Stellaris – Beginners Tips

Tips for New Players

The first helpful tips is to learn about specialising planets: buildings and districts open up jobs, and only when those jobs are actually worked by pops do they produce resources; each job as both an upkeep and an output. When you specialise a planet you get “minor” bonuses to either or both. And even if something like 20% reduced upkeep sounds menial, when you have 50 or so workers on that particular job it becomes a hell of a lot more valuable.

Specialising planets comes particularly useful when you have buildings that increase the output of a certain job, so it makes sense to concentrate those jobs in the same planet rather than spreading them around the Galaxy, since building slots on a planet are limited. Think forge worlds in the Warhammer 40k universe for comparison.

Second thing you must understand to avoid being annihilated by the AI is ship templates. There is no single templates that is “best” and a lot of different counters; what it means is that the same exact fleet might perform incredibly well against an enemy and incredibly poorly against a different one, based on the actual components that are installed in the ships. Let’s say you have a fleet that relies massively on shields for defence: as long as you go against enemies that first need to strip down your shields all is fine and dandy; but when you go against enemies that have shield penetrating weapons, suddenly your ships are just flying coffins. Some enemies, like crises, Leviathans and a few spawn have “fixed” weapons and so you can easily counter them; others are randomised and are a tad harder to hard counter. But if you find yourself severely outmatched that’s the reason why.

Make a proper Save before you declare war, or right when War is declared upon you. War in this game is very, very weird compared to most other games, and it’s very easy to frustrate yourself with silly stuff if you don’t quite know what you’re doing yet.

Learn the difference between Job Slots and Pops occupying Job Slots. Empty Job Slots do nothing good, and often they do a lot of harm.