Headscratchers / Stellaris

• How is Earth/Sol III not a gaia world? Depending on the latitude, you've got desert, arid, tundra, arctic and tropical, the overall makeup is continental, and there's even a few radiated hotspots for your tomb world dwellers.
  • Every species' homeworld is as hospitable to them as a gaian world, but every other planet of the same type as their homeworld is only 80% habitable to them, it's likely that homeworlds have certain biochemicals or symbiotic microorganisms that are required for the most ideal lives of the species. Or similar planets can spawn diseases that can infect them but they lack resistance to. Presumably gaian worlds miraculously have whatever non-homeworlds lack or their ecosystems can easily accommodate them.
    • Also, Earth has two entire folders on the Death World page.
  • Same reason that even our closest planetary neighbors aren't quite perfect. Beyond the biological differences, things like gravity, atmospheric pressure, chemical ratios, weather conditions, usable terrain, sunlight and energy sources, all could and would impact how easy and hospitable a planet would be. And in context of humans, remember that of course we find Earth perfect for us/we are perfectly adapted to it as a planet. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be here or wouldn't be human.
  • The real question should be, "what is a gaia world?". How does a world manage 100% habitability for literally any species, even several at the same time, when close-to-homeworld planets are at best 80%?
  • Also because the world catagories aren't about absolutes but a broad classification on average. It's not that that a desert world is literally and entirely a desert across the entire planet (an even then, desert is not what you think it means - Antarctica is a desert, for instance). Rather, the primary/dominant ecologicaly niches best suited for advanced life on that planet are of a given type but there is still variety in and across the planet. Even for Earth as a continental-type is still 75% water (most of which is salt water) - this is a mere 15% shy of an ocean world (listed at 90%). This produces a lot of environmental effcts and side effects that might not exist or be more subdued on a similar continental planet with less water such as El Nino drawing in warm water and air and the oceans helping to maintain tempuratures. Even beyond that though, within humans, different populations do actually show differences as well - peoples native to high mountains have been shown to be far better at oxygenating their blood while people with long histories of naked ocean diving have been recorded being able to hold their breaths for minutes at a time. This would be why your pops can adapt better to a planet - more so once you actuually have the tech to accelerate the process.
  • The Gaia Worlds were created by the Baol Organism, a Hive Mind Precursor. It is likely the fauna and flora of such a planet has a rudimentary Hive Mind with the "make life easier for the sapient species living there" directive. After all, just activating the Last Baol relic turns even a Tomb World into a perfect, pristine Gaia World.

• Why exactly do my synthetic leaders die of "old age"? Are they supposed to be like the Fallout 4 synthetics, that is still biological? The portrait seems to suggest otherwise. If the hardware is just wearing out then it seems simple enough to replace a few parts or even re upload their consciousness without "killing" them given all the other technological wonders that are feasible in the game.
  • It probably depends. In general, since they're alive and sentient, they also have all the same needs and desires which may include getting bored, lack of interest, or whatever. Each ethos may also have different responses as well. For Materialists, it may be that they need upgrades and what not but while it's possible to do so, it's prohibitively expensive to do so in a normal life time as such AI are as complex as any other life; such AI may come back but under a different name as they may see themselves as newer/better beings. For Spiritualists, they may view whatever thing gives AI it's sentience to be untransferable and intangible; you could no more transfer an organic person's brain into someone else's body and get the same person. Other ethos could have similar rationals and reasoning - xenophobes build in self-destructs to avoid excessive contamination, etc etc.
  • Another possibility is that the A.I.'s program might simply degrade after so many years. While you might be able to replace a malfunctioning appendage (such as a hand or leg); It is entirely plausible that the Synthetic Leaders function as a result of Quantum Computing, and variations in the hardware (at the quantum level) in their Central Processors would result in entirely new personalities, i.e. new Leaders.
  • Similar to the above, it could be like rampancy in Halo, where simple thinking just causes the A.I.s to become unstable and requiring them to be put down, or in other words, Deleted.
    • One of the default races is a fungoid species that is functionally immortal, but after a certain age just stops caring enough to lead. Perhaps its the same with synthetics, after a certain run time they just get too locked into their processes to innovate or react to sudden change effectively.
  • They may also put a preset expiry timer for the unit when they were first manufactured. The Synths are allowed to become leaders once their status have been elevated from servitude to equality with their creators. If they are granted virtually immortal life, wouldn't that put them above their creators? This may in fact the most probable explanation, as there's a correlated achievement called 'Planned Obsolescence': As a Materialist empire with at least 200 pops, have 75% of your pops as Robots.
  • Developments for the Utopia expansion indicate that this behavior was an unintentional side-effect of how synthetics are, code-wise, no different than organic pops save for having a 0% growth rate and the "Synthetic" trait, which causes weirdness (namely, death from age) when those pops become leaders. In Utopia, Synthetics will be immortal, and the Synthetic ascension path will allow you to replace 'all' your leaders with immortal (save for combat or disaster) synths.
  • Taken even further with Synthetic Dawn, in which leaders are actually immortal if they are robotic, which does include the chance for a "Random unknown error" to take the life of your robotic heads of state/research/military at complete random. Given the units involved are all organically evolved artificial intelligence it seems logical to conclude that an intelligence without the stability granted by natural evolution to sapience in this manner might have a higher propensity toward random fatal errors. In fact the death of synthetic or robotic leaders created by primarily biological empires due to age might be explained by the age given being the point where critical errors become to numerous or expansive to fix. That or simple hardware failure ala Chobits.
• So my entire empire, or at least every sector, has one single energy and mineral economy and is able to transport energy to a planet without power plants without a problem. So why can't I transport food from one planet to another? You can't tell me that it's impossible to shock-freeze food on one planet and transport it to another starving planet, just the way you do it with energy and minerals(for ships).
  • Energy credits aren't units of energy so much as a currency backed by energy, similar to "gold" in most games. In any case, wireless power transfer has been around since Tesla, if the implied Subspace Ansible works by sending radio waves through the FTL travel method they can probably beam microwave power the same way. They do have solar-power satellites in canon.
    • However, you are still able to transfer minerals for ship maintainance to ships on the other side of the galaxy. But with food this is impossible?
    • Food is perishable, and a "power" type resource (see You Require More Vespene Gas)
    • Food is not perishable in space, or frozen, it's simply not implemented in the game, IMO there could be a mod for it, but it's simply just not coded that way.
  • Ignoring gameplay considerations, it's possible that it's just a matter of usable surplus. To have a surplus, a planet would need to produce a lot of food - enough to feed the producers, the non-producers on the planet, and then have enough non-emergency and excess food that the planet would be willing to ship it offworld. That's a non-trivial amount of food (and supporting infrastructure) and while some planets might be able to swing that, not every one would. It may be that it does happen, but it's just not a significant enough impact to be explicitly called out.
  • Also, colonization remains the same mechanically throughout time, regardless of tech level. At the beginning, when your species is just figuring out space travel, and has only one planet, any colony would have to learn how to be self-sustaining as fast as possible, and couldn't depend on shipment from the mother world. Even as the empires go from exploration to conventional politics, the worlds still have to be self-sustaining.
  • Question is rendered Moot in Banks (1.5) which, at time of writing, promises to make food an empire wide resource (presumably, you can trade to other empires as well).
• One would think that any spiritualist empire that has picked up both Mind Over Matter and Transcendence ascension perks would be pretty much immune to the AI Rebellion infiltration aspect considering that robots can't join the telepathy the entire species participates in, and would stick out like sore thumbs and be quickly investigated. There are obvious reasons why this is not the case for gameplay reasons, but still a headscratcher with a side dish of Fridge Logic.
  • Could be they get a Brain in a Jar installed so they can participate..
  • No longer the case, the contingency's infiltrators do, indeed, stick out like sore thumbs.
• Why do lithoids eat raw minerals? Humans don't eat raw carbon, we eat plants and animals, and presumably a silicon-based sapient species would have evolved to eat their silicon-based plant and animal relatives the same way.
  • There is no reason to assume the animal/vegetal/fungal/etc. kingdoms division holds true for life anywhere outside of Earth. The Fongoids and Plantoids species already show that organic sapient species don't need to adhere to it. Maybe the lithoids are their silicon-based equivalent and there are other siliconic sapients that eat other species rather than raw minerals. They just aren't playable because then they wouldn't be distinct enough.
• How does an empire that has just made First Contact with a player-controlled Fanatic Purifier know that's what they are? While all the other exterminator civics, including AI controlled Fanatic Purifiers, have unique responses that make it obvious they want to kill everyone player-led Fanatic Purifiers can choose a neutral tone that disguises their contempt and you need some intel on a civilization to know what their civics are, but despite that every empire can automatically identify a Fanatic Purifier at the moment of first contact.