Stellaris – Tips for a Diplomacy/Federation Playthrough (Pacifism)

Federation Tips for Pacifist

Just because you’re not a psychopath/genocidal doesn’t mean you can neglect your military, people won’t even want to listen to you if you’re weaker, so you’ll need to optimize and produce great fleets anyway.

One trick I’ve heard people talking about is spamming autocannons as they have very high fleet power, but in reality they suck and can’t take on a station half as strong, but that’s still good enough to impress your neighbors if you can afford to avoid going to war with them.

As you won’t be expanding much playing tall should be a better idea, the easiest way would be spamming habitats wherever you can, since paradox decided late game structures are not meant to be used and ringworlds are never going to get filled up, you can safely ignore them, specially if you’re not going to conquer over 1k pops to transfer to those big worlds leaving behind empty breeding planets.

Also, playing as a regular pacifist may be ideal, just so you can unlock ideological wars, just because you’re being diplomatic it doesn’t mean you can’t use war in your favor, some empires just won’t accept you no matter what, but you can change them with this CB, making it much easier to invite them to your federations, or even as a vassal.