbaker4186]

One of the best games ever made.

[@sampfrost]

related to docking fleets, planets near the outer edge of a system are ideal anchorages if you kit them out with orbital rings and place a gateway as close to the ring as possible- speeds up reaction time from fleet order to them getting to the target system - especially on defence

[@corvididaecorax2991]

From what I can tell the pops left over after gene modding are actually pops of that type that grew on planets which weren't included in the gene modding list. So typically new colonies or immigrants to planets that didn't have those pops before. Additional pops on planets that are included just add to the cost, and do get modded when the project completes.

[@54032Zepol]

That makes so much sense thank you! I noticed the same thing way later on.

[@Daltem]

3:55 my question on this topic is what the rules are when no homebase is set, I've found that it usually sends them to the nearest shipyard capable allied station

[@andersbjerregaard6243]

1. Of course you want to use the best technology for your ships, but you don't always have to use the most advanced power reactor. Less advanced power reactors cost less alloys to produce, so if you want to spare the alloys use a less powerful power reactor if the ship can take it. 2. Hold down shift when giving a ship orders to make a queue of orders. I.e. give a construction ship orders to build mining & research stations, then return to a starbase. 3. When moving fleets through enemy territory, make sure the fleets have the order to attack the starbase instead of just moving to the system. Although the fleet will move to the system and get close enough to automatically attack the starbase, giving the fleet an order to attack the starbase can save some time, especially when using shift to give multiple orders. When the fleet is done attacking, it will immediately move to the next order instead of moving all the way to the actual star and then moving on to the next order. 4. If a ship already has an order, you can hold down Ctrl + Shift when giving another to prioritize that order. The ship will then move on the previously giving order after completing the new order. 5. (Credit to Aspec for this one) After researching jump drive technologies, create a fleet of mass corvettes to jump behind to major trade hubs (planets with large trade value) to take out the enemy's economy. The corvettes can move fast to avoid fleets, but during later stages in the game when you can have 200+ plus corvettes in one fleet, they can do damage by themselves.

[@Demosthenes84]

I love this game. Only game that allows you to become a race of sentient psychic mushrooms 🍄 who's goal it is to enslave the entire known galaxy. All will be one with the psyshroom!

[@solomani5959]

So far I’ve lost two games. One because I crashed my economy, second time I opened the L-gate and me (and most of the other empires) were overwhelmed (“delved too deep”). I like how the game creates a story as you play.

[@katoorphen4821]

I have just under 500hrs... This just happened to me for the first time ever. It ruined me. Hated it, loved it, and now I will be more cautious about making that choice in the future.

[@penthyn]

600 hours here and I actually knew all of them. But I'd like to add some more pro tips. Planet automation! Stellaris only tells you that you can upgrade your capital but not outher buildings. If you set planet automation to only upgrade buildings you won't suffer from you forgeting to check. Sectors. There was a time back at 2.something when sectors were complete utter shit and it made me not create them anymore. But now they are super strong. If you leave planet automation on on planets in not your main sector and dump some energy credits to your shared stockpile, the sectors will upgrade buildings using these credits instead of strategic resources and minerals. And also secotrs in general allow you to minmax economy even further by creating research only secotrs and giving them governors that boost the desired effect even further.

[@thearkedwolf5754]

2:35 “Oh…oh no…I don’t like that economy”

[@fredrickfuruvald416]

The agressive army trick, hidden modifiers for tech appearance. Was news to me.

[@irishbob26]

MAX. We meet again. Mainly because I keep binging his tutorial videos.

[@HASSMAILBOX]

Okay so basically for both power projection and pirat supression the armament of your ships doesn't matter so you can spamm "empty" corvetts to increas you influence gain or to get a chep pirat supression fleet.

[@TheDude50447]

Going by Montus tests here tracking is a modifier for evasion. The tests have shown that even against 90% evasion corvettes the difference between small and large weapons isnt that big. Large slots have a much higher range doing damage much earlier while also able to fit much higher damage weapons like neutron launchers. All in all he concludes that you shouldnt bother with small weapons and especially later on go with the large variant. Corvettes are better dealt with by adding ships with strike craft capability into the mix.

[@laughingcloud3516]

i did not know the tech tree tricks and Auto-Assault thing but i knew the rest cause ill do different modded runs that focus on different areas of my empire so i end up having to learn tricks to win via where my mods are focused. i dont always win though

[@bravalloy]

1. Heard that tracking does nothing, but against AI I add Targeting Grid aura to my Titans. Every 10 points to tracking brings large and X weapons closer to actually hit destroyers often and corvettes now and then. 2. I stopped colonizing far away planets unless they are really worthy (relic). I colonize first the planets within my capital starbase's trade collect range and, then, spam habitats for research and trade (again within the collect range). * Tips against the AI and average difficult levels (role-playing instead of min/max).

[@DEADGAMESINC]

Tip for advanded ones: whenever you lose any battle and one of your fleets is forced to retreat to "warp" and it doesnt appear anywhere yet, it will later on (depending on a distance from system of battle to the home port system of the fleet) appear in fleet's home system. However, if you had that fleet binded on any hotkey prior to the undesirable end of a battle, you may select it through a hotkey while the fleet is "travelling in warp" and immediately change a home port before it will spawn somewhere far away from a recent ballte location. It will make it appear earlier in any selected home system and may save your systems from being overtaken by an enemy. It helped me dosens of times especially when the great khan suddenly attacked.

[@thoraero]

Thousands of hours here and I didn't know I could set army transports to aggressive.

[@RonzuRerose]

Ive been trying to figure out how to pump alloys stupid fast. I build alloys factories on every planet and got the research to boost it by 15%. But its still not enough. Do ring worlds allow multiple alloy factories?

[@meandtheboyss]

you probably already figured it out, but the best producers are ring world and ecumenopolis, every ring world with the setting forge world have the industrial district with 10 metallurgist per district

[@Daltem]

A good tip would be how tech tiers unlock

[@Tetragramix]

Research 6 of the previous tier.

[@RakeshKumar-pj5xm]

NOICE!!!

[@LucasRicardoBarbieri]

+1200 hours with a lot of mods, so maybe not for everyone what I will say. Full in micro on planets, after like 50 years in game making the same building queue in each planet makes the perfect economy, by like 100 years in game all basic resources can be from space stations and advanced ones from planets, focusing on consumer goods (if needed), alloys and tech, almost 0 basic ones. By 150 years basic ones comes all from megastructures + firsts ones of advanced. On fleets, I just get battleships and titans (and Dreadnought "new ship classes mod") with large batteries of the best weapons, 50% energy, 50% ballistic, basically beats everything from far away way before they can reach to you, minimum of 120 range up to 250 on XL batteries. Fighting the Aeternum in my last game, +6M in fleets lol

[@Bob-ow4ju]

Everyone seems really helpful in these comments. I feel like I’m getting a good grasp of the game, but I keep having a ton of unemployed pops playing as the terminator robots. I’ve been relocating them to outer habitats and then letting them revolt and then killing them 😅

[@scintilion]

to paraphrase Christopher Walken, "Needs more Catfish"

[@slayerhuh404]

I wish I knew you could use gateways to completely avoid piracy

[@cheeki3998]

ayo can someone explain this to me: when youre looking at a planets habitability, and there's like multiple species in your empire, how do you know which species' habitability is shown on the planet screen? for example; i design an aquatic species with ocean preference (which means like 0% habitability or something close to it) on a desert planet, but when in game it could say something like 90% or even 100% habitability even when there are pops of that species on the planet. wish it would say on the planet screen the habitability for every type of species in your empire.

[@seventythreedavid]

The highest species habitability in your empire shows for the planet

[@cheeki3998]

@@seventythreedavid well that's useless the majority of the time it seems. at least it should show the name of whatever species that is. yet it doesn't. :|

[@derrickjohns]

@@cheeki3998 Go to the population tab of the planet and drop down one of the sections so that the individual jobs are shown. Click on one of the jobs and it will show the pop details in a right side panel, which includes habitability on that planet.

[@cheeki3998]

@@derrickjohns even for pops not currently on that planet but are within your empire? and what about uncolonized planets that you're interested in colonizing?

[@derrickjohns]

@@cheeki3998 unfortunately, no, only for pops currently on the planet, because they show up in the job menu. For habitability on other planets, you can see the base habitability on most types of planets from the species menu, hovering over the preferred planet icon for each species. From there you can mentally calculate by adding any empire bonuses. I usually terraform all my planets to the same type and do the species engineering to make them all prefer that type.

[@TheBl4ckSh33p]

Didn't know about the FTL inhibitors. Is this already in 3.0? Need to take a closer look again. 😱

[@Tetragramix]

Been in the game since release.

[@eldritchedward]

I'm not sure if you still have to do this manually, since I haven't played much of 3.5 yet: After modifying a species or robot series, go to each planet which builds the old type. Change what they're building to the new type. Now you won't get any more of the old version built. Nothing you can do about natural pop growth or immigration though.

[@Illuminat-ve5ue]

A thousand hours and didn't know the army trick

[@acharndael9159]

Dear Author, if you'd like to put something into to the table for advanced players, just do it together with Montu Plays. i have 4k hours and he still amazes me

[@MarcusHelius]

I love how he says several hundred hours like that is a lot these days...

[@Lizzieeeeeeee]

I have well over a thousand hours in this game and I came here for tips :x

[@hg2aa]

Explain vassalization. It has changed so much, I lost track of it's details

[@smaugbr]

What can I say? *open arms* Thanks! :D

[@QuestionableObject]

"several hundred hourse" Try several thousand! Them's rookie numbers >:D

[@lightningmcqueen1717]

how is gene modding an advanced tip?

[@swietytomasz]

my super tip is... screw mechanics, just roleplay the game ;D

[@a.carsoul389]

i do not now why i do not make stellaris vids

[@Fiscotte]

Didn't learn anything but cool, I'd like to see actual advanced tips like min-maxing stuff

[@persepha3256]

To keep planetary stability high, resource income high, and empire sprawl down do not build any empty districts or buildings. When a planet is running out of available jobs then build the next set of jobs for that planet.

[@FreedInPieces]

YES. Thank you.

[@SeeTheWholeTruth]

Eh.. The population difference with treaties.. Some politics there in the developers, bit twisted in my opinion. I have a problem with that outlook.

[@kimghanson]

Still beginner stuff.

[@sethierot7067]

Its good that they sponsor someone for this, because paradox games tend to be....rather Noob-hostile

[@COCCOMOJOE]

You made one mistake. You purge the xeno filth. that how you manage other pops that clutter your planets.

[@TrentLayell]

First comment for the algorithm! 😉

[@StellarisOfficial]

You don't know the power of the dark side of the algorithm.

[@bobbyflynn6352]

These are not advanced tips. I'd say these are intermediate at best and some are extremely basic. For players who have less than 1000 hours. And why do you need to prevent spoiling precursor events for advanced players who have completed each precursor event chain a dozen times. Come on. These are intermediate level tips. An actual advanced tip on weapon size should break down the hit chance formula, conduct multiple test battles with different weapon sizes, graph the results, etc. I believe montu plays has plenty of videos like that for those you you who want actual advanced tips and guides.

[@youtubebansdonothing4795]

I can't remember but I got a science leader to gain the Psyonic Theory trait from an anomaly. Wondering if it increases my roll for it

[@davevd9944]

Considered all of this basic tips but then I came across the auto deploy armies and I felt like an idiots.... 1000s of hours and I didn't knew that goddamn xD thanks for the video. This saves so much micro when conquering.

[@tychus8219]

My secret stellaris skill is, press stuff i have no idea what they do and end up slave in 20 years.