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have you ever played void dweller? because what you said at the end for the expansion tree that you get a -20% on material cost on habitats is absolutely false because you also get a - 20% on influence cost when you complete expansion tree with void dweller as well.
About subterfuge... If we had operation to spread ethic attraction in a certain direction or impact happiness/stability/crime it would be great. Especially if you want to spread your ethic. This would make entire subterfuge tree more attractive. Also one correction about encryption - it makes hostile operation more difficult.
I'd argue the -10% influence cost to build starbases from expansion, if picked early on, is actually quite potent when it is a first or second tradition pick. The reduced influence cost means that you are more likely to grab particularly important systems, such as good habitables and chokepoints, before any opponents which can have a cascading effect on the rest of the game.
Yea it's great honestly getting to systems before your neighbors is basically a cheap war. Especially if you can butter up your neighbors into not attacking you.
If influence was so abundant and quick it wouldn't but much of a perk. But systems, orbital rings, habitats, pacts. You only have so much influence, so reducing the cost has exponential effects.
I do understand the reasons he said that it's only C tier, but I would also agree expansion is S tier because in strategy games population is by far the best way to snowball, and 3 of the 5 parts of tradition directly make it faster to start that snowball and the faster a snowball starts the more severe of an affect it has, even then the empire size and starbase upkeep options are both useful for reducing the costs of early snowballing with too high tech and tradition cost as well as more energy to spend on upgrading the starbases you have over cap to mass build hydroponics, nebula refinieries, black hole observatories, and solar arrays But yeah colony development speed is okay but kinda meh at best and the agenda is awful (Also for void dwellers it's even more powerful with a massive 20% decrease in habitat costs which early on can mean earlier habitats thrown out meaning you have more resources early on to throw out even more even faster)
The only time not to take Expansion is if you are a total war empire. Because by the time you even know what your neighbors are even if you have total war enemies around you should have picked your first tradition. And don't underestimate the free pops early, it just puts you ahead and makes your colonies useful that much earlier (or lets you just print pops to resettle)
Adaptability becomes pretty good with Void Dwellers because of the Orbital Prospecting and building slot - you can get an insane number of research habitats from no deposit planets with that!
The pop housing usage is also nice for Void Dwellers, since that could theoretically save you a district or building slot per habitat too, if not on its own then perhaps stacked with another housing use bonus.
@@Arbaaltheundefeated If you stack communal, Double jointed/Fertile (cyborg and gentetic ascension respectively), Adaptability, and finally balance in the middle (galactic decision) you can get a reduced pop housing usage of 40%. This means you can keep over crowding at bay allowing you to negate the malice of having a bunch of pops on a single habitat. I could cram around 48 pops into a fully upgraded habitat while building only 2 housing districts and not suffering from overcrowding penalties so my pop growth was mostly unaffected. Pop housing reduction is actually incredible for void dwellers so Adaptability ain't a bad pick just in need of a rework (Half of the tree is just mid).
Adaptability / Void Dwellers / Prospectorium is a fun little combo. You'll get RNG procs which generate rare resources on your worlds; you can then build a Habitat over them and have workers extract those resources rather than just the station.
Expansion is First or Never. The extra pop & Growth as stated are GREAT (if taken early), they can help you snowball faster, but I think you glossed over the Influence cost reduction on starbases, which lets you expand faster to gain key systems and secure chokepoints. It is a VERY important part of the tree, and if you're going for a wide / early expansion style, it's a must-have. You don't take Expansion b/c it's got great high end abilities, you take it so that you can expand & snowball faster in the early game.
Exactly. Getting to the end of the game with 7 good traditions is just a "win more" scenario. Guaranteeing getting to the end game with 6 great traditions in a decent position is worth giving up the last spot to Expansion imo.
Plus the extra tile per planet is always good, especially when you combine it with MoN and habitation rings, making even size 6 dwarfs into a decent 13 size planet and turn big planets into absolute giants.
I really think that espionage should be the mechanic that should help you break up large alliances and cause chaos in the late game. Far too often I've tried to conquer the galaxy only to find out that I'd have to fight the entire other half of the galaxy to gain complete control.
Espionage is great if you've got a cold war situation, especially when you're in a federation. Helped me dominate my Broken Shackles campaign, since all my focus was on diplomacy & politics. Pairs well with psionics, too
To be fair, that is more or less how politics among developed states works. Massive defensive pacts exist now, and likely will even after humanity reaches the stars.
@Pan_Z Its all fun n games going to war with a giga federation, occupying like 2-3 whole empires in a year's time and thinking to yourself 'for an alliance that doesn't want to status quo because -5 relative fleet strength they really suck' ...And then you see the federation fleet with 160k fleet power start pulling up flanked by like 8 30k fleets
Leader focused builds stack +% leader experience gain. That +300 experience every single time you launch an agenda actually SCALES with that leader xp bonus, so every time you launch, your leaders can get like 1200-1500 xp. It's actually very strong for leader focused builds, especially if you are a unity build that can churn out agendas.
@@primordial7881 I don't think so, but it allows you to more easily finish agendas early. 24 months remaining is usually where I start trying to finish early
In mid-late if the empire size is very low, you can launch-finish more than one at the same time with a good unity generation, and if you play with a mod for leader cap (the actual one is ridiculous), its a must have that tradition, is S tier directly, having 40 or 50 govs and reducing the empire size with the other trad on them per each level is very good.
yeah i have found it excells in a situation i often find myself in : i control about half the galaxy but there are 1-2 federations a bit too strong for me to break. in this situation politics giving me forced control over the community, specifically to become the custodian or emperor and it is very powerful for breaking the stalemate.
I find it too easy to take control of the galaxy by turning everyone into vassals. Don’t care about my political power when every other empire can only vote if they agree with me
the only kind of politics tradition i like is when the AI uses it to try and control the galactic senate as i refuse to join the GS 100% of the time an empire that does this is always putting a target on there back from me lol
The -10% influence cost... really is important early on, where influence is pretty much your limiting factor for expansion. It's absolutely a noticeable difference in terms of much real estate you can grab before the AI does.
I don't pick expansion very often, but when I do it's almost always for the 10% reduced starbase influence cost first and foremost (which you just sort of handwaved as pointless), then the extra pops/growth speed. If I'm not super constrained by my neighbors, being able to expand 10% faster (as influence is difficult to increase very much, so influence/starbase is the biggest limiter of expansion speed, far more than any economic factors) can be very useful in a huge galaxy.
I tend to play wide, so I go Expansion; extra pops and growth speed are great to have, especially when you're getting multiples of that growth. (Plus, the cost reductions for Starbase or Empire sprawl are nice to keep growing.)
i think expansion scales with size of galaxy you play in. the bigger it is, more crucial it becomes. montu seem to play medium size so he prob doesnt need this bonuses as much but when i play on biggest size, i usually end up going wide and so having expansion is a MUST.
Same. Returning to the game after years of absence. Expansion is interesting because I have such a love-hate relationship with it. It really needs to be your first pick for it to be REALLY good, or your second to be okay, and taking it after is just really dumb. That means it is competing with Discovery which he also did a little dirty. Honestly him having it in the B tier might trigger more people than Expansion in the C tier. But that is going off what I remember of the game several patches ago. Depending on the kind of game you are running you might really be hurting for influence. That -10 isn't great but it can mean the difference between nabbing a few systems on the frontier with an empire you don't want to go to war with (yet). If there are no other empires near you it is quite valuable as a means of rapid expansion. Its right there in the name. But you won't really know if your slice of the galaxy is mostly vacant until later. My standard picks for a game WAS Discovery first, the survey speed boost, then Expansion, the -10 influence then the right side if I have colonization options. If not then back to discovery for the science boosting. But that also keeps me from getting my first ascension perk quickly. But it also lets me pick the four or five early game things that will benefit me most at that stage of the game and with all of them the earlier the better. But then technological ascendancy and one vision are great to get as soon as possible too. :| Mostly watching this to see what has changed and if I need to reevaluate.
@@girlbuu9403 You and I are on the same wavelength for this one. Discovery is almost always an automatic first pick for me because science is just such a key focus in general I'd pretty much always want it to be at least one of my picks just for that, and the survey and anomaly bonuses are basically only valuable taken early so may as well make it first pick. When I do pick expansion it's because while grabbing faster survey speed I discovered I'm not hemmed in too hard and can really get an advantage out of the cheaper influence cost for expansion. The pops on new colonies are a minor bonus compared to just owning so much sheer space this way. I always play on huge though, so might definitely feel otherwise on smaller maps.
30:00 One addendum I think you forgot about is that the Starbase cost reduction also applies to Orbital Rings and its buildings and modules. That includes the influence cost, which I think is just an oversight.
I sure hope it isn't an oversight, because its a major selling point of the tradition for me. Together with the technology which reduces the upgrade cost by 20%, you get a total reduction of 70%. This allowes you to outfit all your planets with full orbital rings relativly early, giving a very nice economic and / or defense boost to your empire.
I think Statecraft is actually being underrated here, it has a niche. Because of how strong some agendas are, the agenda speed and duration perks are actually pretty good, moreso than it felt like you gave them credit for. Plus, you yourself talked about how strong leaders are with galactic paragons, and the +300 exp on agenda activation when combined with a bunch of leader exp bonuses can catapult your leaders up in levels quite quickly, and the completion bonuses are actually pretty good as completion bonuses go. It definitely plays second fiddle to aptitude when it comes to leader traditions, but that's also just because aptitude is really damn strong. I actually found a lot of success taking many of the lower tier traditions to stack empire size reduction perks on a fanatic pacifist inward perfection empire and then further offsetting it with large numbers of high level governors bringing down the empire size even farther, which would not have been as effective without statecraft's exp from agendas. Hell, I didn't even know at the time that you could activate agendas early with unity, and that would have accelerated the process even faster.
Thank you can't wait to watch the new version. I just started playing stellaris again (haven't played since shortly after Mega Corp). I'm having a blast again and the videos are just a great support tool.
Hi Montu! I’ve played Stellaris off and on for years but fired it back up again recently and really enjoy what the game has developed into. I’m commenting because I made it to the “secret callout” point, and wanted to let you know that I’ve really enjoyed working my way through your library of videos. Videos like this are really informative, and your multiplayer series are entertaining to watch and pretty funny at times! Keep doing what you’re doing and good luck!
Edict fund bonuses become insignificant at higher empire sizes. It should be coupled with a % decrease for edicts, whichever gives the biggest bonus at the moment
That’s the whole point of the empire size mechanic. If you get bigger it cost more to run your empire, so you would need more edict fund to fund the same edict than a smaller sized empire
Hey Montu, if you read this, just wanted to say thanks for doing this consistently quality content. Full and comprehensive explanations, comparisons between various options, guide videos etc. Just good stuff. Feels like shooting the breeze with a buddy about the game and I always finish your videos wanting to go try out a new build haha.
Made it to the secret call out for this GARGANTUAN video. Loved it. I was surprised that I actually agreed with most of your rankings. The biggest surprise for me with the latest updates was that I no longer take discovery and expansion as first and second picks anymore, if I ever pick them at all. The combat advantages from subterfuge has made it a 4th or 5th pick almost regularly. Pretty surprising since I've never played with it aside from testing when it was new. I really hope some traditions get a rework and/or slight buffs to make them more viable. I think every tradition should be at least B tier in theory.
12:50 - don't you get the additional leader lifespan AND the reduction of negative traits if you are not a necrophage? You made it sound like you get either one OR the other. But since you get both, it is way nicer, no? In general: A new tier list - I love it :D
Yes, this one was explained wrong. Non-Necrophages get +10 leader lifespan AND -1 maximum negative traits while Necrophages only get increased unity per converted pop.
Thanks! Im sure having to update these lists on such a regular basis gets old, but i want you to know we appreciate them. I absolutely love this game but dont have the time to properly keep up with all the changes made to the game so having these lists that I can listen to while working is a massive help. Keep up the work montu
Thank you for this Montu it is an enormous help. I was around for the secret call-out and actually wound up watching the entire video. I often listened to your videos while I am at work here let me simultaneously inform myself while simultaneously helping me focus on my job. Thank you so much for your guidance
Harmony/sync should definitely have some sort of percentage based edict cost reduction. I actually really like having leaders with edict cost reduction and they put this to shame.
Just starting to play, and appreciate the ranking lists. There are a lot of beginner guides out there, but not much covers mid to late game, and this is nice for insight into what is coming.
I agree about the espionage operations. I've been saying you should be able to assassinate leaders for a while now. AND NOW, with Paradox's Leader rework, it seems like a huge opportunity to play sneaky and do some stabbing from the shadows! Hope they address it! Good video, Thanks
Discovery for me is my "Pick it the moment traditions become available" early game savior. Use it then activate the "Map the Stars" Edict for increased anomaly chance for more research and scientist xp Not to mention the bonuses from said tradition help late game as well with minor but very significant boosts once you have a lot of systems with research stations in them
I’m actually quite fond of the statecraft tradition for a gimmick build I’ve come across. Using the statecraft agenda and it’s finished for +3 councillor skill, as well as the +2 from oligarchy and +1 from vaults of knowledge brings your maximum councillor level up to 16. If you go merchant guilds and max out the director of trade you can squeeze out 11.4 trade value from all of your clerks, merchants give 12 trade. (All this is before thrifty and the other bonuses you can get for trade). Still would be nice if statecraft got a buff though
For an isolationist empire of any sort, expansion is quite good as an early pick. The empire size reduction keeps you under the size cap longer, meaning you tech faster for longer. Getting planets early is the most important thing and that tree directly helps it. I honestly couldn't find myself picking anything else.
I always was a Hoi player, but when i tried stellaris i was so blown away. I'm still new to the game, but even from the starters i could tell that the naval projection is the way to go. When you do all 5 focuses, game allows you to pick additional one, with juicy +80 naval capacity and other bonus
LET'S GOOOOOOO!! I recently discovered your channel because I recently got into Stellaris, and BOY did i get into it. Not even 2 weeks and I got almost all of the DLCs lol. Started checking out your channel and saw some videos, really liked your tierlists because it gave me an idea of the state of the game and how to play with certain things even if they are not the best. Unfortunately some of them were kinda outdated so I had to take things with a grain of salt (not your fault of course, just the game being updated and balanced regularly). Traditions are one of the most interesting things in this game, so I'm glad you could make a video it for this patch, even if they change again in the near future LMAO Glad to see your content, keep it up!
It'd be great to also kinda know when to pick them, I know you said it for some but just some example empires with the paths you'd plan to go if that makes sense, although that'd have made the video even more massive. Still a really great list! As always :3
Thank you for all your hard work putting these things together. I don;t get to play very often, and it is nice to be able to find good information on the updates. I made it to the call-out.
I always open with Expansion and the influence cost modifier. It's so good for rapidly gobbling up all the systems in the early game and ensuring I get all the chokepoints that I want. I pick influence cost before I get extra pop and growth speed.
Statecraft has become one of my top picks so I'm surprise to see it so low. There are some benefits which I think he is overlooking. 1) +10% Council Agenda speed means you get agendas more quickly. If you go the unity route and wait until the agenda is about 1/2 the way through the unity cost of rushing the agenda drops a lot so the sooner you get to this point the sooner you can activate it. 2) +20% Agenda Length is nice as late game I often have 3+ active agendas going at one time since it's easier to get them overlapping. 3) +1 Council Skill is nice because the +1 Skill bonuses can go over the level 10 cap. Thus you have have a level 10 leader running as effectively a level 11, with bonuses from other sources you can get a total of like +5 for a max leader with effective 15 level though the single +1 from this is only so so. Lastly because leaders are really powerful when used correctly the thing that makes this Tradition one of my top picks is... 4) +300 XP when you complete an Agenda. It doesn't sound like a lot until you realize how XP works on leaders. XP Bonuses apply from ALL sources so if you have enough bonuses for like +100% XP this becomes a +600 XP gain. I often get closer to 200% in leader XP Bonuses so I earn 900 XP per agenda I complete. Plus I'm rushing agendas every 5+ years mid/late game so it becomes easy to power level my leaders. I originally overlooked Statecraft as well until I found out about that XP gain stacking with my Leader XP gain bonuses. There is only one agenda by default that gives you XP to your leaders and it like all other agendas have a 10 year cooldown once it's no longer active. That means you got about 20+ years between it's uses, sure it does have 2000 XP times your modifier but it's not much considering how rarely you get to use it. My new Meta since leaders were add has been to get as many scientist in the Council for research bonuses and the faster I level them up the higher their bonuses become. Late game I often got like +250-280% bonus to research fields. The other leaders are Govs which I focus more on planetary economic bonuses as I've taken to playing Tall so I can keep the empire sprawl penalties low while boosting my R&D bonuses. I've taken to out pacing Grand Admiral AI so much faster then I had in prior versions in both tech and economy going this route.
The Return of The King. Thank you, Montu, for your great content once again. I will use this knowledge to ̶p̶u̶r̶g̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶s̶u̶b̶j̶u̶l̶g̶a̶t̶e̶ make friends with all the nice aliens out there.
Yesterday, I conned the AIs into invading a rebel robot system. Every civ sent their fleets and armies... all of them. By the time everyone was stacked they were well over four million Fleet Strength. I was over five million. I then gaurenteed independance and declared war on the primary federation. One fleet battle and I went from 0% war exhaustion to almost 70%... And then proceeded to conquer a quarter of the galaxy before I had to submit to status quo. My question is: What is the best way to remove or decrease war exhaustion?
Discovery is always a first pick for me. Faster surveying means you can start wide and carve out your territory faster than those around you. The increase in anomolies also generally means the planets you do survey are going to have more resources. The rest of it is negligible aside from the +1 research alternatives, though the 10% research speed is kinda nice
50% minimum habitability in adaptability would be stupid OP. As of current in order to get something like that you have to play either a lithoid or a subterranean empire, forcing you to change your entire playstyle in order to get that bonus. To have it from a tradition would be a much lower cost for the same effect.
Psionics is so powerful if you get the Instrument of Desire. Put the sanctum of desire on an Ecumonopolis and BOOM you have alloys. I have had as high as 30 alloys per Metalurgist, there must be ways to get it higher than that but that is the best I have managed so far. Other bonuses are also great , all pops pumping out extra resources , great scientists and Admirals , the Governor boost is not great but is still a bonus. I almost always go Discovery then Aptitude. Without Discovery the intital scouting to choke points doesnt go well for me so I always regret not taking it. Leaders are so insanely powerful you should be using every advantage you have to boost them so Aptitude is a must have and must have early imho.
In a recent game I had a forge capital ecumenopolis with the instrument of desire plus the planetary bonus you get for killing the scavenger bot which gave my capital +20% to alloy production. I was producing so much alloys on that my capital alone that I didn't need any other forge worlds and was able to repurpose all my others mainly for energy to support my mega fleet lmao
i think the need of Supremacy unlocking war doctrines is like Diplomacy unlocking federations, War doctrines must be a regular tech (a rare one) and Supremacy could amplify the bonuses of war doctrines or maybe add another doctrine idk... ...ah and the same with Mercantile, the diferent tipes of trade must be a tech and this tradition could amplify that bonuses
Statecraft combined with Machine Empire/Rogue Servitor lets you get a pretty ridiculously high level Council that is also filled out, and leaders in no time, giving you quite a bit of an advantage in the early game.
damm is good as first tradition for literaly all empire free lvl up for first leaders and many more lvl ups later i think he just dont know how strong and stack bonus from erly pick of this can be.
With Genetic ascension, if you get the Tiyanki Matriarch you can grab up the Polymelic trait. this gives +0.05 monthly pop assembly per pop (more than twice that of Crystallization or Budding), which stacks with clone vats and can give you ever growing pop assembly. Combine with Vat Grown for a pretty spectacular pop assembly rate.
I actually wrote a mod to make cloning a more flexible play style for RP reasons and found using jobs to generate organic pop assembly was the most balanced way to do it. So you idea for improving genetic ascension would work well.
Unyield -50% upgrade cost has an additional bonus I rarely seen mentioned. Orbital Rings are considered Starbases for cost and thus it reduces their upgrade cost by 50%. Considering it cost a lot of Influence to upgrade them this can be a huge cost saver if you do like me and go Tall putting Rings on all your worlds.
I like discovery more along the lines of A rank. But I do play (and everyone I play with) on low hyperlane density so "Blitz scanning" all the routes to cut the AI off from taking everything "behind" them works great. Even more so now that leader cap is a thing, can't just plop out 10 science ships to scan like crazy. Would have liked to see base sci ship be able to scan, but not do anomalies or asset tech, etc etc. Then leaders could buff scan rates with level / skills more than the "empty" ship. And tech is king, so having the extra tech speed never hurts.
i always feel like some of the bonuses you can get get as a psionic ascended empire always get overlooked, like the shroud preacher destiny trait for governors (25% resource output for psionic pops) and the zro catalysis edict from lvl 5 holy covenant federations (15% resource output for psionic pops) thats with telepaths and the agenda thats 55% resource output empire wide and 110% resource output on a world with a sanctum and the governor. i love it as necrophage whern i don't mind the lack of pop growth because i get that from the slave market
13:47 fanatic pacifists gang can stack 10 lvl ascentions on every planet. With both leader cap ascentions, Aptitude, Harmony and Domination. Add in cyborgs for the -10% pop size cyborg trait to the mix too...
Love the video! I was surprised by one thing, though: while I know you arent rating the agendas specifically in this, I was shocked you didnt touch on how absurdly powerful synthetic yield is. Unlocking that agenda early as machine puts your pop assembly through the roof.
Made it past 40 minutes, my dude! So far, I agree with the tier list. I'm coming back to the game after about a year and have been experimenting with Void Dwellers and Megacorps. Current game is a Megacorp with Tomb World Origin so I could experiment with the relentless industrialist civic. Basically: Post Apocalypse Earth turned Megacorp, With the "adaptive" trait at start. Occupy tomb worlds I find and turn into banger forge worlds. Occupy and turn continental worlds into agri-worlds. Take the Adaptation trad after Mercantile. Occupy worlds I can get up to 70% habitability through research, turn them into industrial worlds, poison them until they passively become Tomb worlds my People are more than happy to live on. Still sciencing it, you should take a look. Love the Content!
My big issue with espionage is the overlap in envoys and how long the operations take before they do anything. I feel an assigned envoys should be able to open both diplo and espionage at the same time, with penalties to the diplomacy side when espionage missions fail. The missions themselves should be more like archeology where you get partial results on successful periodic checks.
The fact that going on missions reduces infiltration levels just ruins the system I think. Infiltration level is a good source of intel and sometimes makes it worth assigning an envoy to espionage, but actually doing operations is completely detrimental to that aim. There is some point on aquiring assets in theory since assets increase maximum infiltration, but with how it resets infiltration down and then slowly creeps up again, that is just sooo sloooow. My current view is that if you need fast intel the best way is a cloaked science ship doing active reconnocence. But how much intel you can get from that is capped, so if you need more the mest way is to assign an envoy to spy. That envoy should just sit there though, don't touch operations, other than possibly sleeper cells.
Distinguished Admiralty* + admiral ruler + Aptitude can get very interesting, especially if you roll Skirmisher at game-gen & start with it at level 2 (further enhanced if you later make them a Strategist & they get Gale-speed). The extra trait picks are huge if you want to match naval design strategies which focus on a single weapon type (hello, missile boats!) I tend to focus on missile kiting with destroyers, so that speed bonus from Skirmisher 2 is a MASSIVE advantage. I often win combats with zero damage taken, & my ships get where they're going faster, which incidentally saves me money as they spend less time out of port. Also helps with exploration & to a lesser extent with construction ships. *Distinguished Admiralty starts your admirals at level 3, & you get to pick the level 2 & 3 traits of your defense minister & optionally your ruler.
I like expansionist for the colony buffs and the influence discount. In almost every game I play, I am usually hurting for influence. Except for one game I played where I was running into the influence limit, which I never new existed. I still do not know what I need to get so much influence.
Usually I go discovery first just to get map the stars and the extra survey speed, then go expansion for the influence discount on starbases so I can rush for the chokepoints. Finish up expansion for the extra pops, finish up discovery, and from there it depends on the empire build.
discovery is usually very good for early game, though i see dimishing results from mid game and especially late game. It's good but it kinda just stagnates if you know what i mean
I know it's not a popular tree, but I like going oppressive autocracy/necrophage into a first tree domination. +30% worker jobs from the second species and 1k minerals saved from lithoid blockers lets you have a healthy start even if the guaranteed planets don't have a lot of available districts for energy or minerals
I'd say you're flat wrong about the -10% Starbase influence cost on the Expansion tree. It's THE most important early tradition to grab, because it gives you the ability to take extra starbases way faster. The cost may be whatever late in the game, but in a highly populated game where you have to race to grab as much territory as you can before other empires do, it's THE most important thing to have. It lets you lock in choke points early on, or mess up other empires borders to open a path to attack. It lets you box in empires, or snake yourself into highly rich systems. It's THE tradition that sets up your late game. The tree itself might not be that important, but that one tradition early is a game changer. Then you can pick up the +1 pop once you already have a colony starting up. You can actually pick it after the colony is already establishing, as long as you get it before its finished, you get the extra pop, so you don't have to rush the +1 pop tradition, but the -10% influence cost is insanely good for the early 'race' phase of the game.
5:33 - Montu, we need better transparency of building slot calculation so we know when it's safe to deconstruct a city district. Also the game could be smarter about swapping the city district for Industrial when that equals 0.3x1=> 1 with Master Crafter's or the Mega Corp equivalent, I usually end up having to repair after it blips in-and-out-of existence. 6:48 - did you ever finish the complete leader trait tier list? What about paragons? 9:32 - now would be a good time to mention taking just the opener in blocker-heavy builds then finishing it later (used to be used for relic world, shattered ring comes to mind, the pre-FTL challenge story runs) and also the Federation types it opens - some which are also opened by Ethics or Civics! 26:39 omg influence rebalance when 28:11 mitigate the fact they don't want to change your federation type if you're invited but they're peaceful traders but they always want to start Unions?? 34:40 the bonuses from discovery can falloff massively if I get boxed in or don't discover wormhole/gateway/L-gate/speculative hyperlane breaching -- and when I do I forget to explore the wormholes (not subject to auto-survey) and "MIA" from speculative hyperlane breaching takes way too long to find any missing pieces from closed borders; and often cloaking also takes too long to pop in research to be any useful for that. Stellaris might be a game about exploration, but your neighbors - and crisis - have different ideas. Maybe it could help with getting techs related to better research speed, and unlocking new galactic regions such as wormholes? 40:12 secret callout. espionage can be fairly hilarious when you drop a crisis beacon on the chosen 47:24 plz clone jobs 53:03 would you recommend Cybernetic over Synthetic for Assimilation machines?
You made some very good arguments and made me question a lot of my common choices. As much as I want to agree with Expansion and Discovery being lower, I just cannot. Choke points are very important, and knowing where they are and the ability to get them first is vital. On top of that, the perks from the rest of both trees are very good. Pop growth is insane, even if only 10%. That is 10% faster than other people. Pops being the most important resource in the game makes that extremely powerful. | Next, Research alts are extremely good because tech is RNG. that is another chance to roll mega strucs, another chance to roll Phyonics, another chance to roll any important tech. Also sleeping on survey speed is insane when the L-cluster is a thing. Getting to the L-cluster first is a massive military advantage as well as economic. Also 10% is the same as an ascension perk that is insanely helpful (that is due to the research options gained but still. Research is what will make or brake a war). As for Research Subsides, late game is expensive but spiritualist wont ever feel it so its every better for them. I do not think they are S tier but Expansion is minimum B tier (because only 2-3 parts of it are useful, even if they are really useful) and Discovery is an easy A tier. Research and Economics is king. Discovery is not as good as Prosperity but far more rounded and commonly useful than Mercantile, Subterfuge, Diplomacy, and Unyielding. All of those are niche.
When my happiness authoritarian stability build for maximum money (HASBMM) has some F and C teirs while im thinking they are B teir, (early edict for me really helpsmout having 5-6 things running) More starbases early on means more food, just build them for food and trade within edges, on edges you can make them tanky boys (really easy to get +16 starbases)
Finishing Statecraft early as your first tradition does let you rush out your third civic and that 300 xp for every agenda actually really shines early on considering how big some of the level bonus from leaders are, viewed in a vacuum Statecraft is terrible but if you view it as an extra leader level and civic over everyone else in the early game it is actually pretty huge. Terrible late game choice though.
Unyielding is awesome from an economical point of view! More starbases for a lot less alloys will allow you to produce more resources and naval capacity.
One of the improvements one could add to the federation tree could be using envoys to boost the targets opinion of every federation member. That may mitigate the issue where if one member of you federation is hated by a non-federation member, the opinion malus applies to you as well. If I’m role playing the United Federation of Planets I should be able to liaise between the Vulcans and the Andorians to expand the federation.
I think it should do more with pacts, reduce their influence costs and buffs when having more. I think they should remove the federation limit to a tech and just give more buffs to envoys
"If you want to do basically anything except faster survey speed and get more anomalies, you don't really need Discovery." I do agree with this statement, but only because the faster survey speed is quite a gem in boosting basically everything. For me, it is indeed the reason to have it as an auto 1st pick. Survey results are RNG-based which makes it hard to calculate the gains for comparison, but in my experience it tends to really enhance both research and economy. (Economy a bit less than research though.) Consider that with the maps the stars edict enabled, the tree gives +60% survey speed +10% Anomaly discovery chance. This means that 3 scientists can do the work that should keep 5 scientists busy for other empires! It does require a bit of mis-balancing your empire in the early game, but if you can get a 25 year long 6-scientist early-game survey expedition going, the discovery tree basically gives you 4 additional scientists worth of output during that time. I don't think Discovery is quite as good as Prosperity overall, but I think it is certainly good enough automatically to pick discovery first, and prosperity second. You really have to use it though. The moment assisting research becomes a better use of your scientists time than surveying, the tradition pick must already have paid for its opportunity cost, or it is better to not pick it (first, or at all).
Early game, dismiss your only admiral so you can get 1 more scientist surveying stuff. You won't need the admiral that early and the council bonus you lose are negligible, especially with a small fleet
@@thesenate1844 I'm not sure what you mean exactly. You mean building empty science ships and hop scientists around? Or you just don't need so many vessels that you have to worry about the leader cap to staff them? If you primarily survey for building outposts, then you don't need a lot of scientists at all. But the strategy that I was talking about includes surveying *much* more than you'll need for colonial expansion. The purpose of doing it are the bonuses that anomalies give, rushing the precursor, having first contacts, the leader experience, etc. (It's also important to know what anomalies to investigate immediately or later, I default to later when I don't remember the bonus.) That's the only way that the survey speed modifier makes much sense. If your science ships are idling 35% of the time, then you had no need for the modifier and doing discovery first is not the right choice for that empire.
I've been playing Stellaris since release and only recently have I stopped first-picking expansion. I think the left side of the tree was more balanced around the original frontier outpost system. I think if the left hand side was changed to give bonuses to starbases or colonization-relevant economic bonuses like construction cost or speed the tree would become stronger again.
I think the rightful claims agenda in statecraft is really good actually, it really helps if you want to conquer large swathes of land in one go. It doesn't fully redeem the tradition tree as a whole though.
I think I agree with expansion placement, except if your playing as a Lithoid species. The slightly cheaper outpost building means I can yoink more planets to help take advantage of the Lithoid +50% habitability bonus and grow pops on more planets, while the pop growth helps deal with the Lithiods slower base pop growth. Hell if you want to stretch it a little bit more, the faster colonies and 1 extra starting pops helps your colonies start producing useful stuff faster, which Lithoids are normally slower at.
Apetitude should be changed so the +1 leader trait is the finisher instead of opener effect . As it’s arguably the best bonus in the entire tree. And is literally on the level of entire civics (heroic past)
I now always take the aptitude tree first so I unlock the leadership conditioning, but I don’t take any of the picks in it. I then go through prosperity tree, then either discovery or supremacy depending on what state I’m at in the galaxy and any neighbors I’ve found. After that I finish off aptitude.
Expansion tradition habitat build cost reduction applies to Habitat influence cost as well, costing 120 influence instead of 150. Also in 3..4.5 Diplomacy Tradition's boost to Trust growth and the like does affect the Federation experience gain to some extent, that should still be the case.
I’d argue that discovery and expansion are great specifically when picked early because the survey speed bonuses and outpost influence costs let you expand your territory faster to prevent yourself from getting potentially boxed in by other expanding empires
A note regarding the reduced building upkeep from Prosperity: The alloy maintenance cost on habitats is assigned to their capital buildings. In other words, the Administrative Operations tradition *reduces habitat upkeep costs*. That can be a LOT of alloys.
8:45 should grant small bonuses per active edict rather than +20 edict fund, faster council agenda speed per level of councilor instead of flat bonus, same with duration, councilor xp bonus should just be bigger, leader xp boost should be % xp increase based on total currently launched agenda's, (5-10% per, or something around that), and capstone would be better off with being +1 effective level for all leaders and doubled as a councilor(while axing the tech boost and keeping the leader capacity) As it stands, it's genuinely the least worthwhile imo, as I would always choose adaptability and versatility over it in any playthrough. They have at least SOME tangible effects on my gameplay that don't take 30-40 years to see the biggest benefits from, and even then, they still have higher investment returns due to the fact of simply having more pop means more everything
26:10 - if Federation Likelihood of acceptance went up for A.I. Empires that would be so useful for this Federations Tradition. That should be the benefits for the 'pre-federation focus' of this branch... but then of course increase the 'already formed federation' bonuses too. I personally would maybe like to see the ability in this tradition to 'BY PASS 1 LEVEL OF THE MAXIMUM of your federation type'. So for example research federations are very limited in their military capacity in their federation fleets. If this tradition gave the ability to get to level 4 making the fleet costs minimal, minimal, medium, very high rather than minimal, medium, very high, IMPOSSIBLE. There should also be another section on Federation resource/trade increases, where it could have the same minimal, medium & very high costs to boosting these values across each empire in the federation. Give some more variety in there in a baseline/passive stance way.
I don't know how i managed to stay awake for the whole thing (cuz i watched it right before bed) but i did. Good job, though. I really like some of your reasoning. I've always felt Expension and Discovery were a little too popular but i could say why. You did a really good job articulating it.
I feel like strongholds and fortresses should reduce collateral damage on the planet. There should be other ways as well, but these buildings are a start
I like this idea, although maybe limit it to a set amount of pops per building. So a fortress habitat is still an annoying impenetrable wall, but a stronghold on a world prevents it being depopulated because a couple xenomorphs touch down.
I agree that locking a Federation behind a Tradition is part of the problem, especially with vassaling so easy. It shouldn't even be a tech. I think it should just be a natural progress of Non-aggression -> Defensive Pact -> Alliance (a new tier) -> then Federation. The Diplomatic tree can then be about accelerating that process and making Feds better. Also there needs to be a Mediator mechanic, assign an Envoy, or more, to improve 2 other empires' relation. Lock that into the Dip Tree maybe? I am unsure on that.
There is kindof a build that benefits from the expansionist tradition: fanatic xenophobe, interstellar dominion expansionist puts you down to like 22 influence per starbase which can be SUPER powerful all stacked up. The extra (linear) 10% off makes it cost something like 40% less influence per starbase than without. It can be one pretty solid way of just gobbling up territory voraciously before the AI can catch up
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We need a tier list of tier lists. What tier lists are most important?
have you ever played void dweller? because what you said at the end for the expansion tree that you get a -20% on material cost on habitats is absolutely false because you also get a - 20% on influence cost when you complete expansion tree with void dweller as well.
Could you tell me some names I should watch if I'm interested in an overall rebalance/additions mod around?
I've found Evolved only yet.
About subterfuge... If we had operation to spread ethic attraction in a certain direction or impact happiness/stability/crime it would be great. Especially if you want to spread your ethic. This would make entire subterfuge tree more attractive. Also one correction about encryption - it makes hostile operation more difficult.
Screw humble bundle, pretending their political donations are charities.
Imperator Protegit
F TEIR:
1:24 Versatility
3:13 Adaptability
5:40 Statecraft
C TEIR:
9:19 Domination
11:20 Harmony & Synchronicity
15:58 Expansion
19:20 Like Button
19:30 Politics
B TEIR:
22:29 Mercantile
25:32 Diplomacy
28:38 Unyielding
32:36 Discovery
36:20 Subterfuge
A TEIR:
40:47 Aptitude
44:07 *Synthetic
46:38 *Genetic
S TEIR:
48:35 Prosperity
50:48 Supremacy
53:19 *Cybernetic
56:35 *Psionic
Why like button is c their?
bless you my fellow xeno
Hero
Chad
Expansion is in the C tier? Wtf?
I'd argue the -10% influence cost to build starbases from expansion, if picked early on, is actually quite potent when it is a first or second tradition pick. The reduced influence cost means that you are more likely to grab particularly important systems, such as good habitables and chokepoints, before any opponents which can have a cascading effect on the rest of the game.
Yea it's great honestly getting to systems before your neighbors is basically a cheap war. Especially if you can butter up your neighbors into not attacking you.
If influence was so abundant and quick it wouldn't but much of a perk. But systems, orbital rings, habitats, pacts. You only have so much influence, so reducing the cost has exponential effects.
Yes, Expansion is S tier when taken early. You can snowball from there. Very important.
I do understand the reasons he said that it's only C tier, but I would also agree expansion is S tier because in strategy games population is by far the best way to snowball, and 3 of the 5 parts of tradition directly make it faster to start that snowball and the faster a snowball starts the more severe of an affect it has, even then the empire size and starbase upkeep options are both useful for reducing the costs of early snowballing with too high tech and tradition cost as well as more energy to spend on upgrading the starbases you have over cap to mass build hydroponics, nebula refinieries, black hole observatories, and solar arrays
But yeah colony development speed is okay but kinda meh at best and the agenda is awful
(Also for void dwellers it's even more powerful with a massive 20% decrease in habitat costs which early on can mean earlier habitats thrown out meaning you have more resources early on to throw out even more even faster)
The only time not to take Expansion is if you are a total war empire. Because by the time you even know what your neighbors are even if you have total war enemies around you should have picked your first tradition. And don't underestimate the free pops early, it just puts you ahead and makes your colonies useful that much earlier (or lets you just print pops to resettle)
Tier lists never get old.
Except when they get out of date and I have to make a new one!
@@MontuPlaysWhich is like every few months haha
They become outdated and thus require a remake. A constant revenue of views.
@@mortacheSometimes it can happen like, the same day!
But they DO get outdated 😂
Adaptability becomes pretty good with Void Dwellers because of the Orbital Prospecting and building slot - you can get an insane number of research habitats from no deposit planets with that!
I agree, Adaptability is a late pick, but a pick for a void dweller playthrough for me.
The pop housing usage is also nice for Void Dwellers, since that could theoretically save you a district or building slot per habitat too, if not on its own then perhaps stacked with another housing use bonus.
@@Arbaaltheundefeated If you stack communal, Double jointed/Fertile (cyborg and gentetic ascension respectively), Adaptability, and finally balance in the middle (galactic decision) you can get a reduced pop housing usage of 40%. This means you can keep over crowding at bay allowing you to negate the malice of having a bunch of pops on a single habitat. I could cram around 48 pops into a fully upgraded habitat while building only 2 housing districts and not suffering from overcrowding penalties so my pop growth was mostly unaffected. Pop housing reduction is actually incredible for void dwellers so Adaptability ain't a bad pick just in need of a rework (Half of the tree is just mid).
Its also very good for broken ring.
Hab boost
Housing boost
Building slot
Less strat upkeep for late game
Prospecting
All very good
Adaptability / Void Dwellers / Prospectorium is a fun little combo. You'll get RNG procs which generate rare resources on your worlds; you can then build a Habitat over them and have workers extract those resources rather than just the station.
Expansion is First or Never. The extra pop & Growth as stated are GREAT (if taken early), they can help you snowball faster, but I think you glossed over the Influence cost reduction on starbases, which lets you expand faster to gain key systems and secure chokepoints. It is a VERY important part of the tree, and if you're going for a wide / early expansion style, it's a must-have.
You don't take Expansion b/c it's got great high end abilities, you take it so that you can expand & snowball faster in the early game.
Exactly. Getting to the end of the game with 7 good traditions is just a "win more" scenario. Guaranteeing getting to the end game with 6 great traditions in a decent position is worth giving up the last spot to Expansion imo.
Plus the extra tile per planet is always good, especially when you combine it with MoN and habitation rings, making even size 6 dwarfs into a decent 13 size planet and turn big planets into absolute giants.
I really think that espionage should be the mechanic that should help you break up large alliances and cause chaos in the late game. Far too often I've tried to conquer the galaxy only to find out that I'd have to fight the entire other half of the galaxy to gain complete control.
Espionage is great if you've got a cold war situation, especially when you're in a federation. Helped me dominate my Broken Shackles campaign, since all my focus was on diplomacy & politics. Pairs well with psionics, too
@@daryariazati1887 what did you do?
To be fair, that is more or less how politics among developed states works. Massive defensive pacts exist now, and likely will even after humanity reaches the stars.
@Pan_Z Its all fun n games going to war with a giga federation, occupying like 2-3 whole empires in a year's time and thinking to yourself 'for an alliance that doesn't want to status quo because -5 relative fleet strength they really suck'
...And then you see the federation fleet with 160k fleet power start pulling up flanked by like 8 30k fleets
Leader focused builds stack +% leader experience gain. That +300 experience every single time you launch an agenda actually SCALES with that leader xp bonus, so every time you launch, your leaders can get like 1200-1500 xp. It's actually very strong for leader focused builds, especially if you are a unity build that can churn out agendas.
Does unity generation affect agenda speeds?
@@primordial7881 I don't think so, but it allows you to more easily finish agendas early. 24 months remaining is usually where I start trying to finish early
@@eklu65 Also if you stay under 100 empire size you get a massive reduction in the cost of rushing with unity
@@SolazLive I will have to try that
In mid-late if the empire size is very low, you can launch-finish more than one at the same time with a good unity generation, and if you play with a mod for leader cap (the actual one is ridiculous), its a must have that tradition, is S tier directly, having 40 or 50 govs and reducing the empire size with the other trad on them per each level is very good.
I am quite fond of the politics tradition, but then again I do enjoy controlling the galactic senate and becoming custodian.
Diplomacy+Politics+FanEgal can really mess with Galcomm. Just hitting them with all the favours my envoys I've gotten always cracks me up
yeah i have found it excells in a situation i often find myself in :
i control about half the galaxy but there are 1-2 federations a bit too strong for me to break.
in this situation politics giving me forced control over the community, specifically to become the custodian or emperor and it is very powerful for breaking the stalemate.
I find it too easy to take control of the galaxy by turning everyone into vassals. Don’t care about my political power when every other empire can only vote if they agree with me
the only kind of politics tradition i like is when the AI uses it to try and control the galactic senate as i refuse to join the GS 100% of the time an empire that does this is always putting a target on there back from me lol
Not yet
The -10% influence cost... really is important early on, where influence is pretty much your limiting factor for expansion. It's absolutely a noticeable difference in terms of much real estate you can grab before the AI does.
I don't pick expansion very often, but when I do it's almost always for the 10% reduced starbase influence cost first and foremost (which you just sort of handwaved as pointless), then the extra pops/growth speed. If I'm not super constrained by my neighbors, being able to expand 10% faster (as influence is difficult to increase very much, so influence/starbase is the biggest limiter of expansion speed, far more than any economic factors) can be very useful in a huge galaxy.
I tend to play wide, so I go Expansion; extra pops and growth speed are great to have, especially when you're getting multiples of that growth. (Plus, the cost reductions for Starbase or Empire sprawl are nice to keep growing.)
yep, extra pops is the insignificant part of expansion to me. But empire size and influence cost? Yes please!
i think expansion scales with size of galaxy you play in. the bigger it is, more crucial it becomes.
montu seem to play medium size so he prob doesnt need this bonuses as much but when i play on biggest size, i usually end up going wide and so having expansion is a MUST.
Same. Returning to the game after years of absence.
Expansion is interesting because I have such a love-hate relationship with it. It really needs to be your first pick for it to be REALLY good, or your second to be okay, and taking it after is just really dumb. That means it is competing with Discovery which he also did a little dirty. Honestly him having it in the B tier might trigger more people than Expansion in the C tier. But that is going off what I remember of the game several patches ago.
Depending on the kind of game you are running you might really be hurting for influence. That -10 isn't great but it can mean the difference between nabbing a few systems on the frontier with an empire you don't want to go to war with (yet). If there are no other empires near you it is quite valuable as a means of rapid expansion. Its right there in the name. But you won't really know if your slice of the galaxy is mostly vacant until later.
My standard picks for a game WAS Discovery first, the survey speed boost, then Expansion, the -10 influence then the right side if I have colonization options. If not then back to discovery for the science boosting. But that also keeps me from getting my first ascension perk quickly. But it also lets me pick the four or five early game things that will benefit me most at that stage of the game and with all of them the earlier the better. But then technological ascendancy and one vision are great to get as soon as possible too. :|
Mostly watching this to see what has changed and if I need to reevaluate.
@@girlbuu9403 You and I are on the same wavelength for this one. Discovery is almost always an automatic first pick for me because science is just such a key focus in general I'd pretty much always want it to be at least one of my picks just for that, and the survey and anomaly bonuses are basically only valuable taken early so may as well make it first pick. When I do pick expansion it's because while grabbing faster survey speed I discovered I'm not hemmed in too hard and can really get an advantage out of the cheaper influence cost for expansion. The pops on new colonies are a minor bonus compared to just owning so much sheer space this way. I always play on huge though, so might definitely feel otherwise on smaller maps.
30:00 One addendum I think you forgot about is that the Starbase cost reduction also applies to Orbital Rings and its buildings and modules. That includes the influence cost, which I think is just an oversight.
I sure hope it isn't an oversight, because its a major selling point of the tradition for me. Together with the technology which reduces the upgrade cost by 20%, you get a total reduction of 70%. This allowes you to outfit all your planets with full orbital rings relativly early, giving a very nice economic and / or defense boost to your empire.
I think Statecraft is actually being underrated here, it has a niche. Because of how strong some agendas are, the agenda speed and duration perks are actually pretty good, moreso than it felt like you gave them credit for. Plus, you yourself talked about how strong leaders are with galactic paragons, and the +300 exp on agenda activation when combined with a bunch of leader exp bonuses can catapult your leaders up in levels quite quickly, and the completion bonuses are actually pretty good as completion bonuses go. It definitely plays second fiddle to aptitude when it comes to leader traditions, but that's also just because aptitude is really damn strong.
I actually found a lot of success taking many of the lower tier traditions to stack empire size reduction perks on a fanatic pacifist inward perfection empire and then further offsetting it with large numbers of high level governors bringing down the empire size even farther, which would not have been as effective without statecraft's exp from agendas. Hell, I didn't even know at the time that you could activate agendas early with unity, and that would have accelerated the process even faster.
Of course it's being underrated. Giving it F Tier is a pathetic joke.
Thank you can't wait to watch the new version.
I just started playing stellaris again (haven't played since shortly after Mega Corp). I'm having a blast again and the videos are just a great support tool.
Don't play at the harder difficulty, and choose what you want
My advice...get out now while you still have a chance! Once you get sucked in your in for 1,000's of hours lol.
Hi Montu! I’ve played Stellaris off and on for years but fired it back up again recently and really enjoy what the game has developed into. I’m commenting because I made it to the “secret callout” point, and wanted to let you know that I’ve really enjoyed working my way through your library of videos. Videos like this are really informative, and your multiplayer series are entertaining to watch and pretty funny at times! Keep doing what you’re doing and good luck!
Edict fund bonuses become insignificant at higher empire sizes. It should be coupled with a % decrease for edicts, whichever gives the biggest bonus at the moment
That’s the whole point of the empire size mechanic. If you get bigger it cost more to run your empire, so you would need more edict fund to fund the same edict than a smaller sized empire
Hey Montu, if you read this, just wanted to say thanks for doing this consistently quality content. Full and comprehensive explanations, comparisons between various options, guide videos etc. Just good stuff. Feels like shooting the breeze with a buddy about the game and I always finish your videos wanting to go try out a new build haha.
Made it to the secret call out for this GARGANTUAN video. Loved it. I was surprised that I actually agreed with most of your rankings. The biggest surprise for me with the latest updates was that I no longer take discovery and expansion as first and second picks anymore, if I ever pick them at all. The combat advantages from subterfuge has made it a 4th or 5th pick almost regularly. Pretty surprising since I've never played with it aside from testing when it was new.
I really hope some traditions get a rework and/or slight buffs to make them more viable. I think every tradition should be at least B tier in theory.
12:50 - don't you get the additional leader lifespan AND the reduction of negative traits if you are not a necrophage?
You made it sound like you get either one OR the other.
But since you get both, it is way nicer, no?
In general: A new tier list - I love it :D
Yes, this one was explained wrong. Non-Necrophages get +10 leader lifespan AND -1 maximum negative traits while Necrophages only get increased unity per converted pop.
@@spored932 I wonder if it should be higher up in this list then.
Thanks! Im sure having to update these lists on such a regular basis gets old, but i want you to know we appreciate them. I absolutely love this game but dont have the time to properly keep up with all the changes made to the game so having these lists that I can listen to while working is a massive help. Keep up the work montu
You should invest in a D tier, to give adaptability the respect of not being put in the same tier as statecraft
I'd accept 'Super F' for statecraft, but yeah...
@@MontuPlays Lol. Atleast adaptability works in max orbital damage reduction meme builds. Statecraft is just... useless... So yeah that works too haha
@@rasmuswhittembury6350tell it to my leaders who are on 8 lvl after 40 years of game xd
@@rasmuswhittembury6350max orbital meme is dead
@@Darlf_Sevil did the new bombardment changes kill it?
Thank you for this Montu it is an enormous help. I was around for the secret call-out and actually wound up watching the entire video. I often listened to your videos while I am at work here let me simultaneously inform myself while simultaneously helping me focus on my job. Thank you so much for your guidance
Harmony/sync should definitely have some sort of percentage based edict cost reduction. I actually really like having leaders with edict cost reduction and they put this to shame.
I'm glad they finally put merchant guilds in the glame.
Just starting to play, and appreciate the ranking lists. There are a lot of beginner guides out there, but not much covers mid to late game, and this is nice for insight into what is coming.
I agree about the espionage operations. I've been saying you should be able to assassinate leaders for a while now. AND NOW, with Paradox's Leader rework, it seems like a huge opportunity to play sneaky and do some stabbing from the shadows! Hope they address it! Good video, Thanks
Discovery for me is my "Pick it the moment traditions become available" early game savior. Use it then activate the "Map the Stars" Edict for increased anomaly chance for more research and scientist xp
Not to mention the bonuses from said tradition help late game as well with minor but very significant boosts once you have a lot of systems with research stations in them
A new tierlist from montu and its an hour long. Basically christmas.
I’m actually quite fond of the statecraft tradition for a gimmick build I’ve come across. Using the statecraft agenda and it’s finished for +3 councillor skill, as well as the +2 from oligarchy and +1 from vaults of knowledge brings your maximum councillor level up to 16. If you go merchant guilds and max out the director of trade you can squeeze out 11.4 trade value from all of your clerks, merchants give 12 trade. (All this is before thrifty and the other bonuses you can get for trade).
Still would be nice if statecraft got a buff though
For an isolationist empire of any sort, expansion is quite good as an early pick. The empire size reduction keeps you under the size cap longer, meaning you tech faster for longer. Getting planets early is the most important thing and that tree directly helps it. I honestly couldn't find myself picking anything else.
I always was a Hoi player, but when i tried stellaris i was so blown away. I'm still new to the game, but even from the starters i could tell that the naval projection is the way to go. When you do all 5 focuses, game allows you to pick additional one, with juicy +80 naval capacity and other bonus
Are you still planning to make that Leader traits tier list video? I noticed the preview is no longer up.
LET'S GOOOOOOO!!
I recently discovered your channel because I recently got into Stellaris, and BOY did i get into it. Not even 2 weeks and I got almost all of the DLCs lol.
Started checking out your channel and saw some videos, really liked your tierlists because it gave me an idea of the state of the game and how to play with certain things even if they are not the best. Unfortunately some of them were kinda outdated so I had to take things with a grain of salt (not your fault of course, just the game being updated and balanced regularly).
Traditions are one of the most interesting things in this game, so I'm glad you could make a video it for this patch, even if they change again in the near future LMAO
Glad to see your content, keep it up!
It'd be great to also kinda know when to pick them, I know you said it for some but just some example empires with the paths you'd plan to go if that makes sense, although that'd have made the video even more massive.
Still a really great list! As always :3
Thank you for all your hard work putting these things together. I don;t get to play very often, and it is nice to be able to find good information on the updates. I made it to the call-out.
I always open with Expansion and the influence cost modifier. It's so good for rapidly gobbling up all the systems in the early game and ensuring I get all the chokepoints that I want. I pick influence cost before I get extra pop and growth speed.
Statecraft has become one of my top picks so I'm surprise to see it so low. There are some benefits which I think he is overlooking.
1) +10% Council Agenda speed means you get agendas more quickly. If you go the unity route and wait until the agenda is about 1/2 the way through the unity cost of rushing the agenda drops a lot so the sooner you get to this point the sooner you can activate it.
2) +20% Agenda Length is nice as late game I often have 3+ active agendas going at one time since it's easier to get them overlapping.
3) +1 Council Skill is nice because the +1 Skill bonuses can go over the level 10 cap. Thus you have have a level 10 leader running as effectively a level 11, with bonuses from other sources you can get a total of like +5 for a max leader with effective 15 level though the single +1 from this is only so so.
Lastly because leaders are really powerful when used correctly the thing that makes this Tradition one of my top picks is...
4) +300 XP when you complete an Agenda. It doesn't sound like a lot until you realize how XP works on leaders. XP Bonuses apply from ALL sources so if you have enough bonuses for like +100% XP this becomes a +600 XP gain. I often get closer to 200% in leader XP Bonuses so I earn 900 XP per agenda I complete. Plus I'm rushing agendas every 5+ years mid/late game so it becomes easy to power level my leaders.
I originally overlooked Statecraft as well until I found out about that XP gain stacking with my Leader XP gain bonuses. There is only one agenda by default that gives you XP to your leaders and it like all other agendas have a 10 year cooldown once it's no longer active. That means you got about 20+ years between it's uses, sure it does have 2000 XP times your modifier but it's not much considering how rarely you get to use it.
My new Meta since leaders were add has been to get as many scientist in the Council for research bonuses and the faster I level them up the higher their bonuses become. Late game I often got like +250-280% bonus to research fields. The other leaders are Govs which I focus more on planetary economic bonuses as I've taken to playing Tall so I can keep the empire sprawl penalties low while boosting my R&D bonuses. I've taken to out pacing Grand Admiral AI so much faster then I had in prior versions in both tech and economy going this route.
35:50
... Traditions giving higher weights to Leader Traits in general should be a thing. That sounds amazing.
The Return of The King. Thank you, Montu, for your great content once again. I will use this knowledge to ̶p̶u̶r̶g̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶s̶u̶b̶j̶u̶l̶g̶a̶t̶e̶ make friends with all the nice aliens out there.
'nice aliens' ???
I'm concerned you're using my knowledge responsibly!
@@MontuPlays ...Sure 👉👈
The only good xeno is a dead xeno
Are you doing your part? Service guarantees citizenship.
I've been waiting for an updated traditions tier list! Thanks so much!
The +5 diplomatic acceptance also applies to vassalization and achieving war goals, so it has military use as well
Yesterday, I conned the AIs into invading a rebel robot system. Every civ sent their fleets and armies... all of them. By the time everyone was stacked they were well over four million Fleet Strength. I was over five million. I then gaurenteed independance and declared war on the primary federation. One fleet battle and I went from 0% war exhaustion to almost 70%... And then proceeded to conquer a quarter of the galaxy before I had to submit to status quo.
My question is: What is the best way to remove or decrease war exhaustion?
Amazing tier breakdown. Thanks for making it as long and detailed as possible. Watching from start to finish!
Discovery is always a first pick for me. Faster surveying means you can start wide and carve out your territory faster than those around you. The increase in anomolies also generally means the planets you do survey are going to have more resources. The rest of it is negligible aside from the +1 research alternatives, though the 10% research speed is kinda nice
Wait -10% starbase influence cost is nothing special? We play very differently.
50% minimum habitability in adaptability would be stupid OP. As of current in order to get something like that you have to play either a lithoid or a subterranean empire, forcing you to change your entire playstyle in order to get that bonus. To have it from a tradition would be a much lower cost for the same effect.
I'm always glad to see these. You're honestly my favorite Stellaris-tuber.
This has been a very useful video to watch, thank you for taking the time to make it
Psionics is so powerful if you get the Instrument of Desire. Put the sanctum of desire on an Ecumonopolis and BOOM you have alloys. I have had as high as 30 alloys per Metalurgist, there must be ways to get it higher than that but that is the best I have managed so far.
Other bonuses are also great , all pops pumping out extra resources , great scientists and Admirals , the Governor boost is not great but is still a bonus.
I almost always go Discovery then Aptitude. Without Discovery the intital scouting to choke points doesnt go well for me so I always regret not taking it. Leaders are so insanely powerful you should be using every advantage you have to boost them so Aptitude is a must have and must have early imho.
In a recent game I had a forge capital ecumenopolis with the instrument of desire plus the planetary bonus you get for killing the scavenger bot which gave my capital +20% to alloy production. I was producing so much alloys on that my capital alone that I didn't need any other forge worlds and was able to repurpose all my others mainly for energy to support my mega fleet lmao
was just looking to get back into Stellaris. Splendid timing, Montu!!
i think the need of Supremacy unlocking war doctrines is like Diplomacy unlocking federations, War doctrines must be a regular tech (a rare one) and Supremacy could amplify the bonuses of war doctrines or maybe add another doctrine idk...
...ah and the same with Mercantile, the diferent tipes of trade must be a tech and this tradition could amplify that bonuses
Statecraft combined with Machine Empire/Rogue Servitor lets you get a pretty ridiculously high level Council that is also filled out, and leaders in no time, giving you quite a bit of an advantage in the early game.
damm is good as first tradition
for literaly all empire
free lvl up for first leaders and many more lvl ups later
i think he just dont know how strong and stack bonus from erly pick of this can be.
Awake, listening and happy that you provide such amazing coverage!
With Genetic ascension, if you get the Tiyanki Matriarch you can grab up the Polymelic trait. this gives +0.05 monthly pop assembly per pop (more than twice that of Crystallization or Budding), which stacks with clone vats and can give you ever growing pop assembly. Combine with Vat Grown for a pretty spectacular pop assembly rate.
Does it stack with budding?
@@clem2526 sadly no. However, 3 trait points for a trait 2 and a half times as good as the 2 trait point Budding isn't bad value.
I love your tier lists! I watch them all the way through. They are so helpful! Thanks!
I actually wrote a mod to make cloning a more flexible play style for RP reasons and found using jobs to generate organic pop assembly was the most balanced way to do it. So you idea for improving genetic ascension would work well.
Unyield -50% upgrade cost has an additional bonus I rarely seen mentioned. Orbital Rings are considered Starbases for cost and thus it reduces their upgrade cost by 50%. Considering it cost a lot of Influence to upgrade them this can be a huge cost saver if you do like me and go Tall putting Rings on all your worlds.
Thank you so much for this Montu
I like discovery more along the lines of A rank. But I do play (and everyone I play with) on low hyperlane density so "Blitz scanning" all the routes to cut the AI off from taking everything "behind" them works great.
Even more so now that leader cap is a thing, can't just plop out 10 science ships to scan like crazy. Would have liked to see base sci ship be able to scan, but not do anomalies or asset tech, etc etc. Then leaders could buff scan rates with level / skills more than the "empty" ship.
And tech is king, so having the extra tech speed never hurts.
i always feel like some of the bonuses you can get get as a psionic ascended empire always get overlooked, like the shroud preacher destiny trait for governors (25% resource output for psionic pops) and the zro catalysis edict from lvl 5 holy covenant federations (15% resource output for psionic pops) thats with telepaths and the agenda thats 55% resource output empire wide and 110% resource output on a world with a sanctum and the governor. i love it as necrophage whern i don't mind the lack of pop growth because i get that from the slave market
Glad to see you posting again Montu! Missed ya
13:47 fanatic pacifists gang can stack 10 lvl ascentions on every planet. With both leader cap ascentions, Aptitude, Harmony and Domination. Add in cyborgs for the -10% pop size cyborg trait to the mix too...
Love the video! I was surprised by one thing, though: while I know you arent rating the agendas specifically in this, I was shocked you didnt touch on how absurdly powerful synthetic yield is. Unlocking that agenda early as machine puts your pop assembly through the roof.
Made it past 40 minutes, my dude! So far, I agree with the tier list. I'm coming back to the game after about a year and have been experimenting with Void Dwellers and Megacorps. Current game is a Megacorp with Tomb World Origin so I could experiment with the relentless industrialist civic. Basically: Post Apocalypse Earth turned Megacorp, With the "adaptive" trait at start. Occupy tomb worlds I find and turn into banger forge worlds. Occupy and turn continental worlds into agri-worlds. Take the Adaptation trad after Mercantile. Occupy worlds I can get up to 70% habitability through research, turn them into industrial worlds, poison them until they passively become Tomb worlds my People are more than happy to live on. Still sciencing it, you should take a look. Love the Content!
My big issue with espionage is the overlap in envoys and how long the operations take before they do anything. I feel an assigned envoys should be able to open both diplo and espionage at the same time, with penalties to the diplomacy side when espionage missions fail. The missions themselves should be more like archeology where you get partial results on successful periodic checks.
The fact that going on missions reduces infiltration levels just ruins the system I think. Infiltration level is a good source of intel and sometimes makes it worth assigning an envoy to espionage, but actually doing operations is completely detrimental to that aim. There is some point on aquiring assets in theory since assets increase maximum infiltration, but with how it resets infiltration down and then slowly creeps up again, that is just sooo sloooow.
My current view is that if you need fast intel the best way is a cloaked science ship doing active reconnocence. But how much intel you can get from that is capped, so if you need more the mest way is to assign an envoy to spy. That envoy should just sit there though, don't touch operations, other than possibly sleeper cells.
Distinguished Admiralty* + admiral ruler + Aptitude can get very interesting, especially if you roll Skirmisher at game-gen & start with it at level 2 (further enhanced if you later make them a Strategist & they get Gale-speed). The extra trait picks are huge if you want to match naval design strategies which focus on a single weapon type (hello, missile boats!)
I tend to focus on missile kiting with destroyers, so that speed bonus from Skirmisher 2 is a MASSIVE advantage. I often win combats with zero damage taken, & my ships get where they're going faster, which incidentally saves me money as they spend less time out of port. Also helps with exploration & to a lesser extent with construction ships.
*Distinguished Admiralty starts your admirals at level 3, & you get to pick the level 2 & 3 traits of your defense minister & optionally your ruler.
These videos are always great. Thanks for them they help a lot.
I am so sorry for how soon this will be outdated.
I love your Tier lists and come back all the time! ♥
I like expansionist for the colony buffs and the influence discount. In almost every game I play, I am usually hurting for influence. Except for one game I played where I was running into the influence limit, which I never new existed. I still do not know what I need to get so much influence.
Usually I go discovery first just to get map the stars and the extra survey speed, then go expansion for the influence discount on starbases so I can rush for the chokepoints. Finish up expansion for the extra pops, finish up discovery, and from there it depends on the empire build.
discovery is usually very good for early game, though i see dimishing results from mid game and especially late game. It's good but it kinda just stagnates if you know what i mean
Wait, the starbase influence cost reduction has helped me out so much in the early game. Early expansion is so important, so that little hood is huge
I know it's not a popular tree, but I like going oppressive autocracy/necrophage into a first tree domination. +30% worker jobs from the second species and 1k minerals saved from lithoid blockers lets you have a healthy start even if the guaranteed planets don't have a lot of available districts for energy or minerals
oh boy, we need a guide of how ships should be made and the composition.
Aspec has some videos on this on the main stellaris channel recently. Definitely worth a watch
Montu has one of those but the short answer is 'vettes or cruisers. Disrupters, missiles/torpedoes spam.
I'd say you're flat wrong about the -10% Starbase influence cost on the Expansion tree. It's THE most important early tradition to grab, because it gives you the ability to take extra starbases way faster. The cost may be whatever late in the game, but in a highly populated game where you have to race to grab as much territory as you can before other empires do, it's THE most important thing to have.
It lets you lock in choke points early on, or mess up other empires borders to open a path to attack. It lets you box in empires, or snake yourself into highly rich systems.
It's THE tradition that sets up your late game.
The tree itself might not be that important, but that one tradition early is a game changer. Then you can pick up the +1 pop once you already have a colony starting up. You can actually pick it after the colony is already establishing, as long as you get it before its finished, you get the extra pop, so you don't have to rush the +1 pop tradition, but the -10% influence cost is insanely good for the early 'race' phase of the game.
5:33 - Montu, we need better transparency of building slot calculation so we know when it's safe to deconstruct a city district. Also the game could be smarter about swapping the city district for Industrial when that equals 0.3x1=> 1 with Master Crafter's or the Mega Corp equivalent, I usually end up having to repair after it blips in-and-out-of existence.
6:48 - did you ever finish the complete leader trait tier list? What about paragons?
9:32 - now would be a good time to mention taking just the opener in blocker-heavy builds then finishing it later (used to be used for relic world, shattered ring comes to mind, the pre-FTL challenge story runs) and also the Federation types it opens - some which are also opened by Ethics or Civics!
26:39 omg influence rebalance when
28:11 mitigate the fact they don't want to change your federation type if you're invited but they're peaceful traders but they always want to start Unions??
34:40 the bonuses from discovery can falloff massively if I get boxed in or don't discover wormhole/gateway/L-gate/speculative hyperlane breaching -- and when I do I forget to explore the wormholes (not subject to auto-survey) and "MIA" from speculative hyperlane breaching takes way too long to find any missing pieces from closed borders; and often cloaking also takes too long to pop in research to be any useful for that. Stellaris might be a game about exploration, but your neighbors - and crisis - have different ideas. Maybe it could help with getting techs related to better research speed, and unlocking new galactic regions such as wormholes?
40:12 secret callout. espionage can be fairly hilarious when you drop a crisis beacon on the chosen
47:24 plz clone jobs
53:03 would you recommend Cybernetic over Synthetic for Assimilation machines?
You made some very good arguments and made me question a lot of my common choices.
As much as I want to agree with Expansion and Discovery being lower, I just cannot. Choke points are very important, and knowing where they are and the ability to get them first is vital. On top of that, the perks from the rest of both trees are very good. Pop growth is insane, even if only 10%. That is 10% faster than other people. Pops being the most important resource in the game makes that extremely powerful. | Next, Research alts are extremely good because tech is RNG. that is another chance to roll mega strucs, another chance to roll Phyonics, another chance to roll any important tech. Also sleeping on survey speed is insane when the L-cluster is a thing. Getting to the L-cluster first is a massive military advantage as well as economic. Also 10% is the same as an ascension perk that is insanely helpful (that is due to the research options gained but still. Research is what will make or brake a war). As for Research Subsides, late game is expensive but spiritualist wont ever feel it so its every better for them.
I do not think they are S tier but Expansion is minimum B tier (because only 2-3 parts of it are useful, even if they are really useful) and Discovery is an easy A tier. Research and Economics is king. Discovery is not as good as Prosperity but far more rounded and commonly useful than Mercantile, Subterfuge, Diplomacy, and Unyielding. All of those are niche.
When my happiness authoritarian stability build for maximum money (HASBMM) has some F and C teirs while im thinking they are B teir, (early edict for me really helpsmout having 5-6 things running)
More starbases early on means more food, just build them for food and trade within edges, on edges you can make them tanky boys (really easy to get +16 starbases)
Finishing Statecraft early as your first tradition does let you rush out your third civic and that 300 xp for every agenda actually really shines early on considering how big some of the level bonus from leaders are, viewed in a vacuum Statecraft is terrible but if you view it as an extra leader level and civic over everyone else in the early game it is actually pretty huge. Terrible late game choice though.
Honestly. You're the reason I got into the game. Though to your dismay i do full farmer builds. Keep the great content my man. We all owe you
Unyielding is awesome from an economical point of view! More starbases for a lot less alloys will allow you to produce more resources and naval capacity.
One of the improvements one could add to the federation tree could be using envoys to boost the targets opinion of every federation member. That may mitigate the issue where if one member of you federation is hated by a non-federation member, the opinion malus applies to you as well. If I’m role playing the United Federation of Planets I should be able to liaise between the Vulcans and the Andorians to expand the federation.
I think it should do more with pacts, reduce their influence costs and buffs when having more. I think they should remove the federation limit to a tech and just give more buffs to envoys
"If you want to do basically anything except faster survey speed and get more anomalies, you don't really need Discovery."
I do agree with this statement, but only because the faster survey speed is quite a gem in boosting basically everything. For me, it is indeed the reason to have it as an auto 1st pick. Survey results are RNG-based which makes it hard to calculate the gains for comparison, but in my experience it tends to really enhance both research and economy. (Economy a bit less than research though.) Consider that with the maps the stars edict enabled, the tree gives +60% survey speed +10% Anomaly discovery chance. This means that 3 scientists can do the work that should keep 5 scientists busy for other empires!
It does require a bit of mis-balancing your empire in the early game, but if you can get a 25 year long 6-scientist early-game survey expedition going, the discovery tree basically gives you 4 additional scientists worth of output during that time.
I don't think Discovery is quite as good as Prosperity overall, but I think it is certainly good enough automatically to pick discovery first, and prosperity second. You really have to use it though. The moment assisting research becomes a better use of your scientists time than surveying, the tradition pick must already have paid for its opportunity cost, or it is better to not pick it (first, or at all).
Early game, dismiss your only admiral so you can get 1 more scientist surveying stuff. You won't need the admiral that early and the council bonus you lose are negligible, especially with a small fleet
I just build more science ships, I dont usually need many since by far the biggest bottleneck is expansion
@@thesenate1844 I'm not sure what you mean exactly. You mean building empty science ships and hop scientists around? Or you just don't need so many vessels that you have to worry about the leader cap to staff them? If you primarily survey for building outposts, then you don't need a lot of scientists at all.
But the strategy that I was talking about includes surveying *much* more than you'll need for colonial expansion. The purpose of doing it are the bonuses that anomalies give, rushing the precursor, having first contacts, the leader experience, etc. (It's also important to know what anomalies to investigate immediately or later, I default to later when I don't remember the bonus.)
That's the only way that the survey speed modifier makes much sense. If your science ships are idling 35% of the time, then you had no need for the modifier and doing discovery first is not the right choice for that empire.
@@upgradeplans777 agree!
If you take discovery, you either go all in on survey and anomalies or you should take something else instead
I've been playing Stellaris since release and only recently have I stopped first-picking expansion. I think the left side of the tree was more balanced around the original frontier outpost system. I think if the left hand side was changed to give bonuses to starbases or colonization-relevant economic bonuses like construction cost or speed the tree would become stronger again.
I think the rightful claims agenda in statecraft is really good actually, it really helps if you want to conquer large swathes of land in one go. It doesn't fully redeem the tradition tree as a whole though.
I think I agree with expansion placement, except if your playing as a Lithoid species. The slightly cheaper outpost building means I can yoink more planets to help take advantage of the Lithoid +50% habitability bonus and grow pops on more planets, while the pop growth helps deal with the Lithiods slower base pop growth. Hell if you want to stretch it a little bit more, the faster colonies and 1 extra starting pops helps your colonies start producing useful stuff faster, which Lithoids are normally slower at.
Apetitude should be changed so the +1 leader trait is the finisher instead of opener effect . As it’s arguably the best bonus in the entire tree. And is literally on the level of entire civics (heroic past)
if they wanted to nerf it a bit, that would work
I now always take the aptitude tree first so I unlock the leadership conditioning, but I don’t take any of the picks in it. I then go through prosperity tree, then either discovery or supremacy depending on what state I’m at in the galaxy and any neighbors I’ve found. After that I finish off aptitude.
Expansion tradition habitat build cost reduction applies to Habitat influence cost as well, costing 120 influence instead of 150.
Also in 3..4.5 Diplomacy Tradition's boost to Trust growth and the like does affect the Federation experience gain to some extent, that should still be the case.
I’d argue that discovery and expansion are great specifically when picked early because the survey speed bonuses and outpost influence costs let you expand your territory faster to prevent yourself from getting potentially boxed in by other expanding empires
A note regarding the reduced building upkeep from Prosperity: The alloy maintenance cost on habitats is assigned to their capital buildings. In other words, the Administrative Operations tradition *reduces habitat upkeep costs*. That can be a LOT of alloys.
Still here Montuwu. ❤
8:45 should grant small bonuses per active edict rather than +20 edict fund, faster council agenda speed per level of councilor instead of flat bonus, same with duration, councilor xp bonus should just be bigger, leader xp boost should be % xp increase based on total currently launched agenda's, (5-10% per, or something around that), and capstone would be better off with being +1 effective level for all leaders and doubled as a councilor(while axing the tech boost and keeping the leader capacity)
As it stands, it's genuinely the least worthwhile imo, as I would always choose adaptability and versatility over it in any playthrough. They have at least SOME tangible effects on my gameplay that don't take 30-40 years to see the biggest benefits from, and even then, they still have higher investment returns due to the fact of simply having more pop means more everything
Tier list always helpful! Praise Montu!🎉🎉🎉
26:10 - if Federation Likelihood of acceptance went up for A.I. Empires that would be so useful for this Federations Tradition. That should be the benefits for the 'pre-federation focus' of this branch... but then of course increase the 'already formed federation' bonuses too.
I personally would maybe like to see the ability in this tradition to 'BY PASS 1 LEVEL OF THE MAXIMUM of your federation type'. So for example research federations are very limited in their military capacity in their federation fleets. If this tradition gave the ability to get to level 4 making the fleet costs minimal, minimal, medium, very high rather than minimal, medium, very high, IMPOSSIBLE.
There should also be another section on Federation resource/trade increases, where it could have the same minimal, medium & very high costs to boosting these values across each empire in the federation. Give some more variety in there in a baseline/passive stance way.
Can someone tell me the name of the song played at 36:20 when hes talking about subterfuge? Name and which DLC?
I don't know how i managed to stay awake for the whole thing (cuz i watched it right before bed) but i did. Good job, though. I really like some of your reasoning. I've always felt Expension and Discovery were a little too popular but i could say why. You did a really good job articulating it.
I feel like strongholds and fortresses should reduce collateral damage on the planet. There should be other ways as well, but these buildings are a start
I like this idea, although maybe limit it to a set amount of pops per building. So a fortress habitat is still an annoying impenetrable wall, but a stronghold on a world prevents it being depopulated because a couple xenomorphs touch down.
I agree that locking a Federation behind a Tradition is part of the problem, especially with vassaling so easy. It shouldn't even be a tech. I think it should just be a natural progress of Non-aggression -> Defensive Pact -> Alliance (a new tier) -> then Federation.
The Diplomatic tree can then be about accelerating that process and making Feds better.
Also there needs to be a Mediator mechanic, assign an Envoy, or more, to improve 2 other empires' relation. Lock that into the Dip Tree maybe? I am unsure on that.
There is kindof a build that benefits from the expansionist tradition: fanatic xenophobe, interstellar dominion expansionist puts you down to like 22 influence per starbase which can be SUPER powerful all stacked up. The extra (linear) 10% off makes it cost something like 40% less influence per starbase than without.
It can be one pretty solid way of just gobbling up territory voraciously before the AI can catch up