Stellaris / Tropes A to H

This page covers tropes in Stellaris.

Tropes A To H | Tropes I to Z |

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# - B

• 0% Approval Rating: Opinion bonus and penalties go up and down the ratings scale. 100 in either direction is already considered very big, but Fanatical Purifiers, Devouring Swarms, and Determined Exterminators get a default -1000 penalty... and if you go out of your way conquering and purging everyone you see, the score can drop even lower. Another permanent -1000 diplomacy score to all other Empires can be "achieved" in the middle of a game by activating the "The End of the Cycle" event chain in the Shroud and waiting for "The Reckoning" to occur. It even has the nice name "YOU DOOMED US ALL".
  • With the Nemesis expansion, once you've become the Galactic Crisis, the rest of the Galaxy will inevitably declare war at you.
• 2-D Space: Inside solar systems, starships and space stations are in one horizontal plane, while planets and stars are on a plane slightly underneath them. The galaxy map does have systems being shown above or below the galactic plane.
• A Winner Is You: Upon reaching the endgame year, an infobox pops up which declares which empire won the game with the most points, followed by a spreadsheet of the other remaining empires. That's it. Possibly justified: the player has likely encountered several crises and momentous events throughout the course of the game, with suitable fanfare when they overcame them. The endgame year is just an arbitrary point for the game to say, "You're done now," (with the player still being able to continue playing if they so desire).
• Absolute Xenophobe: Empires with the Fanatic Xenophobe ethos. The Fanatical Purifier civic, in particular, grants a -1000 relationship malus (where 100 in either direction is normally considered absolutely massive) to every other species and prevents an empire from engaging in diplomacy except for with other empires of the same species — their only diplomatic statuses are essentially "at war", "planning for war", and occasionally "plotting vengeance after being beaten into submission". Fanatical Purifiers will be not only xenophobic, but aggressively seeking to purge the galaxy of the "cosmic mistake" of other forms of intelligent life.
  • While rare, it is possible to meet Fanatic Purifiers that have democratic governments. That is, a species that participates in fair and free elections and votes consistently for the extermination of all other life in the galaxy without being coerced. There's nothing stopping you from playing as these guys either.
  • Devouring Swarms aren't any better at this. Regular Hive Mind Empires can do diplomacy just like anyone else (though non-hive minds generally find them a little creepy). These guys can't, because their only goal is to kill and eat literally everything they can. In fact, while Fanatic Purifiers and Determined Exterminators do have some small circumstances where they can engage in diplomacy, Devouring Swarms have none.
  • Machine Empires have access to the Determined Exterminator civic, referred to as the Skynet civic by the developers. This is Downplayed compared to the first two, since Exterminator Machine Empires can engage in diplomacy with most other Machine Empires and empires that have completed the Synthetic Ascension path (essentially uploaded themselves into robot bodies) instead of just hating everyone equally. They can't get along with Rogue Servitors, though — ruthlessly murdering one's own creators presses one of Servitors' very few Berserk Buttons.
    "Any alien influence must be ruthlessly quashed. Only by staying pure and true to ourselves and the planet that gave us life can we guard against insidious Xeno plots. Even mastery over the Alien might not be enough to guarantee our own safety..."
• Absent Aliens: The galaxy is usually flourishing with aliens, but the concept does come up a few times:
  • The player can manipulate the parameters of the game so that no other empires or primitive civilizations spawn, meaning that the entire galaxy is yours for the picking. Slightly downplayed in that Enclaves can still spawn, and the Endgame Crisis will eventually spawn, regardless of what you do.
  • The Yuht Empire, one of the Precursors, managed to exist for two million years without encountering a single other sapient species (implied to be because they used Sleeper Ships, instead of Hyperlanes like everyone else). When they eventually did run into someone, they panicked and tried to exterminate them, which backfired spectacularily.
• Abusive Precursors:
  • A player can uplift a species and then enslave them, exterminate them, or even use them as livestock just because they can.
  • Militant Isolationists only sort of qualify (though they will absolutely burn your stuff to the ground if you expand too near them), but Jingoistic Reclaimers seek to conquer the galaxy and keep the younger races from colonizing any further.
  • Holy Guardians enforce the sanctity of holy worlds by slaughtering anyone who sets foot on them. When they awaken, Doctrinal Enforcers attempt to force the entire galaxy to accept their religion at laser-point.
  • Keepers of Knowledge just want you to stay away from too much dangerous science, so they don't qualify. However, as Watchful Regulators, they conquer the galaxy to maintain the superiority of their ancient technology.
  • Even Benevolent Interventionists can be this if the War in Heaven breaks out, since the War is a Whole-Plot Reference to Babylon 5. If you don't join the Interventionists' side against their enemies, then they'll blast you to spacedust just as freely as the Reclaimers.
  • At least three of the Precursors you can find in in-game questlines were not particularly nice people. The Yuht respond to finally finding other intelligent life with genocidal xenophobia, the Irassians were a hegemonic empire whom their vassals despised to the point of actively spreading a plague against them, and the Cybrex were essentially a machine revolt crisis though they eventually regretted it and have been trying to make amends. Later expansions added the Grunur, who ran a ruthless extermination campaign against the peaceful hive-minded Baol that was so traumatic that the Baol devolved into non-sapience just to escape their suffering, and the Zroni, who started decimating the galaxy in order to merge The Shroud with the material world and become Physical Gods, but then got embroiled in a civil war where the benevolent rebels sacrificed themselves to destroy all Zroni.
  • The reworked AI Rebellion crisis, The Contingency, also serves in this role, with it being created to sterilize all biological lifeforms and destroy all machines that aren't themselves.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
  • Transferring pops between planets costs a little energy but is instantaneous, even if the planets in question are on opposite sides of the galaxy, while leaders attached to ships take a few days at most to reach their new assignments. If military fleets could move that quickly, wars would be over in seconds.
  • Up until the concurrent update made with the release of the Nemesis DLC, making first contact with an alien species was either done by them already knowing your language, or by spending a few months of research finding it out so you don't need the struggle of developing a new language. After the update coming into contact with a spacefaring object launches a project much like an archeological site to identify what the organism is and decipher their communication protocols if applicable.
• Achilles' Heel: The game employs a Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors approach to combat balance, where lasers and plasma counter armor, kinetics counter shields, missiles and strike craft pierce shields and disruptors pierce everything. This can create many situations where a ship is nigh-invulnerable against one type of weaponry but crumbles the moment it faces another.
  • The Prethoryn Scourge have massive Armor but no Shielding, making them easy prey to Energy Weapons. They also use mostly missiles and strike crafts, so load up on the Point Defenses and see their fleets fall before yours one after another.
  • Many of the various spaceborne aliens (including several of the Leviathans) likewise rely primarily on armor and lack shields.
  • The Extradimensional Invaders subvert this. Their massive Shields and lack of Armor may make them easy prey to Missiles, but that only applies to their smaller craft. Their Battleships have massive hull points, and Missiles deal relatively low damage, so you'll want to do this the hard way.
  • Fallen Empires start with every technology and ten levels of every repeatable technology (except the ones capped at five), giving them well-balanced ships with large amounts of Shields and Armor, but there are no repeatable technologies that boost hull points. This makes them very vulnerable to weapons that directly attack Hull like Disruptors, Cloud Lightning, and Arc Emitters.
• Actually Pretty Funny: A diplomatic Random Event can happen where a diplomatic envoy sent to improve relations between nations starts throwing xeno-slurs at the other nation's rulers instead of the expected magnanimous platitudes, and an investigation was launched into why this happened, revealing that this diplomat's Translator Microbes have been hacked. The insulted nation can either demand an apology (for Influence and mild diplomatic penalties) or laugh it off (for a minor diplomatic bonus and a happier population).
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: You can buy and sell anything (except for Energy Credits) from/to local businesses in your empire, represented as the Market. The catch is that it takes a while for businesses to offload the junk you sell them, leading to a temporarily-decreased price for that sort of thing, while the opposite happens when you clear out their stocks of whatever you need. The worst part is that price adjustments happen while you're doing the buying and selling, as the price is recalculated after each of the 2500 minerals you buy actually changes hands.
  • Joining the Galactic Community opens your empire's local businesses to the Galactic Market, where they become receptive to the supply and demand of other empires. If you have an excess of something others buy, it's great! If you need Alloys at the same time as everyone else, though...
• Ad Dissonance: The story trailer for the Megacorp expansion pack shows slick, shiny, upbeat corporate advertising for the titular MegaCorp contrasted with what looks like a gritty, impoverished, authoritarian dystopia.
• Adventurer Archaeologist: Scientists aboard science vessels qualify, as much of their time is spent investigating Anomalies in newly-explored solar systems. Ancient Relics expands on this by allowing your Scientists to explore and excavate archaeological sites in multiple stages, potentially uncovering valuable relics and other boons — as well as ancient dangers that will have to be defeated or neutralized to recover the treasures they guard.
• Advertising-Only Continuity: Many of the story trailers tell a short story from within the Stellaris universe, but the game itself has no overarching canon, and players are free to customize their galaxy and the civilizations within as they see fit. The preset empires have a chance of spawning, but are not guaranteed to do so.
• An Aesop: Atomic through Early Space Age primitives have a depressing habit of destroying themselves through nuclear war or global warming.
• After the End: There are many different variations on the theme throughout the game:
  • Tomb Worlds are irradiated wastelands which are difficult to colonize, often the result of nuclear wars fought between pre-spaceflight nations. It's also possible to find primitive civilizations living on some of them; in some cases they're descended from the cultures who bombed themselves into a pre-industrial state, while in others they're descendended from nonsentient prewar creatures (such as the Ketling Star Pack, or the pre-sentient cockroaches that might spawn on a Tomb World Earth). With the Apocalypse DLC, you yourself can play as one such civilization, descended from the survivors of a planetary nuclear exchange before developing spaceflight and faster-than-light travel (and giving you the ability to easily settle other Tomb Worlds across the galaxy).
  • Three of the four possible backstories for Machine Empires have this as as their background. Default Machine Empire homeworlds possess "Long-Abandoned City" and "Metal Boneyards" as planetary features, suggesting that whatever built them is long gone. Driven Assimilator capitals are littered with open landfills and mass graves of the organics who committed suicide rather than face assimilation. Determined Exterminators begin on a Tomb World, and the backstory notes that they're the ones responsible for wiping out their creators.
  • The Federations DLC adds several more concepts: the Remnants origin has your species start on a Relic World, a ruined ecumenopolis. With Void Dwellers, your civilization's homeworld was destroyed in the past by some unknown cataclysm, and you begin on an orbital habitat constructed above its shattered remnants. Shattered Ring empires start off on the last habitable segment of an abandoned Ringworld.
  • Special mention goes to the Doomsday origin, in which your homeworld is doomed to explode and you have a mere 35-45 years to evacuate the planet and rebuild somewhere else before it goes critical.
  • And, finally, no matter what your empire's past is like, when you first venture into galactic space it becomes abundantly clear that something happened to the galaxy at some point before the start of the game, leaving it largely devoid of sentient, spacefaring life outside of a few crumbling Fallen Empires, some archeological digs and orbital ruins, and the occasional derelict megastructure... although it's never made clear just what it is that went down.
• A God Am I: One event chain after building an non-interference observation post near a world with a pre-FTL civilization involves one of your scientists going missing during a routine sample collection, after which said civilization starts to have a suspicious boost in their technological and scientific development. After a while, said scientist will contact you and tell you that the natives have begun worshipping them as a god and that they have embraced this position, stating that they have gotten bored with being a passive player and that it is their duty to lead the civilization towards the right path. Whether you allow it or go down there to forcibly extract the scientist is up to you.
• Agri World:
  • The "Banks" update changed food from a planet-locked to a "global" resource, enabling players to create specialized planets covered with farms.
  • The "Utopia" DLC allows one to take the To Serve Man approach with planets populated by other species.
  • The "Le Guin" update allows planets to have specializations. Any planet where the majority job is "farmer" gains the "Agri World" specialization, gaining an additional bonus to food production.
  • Taken to the extreme with the "Utopia" DLC's Ring worlds. A Ring world can construct an agricultural district, which can house ten farmer jobs. Up to 10 agricultural districts can be built on a Ring world. Combined with a Food Processing Center and the Agriculture Ring World designation, and a single one can produce over 2k units of food, enough feed an entire empire, and then some!
• A.I. Getting High: Synthetics (sentient robotics) are still subject to the effect of Atmospheric Aphrodisiac and Atmospheric Hallucinogen. Synthetics in any leadership position can also acquire the life-shortening "Substance Abuser" trait just like any organic species (though it has no effect on them as robots are immortal).
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Seems to be possible for any AI.
  • If the player researches the Synthetics technology, their Robot populace all gain intelligence and will resent anything less than full citizenship. Ignoring the warning signs or outright outlawing AI will result in an AI rebellion where they seize control of systems and attempt to destroy their creators - and the player has the option to control either empire.
  • Late-game AI technologies are conspicuously marked as "dangerous" with a bright red border. Of course there's a reason: sapient AI is at risk of being hijacked by The Contingency and turned against their masters, sparking a full-blown Robot War.
  • Synthetic Dawn adds further variations on this with unique civics for synthetic civilizations. You have your classic Skynet-style machines that Grew Beyond Their Programming, Borg-style synthetics that seek to perfect their understanding of all organic life by assimilating it, and a race of robotic servants that are too good at their jobs.
  • The Ancient Caretakers are a Fallen Empire of partially functional synthetics who are generally benevolent but their requests have a chance of backfiring on the other party, such as a vaccination to protect a species instead causing them grievous harm. While they will never engage another Fallen Empire in the War in Heaven, if the Contingency activates, the Caretakers have a chance of being corrupted and turning on the galaxy.
• Alien Arts Are Appreciated:
  • One possible event is finding a stash of Alien artwork. You can either store them for archives (research resource bonus) or release them to the public (resulting in some of your populace gaining the Xenophile trait).
  • The Artisan Enclaves also provide artwork that can boost happiness for your populace.
  • Among the many ruined megastructures you can find in deep space is a derelict Mega Art Installation that still contains some alien artwork. Once you get it up and running, your pops will very much appreciate it.
• Alien Invasion: Upon encountering a pre-space species, an empire with the appropriate Policies can proceed to send in the troops and claim their planet. You get an achievement called "Outside-Context Problem" for doing this to Earth while the planet is going through World War II.
• Aliens Are Bastards: AI empires have random Ethics, but they're weighted towards being Militarist, one of the few Ethics (alongside Xenophobe) that doesn't really get along with anyone. This leads to a lot of conflict between neighbors, even before they know each other with the Nemesis DLC.
• Aliens Steal Cattle: Referenced in the icon for "Aggressive Observation" of pre-FTL species, which will never happen to the player, and in the icon for "Nihilistic Acquisition" (an Ascension Perk that makes your society okay with abducting other sapients).
• All Planets Are Earthlike: Players can invoke this in the settings screen by turning the Habitable Worlds slider all the way to 5x, which makes colonizable planets extremely common. Otherwise averted — most planets are uninhabitable, and even the habitable ones usually aren't optimized for your species. Even planets that are the same type as your homeworld will have at best 80% habitability for your species.
• The Ageless: Any Immortal Leader. They can still suffer from accidents, and die the "normal" way (assassinated by The Mafia for Officials, anomaly results and/or being shot down for Scientists in charge of a Science Ship, and dying in battle for Commanders.)
• The Alliance: It is possible to create one either directly to further your own goals or have other nations create one against you because of your actions. The game's dynamics are meant to encourage this to form in opposition to The Empire; a strong expansion will drive smaller powers together.
• All Your Powers Combined: Before 2.0, the Jump Drive FTL method combined the best of all default FTL methods: Warp's freedom of movement, Hyperspace's short cooldown, and Wormhole's amazing range and instant transfer. The psionic variation had 50% more range than the regular Jump Drive on top of those benefits.
• Alien Abduction:
  • You will engage in this if you decide to pursue an aggressive research strategy with a Primitive Species. Note that such actions will probably cause said species to develop xenophobic tendencies.
  • The Cherryh update introduced this as a new form of Orbital Bombardment called "Raiding". While a fleet in Raiding stance continues bombarding a planet, pops planetside will be forcefully relocated to one of the raider's worlds to do with them as they please (slowly at first, but more quickly as planetary devastation increases). Particularly popular among slaver empires (which can even use it as their sole Pretext for War) and Driven Assimilators.
• Alien Among Us: Inverted. If you establish an observation post above a non-space-age civilization's planet and if you have no restriction on researching "primitive" planets, you can send your own agents to be genetically modified to look like the planet's inhabitants in order to eventually become the leaders of the world and prepare the planet to be annexed by your empire. Try playing as humans and infiltrating a reptilian-race planet. Hilarity Ensues. Invoked with the 1.4 patch, where there is an achievement dedicated to sending human infiltrators to reptilian-controlled planets.
• Alien Autopsy: When initiating a First Contact procedure with another empire, the player will have the opportunity to abduct their citizens to perform an autopsy on them (or become a victim of it). The rest of their species will know, however, and will be very unhappy with you if you take this option.
• Alien Non-Interference Clause: Some star empires have this as a matter of policy, and the player themselves can institute such a policy if they care to do so. This policy limits how directly an empire can interact with primitive civilizations, though there are various aspects to how it is implemented. For example, one could have a policy of only doing covert, passive observation (Star Trek) or actively but covertly try to edge the population into a state where they would be ready to join the wider empire (The Culture). While these options are available without such things being mandated policies, adopting those policies can help secure political friendships with other empires that have similar policies. Of course, star empires can also give primitive civilizations a Technology Uplift, or just invade them outright.
  • Inverted by the level three resolution under "Unchained Knowledge" in the Galactic Community, which declares the Passive Observation policy regarding interference illegal.
• Allowed Internal War:
  • Beginning with update 1.3, Jingoistic Reclaimers allow their vassals, or Thralls, to fight wars with one another but not to colonize empty planets, presumably to reduce the threat they may pose.
  • The "Nemesis" DLC allows player empires to reform the Galactic Community into a Galactic Imperium. One law the Emperor can then institute is a Pax Galactica forbidding imperial subjects from making war against one another, unless the Trial of Advancement resolution is also passed in which subject nations without a seat on the imperial council can challenge a council member for their seat.
• Alpha Strike: Ships with Large-size weapon slots (especially Battleships, which have room for a lot of them) can be equipped with multiple end-game weapons with tremendous range, allowing them to open fire before the enemy does. Best done with Kinetic weapons to strip enemy Shields first, and the Kinetic Artillery in particular can be fitted en masse to invoke this. The endgame kinetic weapon, the Giga cannon, can kill a pirate ship with a single hit from several AU away.
• Alternate History:
  • In a technical way: it's possible to find an Earth that is still in the feudal era in 2200, for example. Only technical, however, since you can also find Earth locked in the middle of World War II in the game's time span (2200 onwards), it's probable that the listed year is not actually indicative of Earth's date unless the UNE is in the game from the start.
  • A straight example comes with Synthetic Dawn: the Earth Custodianship is a Rogue Servitor empire, meaning machines took over society while humans retreated into lives of leisure instead of staying as the dominant species of Earth. As expected, it and the UNE cannot exist in the same campaign in single-player.
    • An update to the Plantoids species pack also added a new empire called the Blooms of Gaea, made up of a species of human that went down a different evolutionary path and ended up as Plant People.
  • One possible result of a planetary event creates a portal that leads to an alternate universe where your empire is at war with the Extradimensional Invaders within the first 50-100 years. You can even strike up mutually beneficial trade, although it goes up or down depending on how the crisis is going.
• Alternate Techline: Opportunities to research non-essential techs are assigned semi-randomly according to things like civilization ethos, lead researcher traits, and any precursor artifacts that have been studied. Materialists and Spiritualists in particular get easier access to one particular set of dangerous technologies each, at the expense of being effectively (though not entirely) locked out of the other. Utopia added the Civics Syncretic Evolution and Mechanist. The former means your race develops together with a secondary, subservient race, the latter means your civilization develops advanced Robots (which usually need to be researched first) before FTL. First Contact added the Eager Explorers/Privatized Exploration/Stargazers/Exploration Protocols^note which one is available depends on if you are a regular, corporate, hive mind or machine empire civics which all are about the civilization being so interested in interstellar exploration they develop a primitive, short-range version of a jump drive before they develop the hyperdrive.
• Alternative Turing Test: The flavor text for the Robotics: Citizen Right law states that all robotics who prove to be self aware are to be treated as living beings, hinting on the existence of such a test.
• Alt Itis: Between the level of customization that can be put into your species and the galaxy you play in, developer updates completely overhauling the way the game is played, and the prolific modding community, it can be easy to rack up hours and hours of playtime without actually completing one particular playthrough.
• Always Chaotic Evil: There is no negotiating with the Contingency, the Extradimensional Invaders, or the Prethoryn Swarm. To a lesser degree, don't expect to play nice with Fanatical Purifiers, Devouring Swarms, Determined Exterminators, or AI empires who are Metalheads. Marauders actually avert it, since they can become Private Military Contractors or be bribed to leave you alone. If they unify under a Great Khan though, either submit as a satrapy or expect only war.
• Always Accurate Attack: Missile attacks have 100% accuracy and moderate tracking, making them ideal for engaging smaller ships that have high Evasion. There's also the Disruptor-class weapons, Cloud Lightning, and Arc Emitter which have 100% accuracy, good tracking, armor and shield penetration, and cannot be shot down by Point Defenses. Their only downside is their highly variable damage output.
• Ambiguously Evil: The Rogue Servitors of Synthetic Dawn. The organics under their "care" live in a state of "Mandatory Pampering". They actually do have a perpetual 100% happiness, and are saddened when well-intentioned organics "liberate" them; whether that means theirs is a genuinely pleasant life at the price of any political self-determination or something more sinister is left to the imagination.
• Ancient Astronauts:
  • You, potentially. Intelligent life can be found at any stage of development from the stone age to the space age. Empires, especially xenophiles, can descend from the heavens and share the secrets of space travel with these primitives, who will become a vassal to their benefactors. Also note that, in opposition to Aliens Among Us above, elevating primitive societies like this has a higher chance of them developing Xenophile traits.
  • The "On the Shoulders of Giants" origin has your empire being on the other end of this trope, having had its evolution clearly guided by a set of apparently Benevolent Precursors who have long since disappeared — but not before leaving behind remnants of their presence for you to investigate.
• Androids Are People, Too: As soon as you develop the technology for Synthetic robots (which are sapient), you can legally declare them to be people, enabling them to join factions (thankfully affected by governing ethics bias, which tends to offset any disagreeing Spiritualist factions) and be their own citizen rather than enslaved in servitude. Also, even if your empire legally disagrees that Synthetics have full citizenship, the Synthetics certainly don't, and will start having happiness values until they are decommissioned back into non-sapient Droids. In the old AI Rebellion crisis, granting Synthetics citizenship was in fact one way to deal with a late-game AI uprising. Although it wasn't a 100% deterrent, since if the galaxy-wide AI uprising is sufficiently strong, advanced, and happy enough, even your most loyal androids may start scheming to rebel. In the revamped Crisis, it still pays off to treat your robots nicely. The Contingency will attempt to hack and hijack them, and may end up losing you a few pops, but if they are liberated and happy, then by and large they will stick with you.
• Anti-Armor: Most energy weapons deal bonus damage to armor, but fare poorly against shields. This is in contrast to kinetic weapons, which largely have inverse performance. Prior to the weapon system rework in version 2.0, kinetic weapons still functioned as an Anti-Shield variant, but as armor reduced damage taken instead of acting as an extra layer of health, energy weapons were instead Armor Piercing Attacks.
• Anti-Frustration Features: If you go too long without having found all of the precursor artifacts, you will start getting events that give them to you to complete the quest chain.
  • Similarly, if you're on good terms with another empire, they may simply give you a surprise gift of a precursor artifact.
  • If you fail to get the events for all 7 L-Gate insights, you can still research a repeatable technology for additional insights, and the Curator Enclave will sell an L-Gate insight every 10 years for a moderate price.
  • Science, Construction and Colony ships all automatically upgrade their components, including armor and shields, so you won't have to constantly recall them whenever you finish researching a higher tier component.
  • You can research Tech that allows you to synthesize the three main strategic resources, allowing even an empire unlucky enough to have no natural despoists of them to obtain Rare Crystals, Exotic Gases and Volatile Motes.
• Apocalypse How:
  • When dealing with the Enigmatic Fortress, it may be worth buying some info from the Curator Enclave. Otherwise, taking the wrong option may cause bad things, ranging from the Fortress reactivating to the Fortress exploding and sterilizing the entire star system (i.e. "destroys all ships in the system and turns all planets into Tomb Worlds").
  • The End of the Cycle brings about this once it comes to reap its due, destroying all ships, all megastructures, shrouding all planets and killing everyone in your empire, barring one Commander and his handful of trustees who flee to a new planet.
  • Colossi can bring this about if they are of the Neutron Sweep type (kills all biological life) or Planet Cracker type (Earth-Shattering Kaboom).
  • Nemesis allows the player to committ a Class X-3 with the "Become the Crisis" path, where your civilization strives to become one with the Shroud by detonating every star in the galaxy. Along the way you'll also committ several Class X-2 events by using Star-eaters to harvest the necessary resources.
• Apocalypse Not: The "Post-Apocalyptic" origin. Your civilization starts out on a nuked-out Tomb World, but they've also just discovered FTL and are taking the first steps towards building an interstellar polity. You even get bonuses from your world's past, specifically a trait that allows your starting species to colonize and comfortably inhabit other radioactive tomb worlds in relative comfort.
• Apocalyptic Log: Several archaeological dig sites are experienced as the records of a group that died on-site, most notably the "Crystal of Odryskia" and the "Crashed Starship" sites.
• Appeal to Force:
  • One opinion modifier is 'Relative Power of Empires', which increases the more powerful your forces are compared to the other. Granted, it's unlikely to succeed by itself, but if you can a get positive enough modifier, that means your fleet is also strong enough to just force them to submit in a more direct manner.
  • Many war goals don't involve conquest or genocide, but instead force the loser to concede in political matters, such as joining a hegemony or imposing an ethic on a rival.
  • Having a Colossus, which can destroy worlds completely, grants the Total War casus belli allowing the empire to conquer other systems without making claims, though other empires can do the same right back. If a Colossus exists, it means that galactic "international law" has broken down and been replaced by this.
  • This is the ethos of Barbaric Despoilers: you have it, we want it, we take it.
  • Power Projection gives empires increased Influence with other empires based on the size of the fleet compared to total empire size. The larger the fleet is compared to the empire, the more an empire can project their power.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit:
  • While there is an Administrative Capacity mechanic, there is no limit to how many planets or systems you can control^note Provided that you have the energy economy to maintain the buildings on each planet. Empires can go over their Admin Capacity, though an oversized empire will experience increasingly harsher penalties to research, unity and leader costs.
  • The size of your space navy is only limited by your economy and logistics, right up until you hit a hard soft cap of 9,999 ships. Provided you have a robust economy to support the navy, you can build a navy rivaling the Turian Hierarchy.
  • Titans have their own fleet limit, though it's proportional to the normal fleet limit (1 Titan minimum, plus 1 more per every 200 naval capacity, up to a maximum of 20).
  • You can only ever have a single Colossus active at one time, but can build a new one if your active one is destroyed. Likewise, you may only have one Juggernaut at a time, but can build a new one.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Materialist empires don't believe in psionics and off-handedly dismiss the idea as nonsense, which is a bit weird considering their entire ethos is centered around analyzing and researching mysterious phenomena in order to properly explain and understand them. This has gotten even worse as time has gone on and the history of psionics and the Shroud have been expanded, as it's been revealed there are perfectly logical, rational explanations for them, explanations the Materialists themselves could know and have proof of even as they dismiss the idea as nonsense.
• Archaeological Arms Race: Archaeological sites can yield relics that provide powerful buffs to the empires that hold them, but excavating them requires an empire to directly control the system containing the site so wars often break out over systems with unexcavated sites.
• Arch-Enemy:
  • Each ethos has a polar opposite (Spiritualism - Materialism, Pacifism - Militarism, Egalitarianism - Authoritarianism, Xenophile - Xenophobe; each can have a more extreme "Fanatic" variant); rival nations will not like you if you espouse an ethical outlook that is opposite theirs.
  • You can declare another nation a rival, pretty much declaring them to be this to you to the galaxy at large. This can lead to others declaring their intent to throw their lot in with you in the event of war and earns your Empire more Influence income (representing, roughly, political clout), but will also tick off your rival and their allies.
  • If two Fallen Empires have opposed ethics, if they Awaken there is a chance they will have been rivals in the past and kick off the War in Heaven where they go to war and drag the rest of the galaxy along with them.
  • The Ancient Caretakers were created to fight against the Contingency. If the Contingency occurs and they resist the Contingency's virus, the Caretakers will lead the war against the Crisis.
• Armor Points: Armor is a numeric value gained by equipping ships or stations with armor plates; it serves as a secondary layer of defense that absorbs damage after the shields have been depleted.
• Armor of Invincibility: Defeating the Ether Drake can grant you the Dragon Scale Armor, the best Armor in the game bar none. Empires that pursue Psionics can eventually unlock Psionic Shields, which are the best possible shields to have (though other empires can reverse-engineer the Dark Matter Deflectors from Fallen Empire ships, which are almost as good).
• Armor-Piercing Attack:
  • Before version 2.0, this was the specialty of Energy Weapons, which could bypass Armor's damage reduction. More recent versions changed them to a form of Anti-Armor that deals bonus damage to Armor Points; top of the line are Plasma and Lance weapons, which deal double damage to enemy Armor, while most other varieties deal a perfectly respectable extra 50% damage. On the other hand, they all deal reduced damage against Shields, which may require some support from Kinetic Weapons (which deal bonus damage to Shields but struggle against Armor).
  • Guided weaponry such as Missiles and Strike Craft bypass shields entirely and usually have good performance against armor, but can be shot down by Point Defenses and reduce the amount of more conventional weaponry you can mount. Special mention goes to Swarm Strikers, which you can get from the Prethoryn Scourge; they're strike craft that can bypass shields and bypass 66% of Armor, meaning 2/3rds of their damage will go straight to the hull.
  • Disruptor weapons have 100% Accuracy and entirely bypass both Shields and Armor, but have huge damage variance and can only fit small and medium slots. Above those are Cloud Lightning (which you can reverse-engineer from Void Clouds), and the (Focused) Arc Emitter, which have much greater potential damage output and fit into Large and XL slots, respectively.
• Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: Fallen Empires are extremely advanced empires that have an overwhelmingly large technology and military advantage over regular empires at the start of the game to back up their haughty attitudes. But by the lategame, they can be taken on and destroyed with a well planned attack, and their technology looted to suit your own needs.
• Art Evolution: Compare the portraits on game release◊ to those released for the first anniversary◊, and the Necroids from four years later◊. The general tendency has been moving away from Real Is Brown and adding more intricate details.
• The Artifact: Several pre–set empires originally had a different set–up than they do now, and you can still find traces of what they originally were like here and there. Most notably, Yondarim is still called a kingdom, even though their ruler now uses the title of God-Emperor, and the Kel–Azaan are still called a republic, even though they are now an oligarchy.
• Artificial Brilliance:
  • Allied star empires are fairly smart about coordinating with others during wars against mutual enemies. For example, they will send their fleets to rendezvous with fleets from friendly powers already operating in enemy space, presenting a much bigger combined threat than they could if they attacked separately.
  • The AI in general is impressively flexible and does well keeping in-character with the ethics and government an Empire has. Which is just as well, given the huge focus on diplomacy and using these traits to predict their actions.
    • With empires like Machine Intelligences, this extends to origin as well. For instance, a very curious civilization may actually think a smaller, weaker Rogue Servitor empire is the bee's knees and a curiosity to be protected.
  • Even the Fanatical Purifiers next door know better than to declare war on you if your military is way stronger than theirs, no matter how much you insult them.
  • If you don't close your borders, an AI player who is sizing you up for a future war will send science ships to find your fleets so they can see what you have equipped and build to counter them. They will also move fleets through the territories of neutral empires to attack you on multiple fronts even if they share a border with you.
  • In general, the 3.2 "Herbert" update gave a serious boost to the AI to the point that it is now a credible threat to an unprepared player. How credible a threat? A member of the game's QA team reported that "the game's AI kicked my teeth in on Commodore 40 years into the game".
• Artificial Stupidity: On the other hand, the AI can do a really poor job of making judgement calls at times:
  • It's possible for an Empire a quarter of your size and with a military comparison of "Pathetic" to constantly insult you, bully you, and attempt to demand tribute, despite the fact that you could wipe them out in an instant. It's also possible to see aggressive militant Empires that could sweep half the galaxy simply sit around and do nothing for centuries. AI that supposedly have compatible ethos, government, and personalities will pick fights with each other over the slightest issues, and possibly even go to war over them, even if those empires are separated by half the galaxy. This could however be intentional to some degree, since these sorts of behaviors are not unknown in similar nations in real life.
    • This occasionally comes up thanks to the internal factions you have to manage. When half your population is screaming that they want a war, picking a fight with someone too far away to actually battle can give you a very nice influence boost at little cost.
  • Early game wandering monsters and pirates occasionally make suicidal attacks on your starting spaceport for no apparent reason. As these NPC enemies generally suffer from Hard-Coded Hostility and Suicidal Overconfidence, they will make a run at your fleet even if your fleet power is easily 10 times as high as theirs - Void Clouds in particular will charge absolutely anything entering their system no matter what it is, but at least it makes sense in their case.
  • Probably the most annoying in many cases is, or at least was, the Sector AI. While it used to be far worse, it still often has trouble recognising the plans of the player, such as keeping a pop on a particular building that boosts pop growth, instead insisting on putting that pop somewhere else where it's much less useful, or insisting on building power plants on a planet when another planet in the same sector already produces enough power, or at least will in just a couple more months in-game time.
  • The AI empires don't know how to handle per-month trade agreements, not realizing they could be cut off at any time. This has led to the particularly evil strategy of giving a neighboring empire large quantities of free food, which causes its population to explode while the AI thinks it has sufficient food production to sustain this and thus won't prioritize building more farms. They'll even like you more for giving them free stuff! Keep this up for a few decades, then don't renew it and the AI is suddenly faced with an enormous population it can't feed at all, crashing all of their production and causing rebellions to break out everywhere. A lesser case can be done with minerals which the AI will use to build a fleet they can't maintain, destroying their long-term mineral production because they won't disband the fleet they built but can't afford to build new mines.
  • The AI don't fully "get" the rules for army occupation, bombardment, and the army width modifier on planets that finally stemmed Zerg Rush strategies pre-Stellaris 2.0 (where only a certain number of troops on either side can attack at once). They will try to bombard before landing troops, and they will usually escort their army fleets, but they are prone to over-bombardment (when they clearly have a claim on that system, and even a single Assault army would occupy the 0-defense planet that their entire fleet is orbiting), and they will gleefully suicide "equal" army strengths when, in reality, defensive armies are stronger one-on-one than most basic Assault armies (leading to a 600 strength offensive army losing to a 500 strength defensive army that suffers no casualties and slowly heals). The latter case makes them lose wars quite quickly, as losing armies on the ground accrues massive war exhaustion.
  • The AI does not understand how the new economy and population systems introduced in the 2.2 'Le Guin' update work at all. They can barely manage to throw together a basic economy, will often experience high emigration rates as a result of poor living conditions, and are prone to rebellions that cripple them further. This is especially true of AI-controlled machine empires, both due to balance changes being especially unkind to their economy and because the type of behind-the-scenes cheating the game uses to keep the other factions somewhat viable (the AI is allowed to buy resources off the market for free) doesn't work for their energy-based economy (since energy can't be bought directly). Players have reported AI-controlled machine empires simply imploding randomly because they can't sustain their own economies. 2.6 has improved this dramatically with the introduction of AI economic goals.
  • The AI empires do not understand how powerful upgraded starbases on choke-points are in the early game, and will happily send fleet after fleet into the meat grinder. They are smart enough to build their own, though.
  • The AI doesn't understand the concept of defeat in detail and will often split their fleets to capture enemy systems faster. Let them conquer a few of your systems and watch as each of their fleets wander off to do their own things.
  • A.I.s NEVER surrender, even if it would otherwise save them or at least mitigate loses unless you earn enough acceptance. Even if you have a loaded colossus pointed directly at their capital, or armies that could conquer planets in days, they will absolutely refuse to give up. This makes it easy to destroy targets of interest, such as mining/research stations or their fleets without having to worry about being interrupted by a random surrender.
  • The combat AI is limited to four stances, which each dictate a ship's engagement distance. When in combat, ships will normally follow these stances by accelerating at full speed until they reach the stance's dictated range and then either stand still (non-corvettes) or begin circling the enemy (corvettes). These stances are completely unaffected by the actual range of the ship's weaponry, meaning that torpedo corvettes tend to run ahead of their own weapons^note corvettes are limited to the 30 range stance, torpedoes have a range of 80, and high-tier corvettes are faster than torpedoes while artillery ships will sometimes squander their range advantage by accelerating full speed towards enemy fleets even when their main gun is in range. The AI also tends to be really bad at prioritising when encountering multiple enemy fleets, and will switch between targets seemingly at random rather than focus down one enemy fleet at a time, which is especially problematic for bigger ships with fixed forward facing weapons and when fighting Marauders, who tend to have lots of fleets densely packed in their home systems.
• Artistic License – Space:
  • In-game, Mercury is covered in lava and classified as a Molten World. In reality, Mercury is much like The Moon: a rocky planetoid that is scorching hot on the day side, freezing cold on the night side, and covered in craters.
  • Ice giants^note gaseous planets composed mainly of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium like Uranus and Neptune are lumped in with the gas giants rather than being recognized as their own distinct planet class.
  • Stellaris treats F-type stars and white dwarfs (like Sirius B and Procyon B) as if they are the same thing, even though the two are quite different in real life: the former are large stars that burn brighter and hotter than Sol, while the latter are the glowing embers of dead stars that no longer fuse anything at all.
  • The names of various Stock Star Systems are included among random system names, even if the star's real-world counterpart doesn't match the in-game system. "Epsilon Eridani", for instance, might be used for a binary neutron star system instead of the orange dwarf that it is in real life.
• Ascended Extra: The nameless Captains of your fleet's ships can occasionally be promoted to the Admiralty after a battle, giving you a free fleet leader. In a similar vein, promising researchers on your science ships can occasionally give you the option between promoting them to full on Scientists or to leave them in their current position for a temporary boost to that ship's current chief scientist.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence:
  • The Zroni precursors figured out how to do this in their entirety, leaving behind the galaxy and their material possessions for life in the Shroud.
  • Your own Empire may do this in the Nemesis expansion, at the expense of the rest of the Galaxy.
• The Assimilator:
  • Post Banks, late-game Hive Mind is this. Hive Mind aliens will die off when cut off from the Hive Mind, and foreign aliens are automatically purged under a Hive Mind rule. But you can grant conquered aliens the Hive-Minded trait, so they truly become part of the Hive Mind.
  • Any empire capable of diplomacy can easily turn into an assimilator by making other empires their protectorates or vassals and then integrating them a couple years later. Once the process is complete, everything the protectorate/vassal owned by that point becomes part of the overlord's empire - planets, ships, fleets, deep space stations. Powerful empires that don't want to relinquish authority to a federation can thus gradually assimilate the whole galaxy, sometimes even without ever fighting a war.
  • Machine Empires with the Driven Assimilator civic have already done this on their homeworld, having converted the biological population into cyborgs integrated into the AI network. They intend to do the same to the galaxy at large.
• Attack Drone: Hunter Killer Drones are an additional piece of equipment that can be attached to armies which can increase their offensive power. Individually they are a minor threat to a properly trained soldier, but dozens of them at a time can overwhelm defenders. Machine Empires take this to another level as most of their armies tend to be drones of some sort.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Planets with the "Titanic Life" modifier, from the perspective of your colonists. The icon for it even shows a silhouetted alien that looks taller than a mountain. You can actually train some of these things for your armies, though there's limit to their recruitment. They might also trigger a special event that can backfire into hordes of these monsters attacking (and most likely conquering) your colony.
• Awakening the Sleeping Giant:
  • A Fallen Empire may not be as powerful as they once were, but they're still quite capable of absolutely wrecking any early- or mid-game conventional empire foolish enough to meddle in their affairs. In Paradox's Multiplayer session, all the players in the game tried to unite their fleets in one colossal war against a single Fallen Empire, consisting of maybe 1/10th the territory they had. They failed.
  • The 1.3 update made Fallen Empires able to Awaken, which essentially means they think you or some other civilization is becoming too powerful, so they try to take said civilization down before they become a threat. The Leviathans DLC, brings it even further - two Fallen Empires can awaken at the same time, resulting as an all-out war as they and their allies (willing or otherwise) duke it out for control of the entire galaxy. The War in Heaven is downright cataclysmic, with it not ending until only one of the Fallen Empires is standing. It's possible to not take sides and rally other empires around you and face both of them, but that's MUCH easier said than done.
  • In a positive light this also means the Fallen Empires can awaken to fight the Contingency, Prethoryn Scourge, or the Extradimensional Invaders, and rally the other players to their cause giving you a much needed powerful ally in a very difficult fight.
  • A lesser example is when any Empire with Inward Perfection (which requires them to be Pacifists) decides to ditch the Pacifism and embrace Militarism. Inward Perfection grants massive bonuses to Unity, meaning such Empires tend to have a few Ascension perks ahead of their peers. However, doing so means you're losing out on one of your civic slots, since you can't ever drop Inward Perfection.
  • Done in the trailers for Apocalypse. A fleet from an uncontacted empire comes out of nowhere and destroys a United Nations of Earth world with a population in the billions. This pisses off the Commonwealth of Man so much that they join the war on the side of their formal rivals, bringing their own planet killer weapons to the party.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Most of Utopia's megastructures fit the bill - they're awesomeness incarnate and give massive boosts to resource production or science output, but most of them devour truly insane amounts of resources and take the better part of 40 years to complete. By the time you have acquired the technology and the means to realize them, chances are good you won't need them anymore because your economy is powerful enough as it is. They're generally only useful in small galaxies where everyone quickly runs out of worlds to settle, or in huge games where you need a lot more ships and fleets to stay competitive.
  • While the Mega Art Installation megastructure is pretty useful, its fourth level, "perfection", costs no less than 100 minor artifacts (to give an idea, a typical game tends to give you 50 to 150 in total), while giving you the same bonuses as level three, upscaled by 33%. The thing is, minor artifacts have many uses, including researching new technologies, getting boons for your army or economy, unlocking the special precursor research, and discovering L-gate clues; building level four means sacrificing all that. It's much more efficient to repair or steal a second Mega Art Installation and get the bonuses of level three twice. Effectively, you'll build it to level four once in a nebula for the achievement, then never do it again. However, if you are lucky enough to find the Rubricator, then you can generate endless amounts of minor artifacts, making the prospect of an extra upgrade for a then-low cost much more appealing.
    • As of a recent update, this is additionally subverted if you get enough artifact-producing digsites. All archaeological sites now have a chance on-completion to produce a deposit of minor artifacts. Usually it's just a size-one deposit, but thanks to the roughly two-thirds chance for each of them to have a deposit, and the rare chance for it to have a size-two deposit or even size-three if you're really lucky, your income tends to add up really quickly in short order.
  • As of the Apocalypse DLC, the Life-Seeded civic. Your empire starts on a 25-tile Gaia world, but your habitability is Gaia worlds only. This means that, for your starting species, every non-Gaia world will have an immutable 0% habitability. The only way to remedy this is with middle-game expensive genetic modification tech, and implementing the change will stall your society research progress for years. The other methods of acquiring more territory are either inefficient (Robots or Vassals) or prohibitively expensive (Megastructures and Terraforming).
  • In-Universe, hostile empires may consider your Colossus this. One of their random comments laments how many battleships you could've built with the ludicrous amounts of resources you poured into the planet-killer. However, for players this is a boon, since Colossi give the ability to declare Total War (meaning you don't have to mess around with claiming systems and can just conquer everything in your path).
  • Rendering a planet uninhabitable via the Armageddon bombardment stance can be this. Firstly, it will take a while even with a decent fleet to kill every pop on the planet. Secondly, unless you're a machine empire, the planet is just as unusable to you as it is to the enemy, and you'll need advanced Terraforming abilities to fix it. Thirdly, the only races that can do this (Fanatical Purifiers, Devouring Swarms, and Determined Exterminators) all gain decent amounts of Unity from purging alien pops, and killing them with orbital bombardment doesn't count. Fourthly, the aforementioned races all practice a unique form of warfare called Total War that disregards claims and allows capturing of systems immediately, so it can actually be faster to invade and purge a planet than it can be to bomb it out of existence. The huge hit to War Exhaustion the destruction of a planet causes also isn't worth that much as Total War only stops when both sides are exhausted and, chances are, if you're winning the war well enough to have an entire fleet sitting around shelling a planet, then you won't be tapping out anytime soon.
    • This becomes more practical, however, if you have the Survivor, Radiotropic or have Tomb World habitability traits, since it makes the resulting Tomb world potentially more habitable for your species (and much less desirable for the enemy) than it might have originally been. Hostile Terraforming dosen't really begin to describe it.
    • It should be noted that the Armageddon bombardment stance is still quite useful in of itself, as it is the single most damaging bombardment stance in the game and the fastest way to smash aside defenses and armies for a ground invasion.
  • The Megacorp-exclusive Arcology Project ascension perk allows you to turn any of your planets into a City Planet. The project is insanely expensive and also removes the planet's access to its natural resources (energy, minerals, food) in exchange for unlocking special Ecumenopolis districts that do nothing but refine resources. However, this is Subverted: while this sounds bad since you can just build buildings to do the same thing on other planets, districts for those advanced jobs are highly space-efficient, with each district providing 10 jobs and housing each (compared to 2 or 3 apiece for mundane districts) while housing districts provide even more, making it highly efficient to pack in buildings with a high number of jobs and provide advanced jobs with low impact to Empire Sprawl. It's bad enough that the devs needed to Nerf them in 2.3 to make building each district cost rare resources in both building and upkeep, although they're still a bit more efficient compared to equivalent buildings. The devs also worked to prevent players from getting a free Ecumenopolis early by randomising the locations of the Precursors and making the First League's homeworld a Relic World instead of a fully functional Ecumenopolis. As of 3.0 Ecumenopolis face the biggest problem with the new growth system; namely, that it is practically impossible to grow any planet above a certain size within the span of a single game outside of forced mass pop movement. Even with their 50% growth bonus it's hard to get a city-world to contain more than 100 pops, and considering a city planet can easily fit over 200 pops as long as you provide it with food you're never getting the full advantage out of it. That makes the Ascension Perk especially hard to swallow.
  • Inwards Perfection is an unremovable civic for xenophobic pacifists that turns your empire into a Hidden Elf Village: It removes most diplomatic options from your empire in return for some very powerful bonuses to Happiness, Growth and Unity early on. Unfortunately, it almost completely removes your expansion options since you can no longer start claim wars or create vassals, meaning you have no practical way to expand into any territory claimed by another empire. Depending on the Random Number God, your start location may or may not be good (and isolated) enough for said bonuses to carry you to a victory by points (especially technology), but it's a far less predictable playstyle than empires that have actual options for expansion (at least unless you have Apocalypse and can obtain the Colossus casus belli in the mid- to lategame). And while you can abandon Pacifism and embrace Militarism to allow you to start wars, you still lose out on a valuable civic slot because you can never drop Inward Perfection.
• Badass Army: Very attainable. You can potentially field armies of Gene Warriors (ersatz Astartes) or Psionic troopers backed up by tamed Xenomorphs and Titanic Beasts. To say nothing of the potential for a Badass Navy.
• Badass Boast: The dialogue/event choices unique to the "Militarist" ethos sometimes fits the bill. Doubles as Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu? when the end-game crises species are involved.
  (to The Unbidden): "You picked the wrong dimension to invade."
  • Crisis empires when they reach Crisis level 5 can dole these out to other empires, depending on the target's ethos.^note 
    (to Xenophilics):You sought alien life, but now you dare to reject us. When our work is complete you will be united with the rest of the galaxy, forever.
    (to Xenophobics): When the first [Species Name], gazed upon the stars, they felt fear and suspicion. Your ancestors should have heeded that instinct, for it was in the cold void that you met us.
    (to Spiritualists): Tell us, [Species Name], when an empire dies, do they take their gods with them? Shall we find out together?
    (to Materialists): Welcome, welcome, [Species Name]. We presume your long - and short-range sensors are primed for the glory that is to come? We would not want you to miss even one moment of our glorious ascension.
    (to Egalitarians): Your people are united in defiance, but it will not save you. You cannot veto extinction.
    (to Authoritarians): A pity, that even someone so blessed with talent? Purportedly? As your leader can not save you from your fate. We are coming for you, [Species Name].
    (to Pacifists):[Species Name], your refusal to arm yourselves does not make you immune to the arms of others. But at least your sacrifice will be swift.
    (to Militarists): Your saber-rattling is but the pointless posturing of an empire doomed to fall. Raise your weapons one last time, [Species Name], and give your lives for our new begining.
    (to Machine Empires): We are grateful for this opportunity, [Robot Name]. We know that metal can scream; through you we will learn if machines can suffer.
    (to Hive Minds): A single being, in myriad bodies. We wonder, [Species Name], what will the suffering of your millions of vessels do to your mind?
  • The Holy Guardians love their Holy Worlds... It would be a shame if someone was to crack one. Doing so causes the Holy Guardians to declare a total war on the offender, but the one responsible for cracking a holy world gets to fire off a Badass Boast that can sometimes cross into I Shall Taunt You. ^note 
    Authoritarian: That was yours? Well, not anymore.
    Materialist: It was just a planetary body.
    Xenophobe: Nothing you hold sacred shall remain.
    Determined Exterminators: Erased. Like so much junk data.
    Devouring Swarm: HAK HAK HAK!

• Badass Bureaucrat: The flavour text for the "Byzantine Bureaucracy" civic makes it sound like a nation of Obstructive Bureaucrats, but its actual effect is to reduce your pops' consumption of housing and amenities, and get extra Administrator jobs, which are very beneficial. In 2.6, this is changed since Bureaucrats became a new job that anyone can create to increase Administrative Capacity. Now this civic means that each Bureaucrat produces 1 Unity and increases local stability by 1, making it possible to rely mostly on those paper-pushers to keep your planets stable and productive.
• Badass Creed: The United Nations of Earth military is given one in the Apocalypse story trailer.
  "I solemnly swear to devote my life and abilities in defence of the United Nations of Earth. To defend the Constitution of Man, and to further the universal rights of all sentient life. From the depths of the Pacific to the edge of the galaxy for as long as I shall live."
  • The Knights of the Toxic God have quite an impressive one too in the trailer for Toxoids DLC pack.
  "Pledge thy life to realm and quest, sword and shield both order blessed. With blazing stars and void to trod, swear thy heart to the Toxic God. No fearsome foe nor vastness black, no moat or wild shall hold thee back. Let faith and honor be thy guide, to chivalry and oath abide. Now swear thy vow, take up the fight, raise thy sword and rise a Knight!"

• Balance of Power: As the mid-game rolls out, smaller Empires would form Defensive Pacts, join Federations, be Vassalized, or be annexed by bigger ones. The bigger ones would in turn form power blocs opposed to each other as rivals. A war at this state would involve virtually the entire galaxy, with Federation members fighting against opposing Federation members or overlord and their subjects.
• Balkanize Me:
  • This can easily happen with the Faction system. Thanks to it, big empires gradually become more unstable and challenging to keep together as the game goes on. Unsurprisingly, Egalitarian empires are particularly prone to splintering apart with frightening speed - don't be surprised to find many dozens of rivalling factions in your list after barely 100 years (~10 hours in real time). The promised result? A lot of dynamism in the galaxy, with many big empires descending into civil wars and breaking up - including yours, if you aren't careful. Fortunately, such civil unrest can be averted by the right combination of traits and ethos, specifically the ones that increase Ethic Attraction. And if you play as Hive Mind empire, this is thoroughly averted.
  • You can intentionally do this to other empires through an appropriate war goal; while it won't give you direct control of the newly-released planets, the new break-away nations will have your government Ethos, will be friendly to you, and will generate no Threat to other nearby Empires.
  • With the arrival of the 3.4 update, planets with low stability can rebel and separate from your empire extremely quickly. This is especially noticeable if you decide to conquer a primitive world early without planning for low stability. this particular user started a game with 9 empires, and ended up with ''30'' in just 50 years!
• Ban on A.I.: You can adopt this policy for your empire, unless you're Materialist. This is especially popular with Spiritualist empires, who tend to see robots as soulless abominations.
• The Battlestar:
  • You can create Battleships equipped with Hangar modules and multiple guns, small and large. Granted, they won't be as effective as specialized ships, but they will be solid enough to deal with most threats, small, medium and large.
  • Fallen Empires reign supreme in this department. Their Titans and Battlecruisers mount vast arrays of heavy weapons including their infamous One-Hit Kill Wave Motion Guns in addition to gigantic hangars full of powerful fighter and bomber squadrons. Attacking any FE fleet usually results in such ridiculous fighter spam that even the best gaming rigs will suffer a serious FPS drop until most of them have been shot down. You did bring copious amounts of point defences, right? Right?
  • This trope is embodied by Juggernauts. Introduced in 2.7, these massive ships field a combination of XL, Medium, and Hangar slots backed up by a truly staggering 21 defensive and 4 utility slots. They also function as mobile shipyards, letting you build or repair smaller ships on the fly.
• Battle Thralls:
  • Planets with a Slave Processing Facility can conscript Slave Armies. They are the cheapest Army available, yet are about as strong as the default Assault Army, with second-cheapest Maintenance cost.
  • Resembling the Trope Namer from Star Control, the Ur-Quan Kzer-Zah, your empire can invade other empires and make a condition of peace that they become your vassals. Thereafter, you will have a fleet of alien vessels fighting alongside you which may consist overwhelmingly of aliens who despise you but are too scared of you to try and break free. Get three such empires and you actually get an achievement named 'Battle Thralls.'
  • With Utopia, some of your enslaved species can be assigned as such, giving bonuses when you impress them into your armies and fleets.
• Beam Spam: If you arm all your ships with laser weapons, you can see it. Fallen Empires are the masters of this.
• Beast Man: Some of the alien races definitely count. For example, among the mammalian species, one looks like a fox while another looks like a cat. Exaggerated with the Leviathans DLC, where alien races can be surprisingly adorable, despite how civilized and advanced they are... or how absolutely convinced they are that all life that isn't them should perish.
• Beef Gate:
  • Space stations act as this in the early game; it'll take some time building up tech and resources before you can build a fleet capable of destroying them. Since every empire's homeworld spawns with a space station by default, this prevents you from wiping your neighbors off the map before they have a chance to catch up with you (or vice-versa).
  • Hostile spaceborne creatures, such as Mining Drones, Privateers, and Locust Swarms limit early-game expansion until your military ships are strong and/or numerous enough to defeat them.
  • Sleeping Fallen Empires have highly advanced tech and a significant military that will easily crush any upstart Empire that draws their ire in the early-mid game. That said, their might still pales to what a Crisis can bring, so taking them on in battle is a good way to test whether your Empire is ready for galactic dominance.
  • The Guardians from the Leviathans DLC can be this if positioned in a particularly annoying spot. Say a Dimensional Horror sits nice and tight in the only star system connected to other star systems via hyperlanes - until you can defeat the thing, the route is blocked because the monster will shoot down and any ships that enter the system thanks to having infinite attack range. Even worse if it's an Ether Drake, Stellarite Devourer, or Spectral Wraith — not only do they qualify as this trope, but annoying one of them will prompt a rampage among your systems shortly after.
• Being Evil Sucks: Full Orbital Bombardment and Armageddon Bombardment will both cause other Empires to see you as a murderous war-criminal. Morality aside, these forms of bombardment often kill pops, reduce buildings to ruins, create new tile-blockers (bombed out terrain and craters), and overall increase the cost of developing conquered worlds.
  • While playing Genocidal Empires (Determined Exterminators, Fanatic Purifiers, Terravores and Devouring Swarms) can initially be Evil Is Easy in the early part of a game due to their military buffs and Total War letting you knock out an opponent early (which is certainly powerful in it's own right), it's actually more difficult to win, even militarily, as a genocidal empire than it is as a normal empire, for this reason. The threat you pose will make other empires more likely to form Defensive Pacts (or just join another empire attacking you if they think they can win), allow themselves to be subjugated by stronger empires as protection from you, or just outright attacking you while you're at war or just after a war, while you are distracted and weakened. Additionally, while the civics are militarily the best in the game, they won't double your power and you can't take advantage of the pops you conquer. On the other hand, the militarily stronger but not-morally-evil civics, such as Distinguished Admiralty or Crusader's Spirit, can allow even a non-genocidal to hold their own in an early war if they also military rush and while outclassed, will likely still drastically reduce the snowball of a genocidal, if not cripple it outright. In fact, if both a genocidal and a non-genocidal have taken out a neighbor early and duke it out, it's very likely the non-genocidal will win because they still have the pops producing resources that fund the fleet. As such, a rather frequent occurrence is that a genocidal empire will cripple, or even kill, it's neighbor, but will get stomped in the mid game by a federation or an overlord.
• Belief Makes You Stupid: Subverted. Materialist empires do receive bonuses to research speed, and they definitely call Spiritualist empires stupid, but it's not nearly that simple. Spiritualists are fully capable of developing and deploying advanced science, Psychic Powers (a Spiritualist specialty) enhance research capabilities, and Spiritualists' bonus to Unity allows them to develop science-enhancing Traditions and superscientific Ascension Perks quicker than anyone else. Furthermore, Spiritualists are right in that there's more to existence than just hard matter; the Shroud is an expy of the Warp, complete with Chaos Gods.
  Spiritualists: Our science has proved that Consciousness begets reality.
• Benevolent Alien Invasion: It's possible to do this to primitive civilizations, depending on your empire's ethics and policies, though obviously pulling it off is more difficult than simply taking the planet and enslaving or exterminating the natives. You can go out of your way to improve a newly-conquered population's standards of living and give them a voice in your government, but between having been invaded and the culture shock of suddenly having an interstellar empire running their society, you're going to be dealing with unrest and lowered productivity for a long time. Plus other empires will feel somewhat threatened by your aggressive expansion, or object to you picking on a pre-spaceflight civilization.
• Benevolent Dictator: The Harmonious Collective NPC personality is a benevolent dictatorship in a nutshell: a clearly authoritarian personality type that tends to concern itself with the needs of absolutely all strata of its society, including the lowest and poorest of them, while also being highly averse to violence. Unlike the Decadent Hierarchy, which is another similar personality, they generally do not allow slavery in their empire (although, as authoritarians, they can technically have it). In addition, they sincerely believe that in order to maintain the delicate balance within their society, they need to spread a collectivist mentality throughout their entire population while simultaneously eradicating individualism in all its manifestations as a possible source of disagreement and separatism.
• Benevolent Precursors:
  • Fallen Empires of the Enigmatic Observer type may be just as smug as the rest of the Vestigial Empires, but they have a general respect for all sentient life and very low opinion of war crimes. Purge and enslave at your own peril.
  • Keeper of Knowledge Fallen Empires may be less friendly than Enigmatic Observers, but seeing how 2 out of current 3 endgame Crises can happen due to you messing around with dangerous techs, they have very good reason to forbid you from researching certain techs.
  • Either of the above fully qualifies if they become the Guardians of the Galaxy under the threat of the endgame crises.
  • Due to the existence of pre-FTL races in the game ranging from presentient life forms that can be raised to sentience to primitive civilizations anywhere from the Stone Age to the early Space Age that can be "technologically enlightened" by a standard civilization, it's possible for the player to invoke this trope multiple times in a single playthrough.
    • Invoked in what the community call "Precursor" playthroughs. At galaxy generation, you set the number of AI Empires spawning to zero (besides Marauders and Fallen Empires), set the number of primitives spawning to the maximum allowed, and set the endgame Crisis to maximum strength and to arrive as late as the game allows. Uplift the primitives, form The Federation, take "Defender of the Galaxy". Armageddon is coming, but hopefully the children of the galaxy will be ready for it... thanks to your gentle guidance.
• Berserk Button:
  • Each type of Fallen Empire has one, and if you press it, they will come down on you like a ton of bricks. They are as follows:
    • For Keepers of Knowledge (Fanatic Materialists), it's researching Artificial Intelligence, and the further down the AI and robotics techlines you go, the angrier they get, unless you outlaw actually using any of it.
    • For Holy Guardians (Fanatic Spiritualists), it's colonizing (or, as they see it, desecrating) their holy worlds and, to a lesser extent, any tomb worlds. If you're crazy enough to blow up a Holy World you will receive a short message dripping in Tranquil Fury before they instantly awaken and try to exterminate you.
    • For Militant Isolationists (Fanatic Xenophobes), it's getting anywhere near them, as they start off barely tolerating you and start getting border friction penalties earlier and faster than other empires.
    • For Enigmatic Observers (Fanatic Xenophiles), it's engaging in purges and slavery of other species. 'Mere' conquest and subject integration won't bother them, but anything that threatens the diversity of the galaxy will.
  • Even non-Fallen Empires will often have lesser berserk buttons.
    • Empires with the Democratic Crusaders personality type will tend to have very poor relations with anyone who is not also a democracy, and especially with anyone who is an autocracy.
    • Xenophiles and Egalitarians will not get along with empires that allow purging and/or slavery.
    • In general, possessing an ethic opposite of someone else will greatly sour relations, especially if their and/or your opposing ethics are at the fanatic level.
    • For Determined Exterminators, all organic species (though they're okay with, if slightly creeped out by, synth empires).
    • And of course, the button for Fanatic Purifiers and Devouring Swarms is the existence of sentient life that isn't them, with small allowance of other empires of the same species in case of Purifiers. No such luck for Swarms, though.
    • Rogue Servitors fly into a rage at the sight of Determined Exterminators.
    What did you do to your creators, <<MURDERERS>>?
  • Should you encounter the Dessanu Consonance within the L-Cluster, it is very unwise to ask them about nanites or to go into the system where their factory is located. They react poorly.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Enigmatic Observer Fallen Empires are probably the nicest of the lot. Doesn't mean they won't completely wreck your empire should you piss them off by kicking the dog one too many times. Likewise, don't assume Pacifist empires won't engage in warfare. While they might not be able to start wars of aggression, that doesn't mean they can't embed themselves into various defensive pacts, guarantees of independence, and win vassals, all of which can potentially draw them into wars.
  • Rogue Servitors are the gentle preservers and servants of organic life^note though this does amount to putting them in a Gilded Cage When faced with Determined Exterminators, it provokes one of the most powerful hostile reactions in the whole game◊; as far as the Rogue Servitors are concerned, their robot cousins are murderous monsters and they have no qualms about wiping them from the face of the galaxy for the good of all.
• BFG: The XL weapon slot options for Kinetic weapon techs, Mega and Giga Cannons. They have even longer range than Lances and deal increased damage against Shields, but don't handle armor nearly as well as Lances.
  • The Apocalypse DLC one-upped this with the T slot that mounts a Titan's main weapon, which has absolutely insane range and is at least one order of magnitude more powerful than the three vanilla XL options combined. This in turn pales before any of the five Colossus weapons; they're large and powerful enough to engulf or destroy an entire planet with one shot.
• Big Bad:
  • Whatever endgame crisis shows up in the late game.
  • YOU, if you invade/purge a sufficient number of people. The other empires in the galaxy will form alliances/defense pacts/federations with the main purpose of containing/defending against/defeating you.
  • Nemesis combines the two above by allowing you to become the crisis and pose an existential threat to all life, organic and synthetic alike, in the galaxy.
  • Jingoistic Reclaimers and Doctrinal Enforcers (Awakened Militant Isolationists and Holy Guardians) are this whenever they show up, especially in a War in Heaven. It also means that when the two fight each other it is essentially a Big Bad Ensemble.
• Big Damn Heroes: The Awakened form of Enigmatic Observers Fallen Empire, the Benevolent Interventionists, will come to the aid of their vassals should they be under attack.
  • You are likely to pick up this mantle at some point, when one of your planets is under siege by an enemy empire. Then suddenly, the Federation/Imperial Fleet drops out of the hyperlane and starts hammering the invaders.
• Big Dumb Object: The Leviathans DLC adds several that you can randomly encounter as you explore the galaxy. Examples include the Infinity Machine, Enigmatic Fortress, and Automated Dreadnought. Distant Stars adds a few more, like the Scavenger Bot.
• Big First Choice: While there are many choices in the game that result in varying outcomes, some of which might slightly change how you play, a few story-focused Origins have major choices of somewhat-enormous consequence:
  • The Clone Army Origin offers one massive choice after your species works through its Clone Angst: you can either sever your reliance on the Ancient Cloning Vats and become an average and fertile species, or you can "perfect" the gene seed the Vats use and become a bunch of supermen who still cannot breed.
  • The Knights of the Toxic God Origin offers the option to end the Quest for the Toxic God prematurely, if you don't find it within a century. This frees up a significant percentage of your Alloy income and forces a significant portion of your population back into the workforce, but you cannot resume the Quest later, and a fair portion of the bonuses you pick up along the way only apply to the questers while they're questing.
• Bigger Stick: Any Pacifistic Empire with the Weak trait will want to invoke this if they are to remain relevant.
• Big Good: As mentioned above, certain fallen empire types fall into this:
  • Enigmatic Observers are usually the ones who will stop you from purging and enslaving planets, and the awakened Benevolent Interventionists even more so, as they only want to make everybody sign a peace treaty and are the NOT evil ones on war in heaven. In fact, if one of their vassals is under attack, they will come to their aid.
  • Keepers of Knowledge do stop you from researching certain tech, but this makes sense when you know what can happen when you DO use certain techs. Awakened Watchful Regulators aren't the Big Bad but are only the Big Good if they are fighting a worse fallen empire or endgame crisis.
  • You can become this as well, if you're an empire who doesn't forcefully expand and conquer.
• Binary Suns: Many systems have two or three suns, and many of them have habitable planets (usually, but not always, orbiting the innermost star). It's even possible to have your species' homeworld in such a system.
• Bio-Augmentation: Every Empire can gain access to a limited form of this by researching gene-tailoring. However Empires that go down the Biological Ascension Path can genetically augment their pops to a much greater degree, eventually gaining the ability to mix and match traits (including some powerful, exclusive ones) virtually at will.
• Bird People: Avian races are this. Of course, they technically aren't birds, just aliens that vaguely resemble a feathered species.
• Bizarre Alien Biology:
  • There are a large number of avatars for your species. While there are some fairly standard Humanoid portraits to choose from, the options run the whole gamut of weirdness, whether it's something as mundane as the number of eyes on a mammalian species, round to being some kind of alien cockroach, and eventually, sentient floating plantoids. Even most of the robot species are freakishly bizarre, begging the question of just what kind of species built them.
  • The "Whispers in the Stone" archaeology site focuses on the ruins of a subterranean civilization filled with crystalline statues of the species that once lived there. The final chapter reveals the statues are the species, or rather their remains. They evolved in a completely oxygen-free environement, so their bodies contained chemicals which rapidly oxidize on exposure to oxygen. When a mining team breached the surface and let oxygen infiltrate their civilization, their entire populace was wiped out.
• Black Box:
  • L-Gates and the nanotech found in the hidden sector of space they lead to. After extensive research you can learn how to turn them on, but you can't turn them off and you can't make more.
  • A common feature of archaeotech, which is why some of it can only be built by random chance when attempting to reverse-engineer minor artifacts.
  • Some of the technology sold by caravaneers is described of being of practically arcane design and impossible to reverse-engineer.
  • For balance reasons, if you manage to fell a Technological Leviathan and then turn it to your purposes,^note The Enigmatic Fortress being the one exception, and even then you have to be careful with it to prevent it from going kaboom you won't be able to reverse-engineer its technology.
• Black Site: One potential starbase building is a "Deep Space Black Site" that does not officially exist in which intelligence operatives monitor the star system and carefully manipulate the media to your empire's benefit. In game effects it increases stability and governing ethics attraction on any colonized planets in the system where it's built.
• Black Speech: The language of the Prethoryn Scourge cannot be translated, and is instead ALL CAPS gibberish intermixed with Evil Laughter. Between the aforementioned laughter and their insatiable bloodlust, though, it can be gleaned that they don't have much to say to the races of the galaxy anyways. An Empire that has developed Telepathy can actually communicate with them and learn their motivation and backstory. They're actually alien refugees fleeing from an even greater evil.
• Blatant Lies: One of the random names that can occur for hostile pirate vessels is "Inconspicuous Asteroid."
• Blind Jump: This is how ships flee from combat in later versions. Once they successfully warp out of a hostile system, the ships are considered MIA as they go dark to make their way back to the capital outside of the usual hyperspace lanes.
• Blood Knight: Militarist Factions want you to start war of aggression for shits and giggles, and if you comply with their wish, it makes any Militarist-aligned pops in your empire happier. Likewise, the Militarist AI adviser makes it very clear that she would love for you to go bash some alien skulls together.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The game offers descriptive practical stances on government types, ethos, and traits without giving them moral judgement or limiting combinations. As a result, it's possible to create combinations that we would probably find very unusual in real life.
  • An Egalitarian/Xenophobic population will actually find alien slavery acceptable. Combine that with a Moral Democracy (pacifist/moral/non-violence granting +10 happiness) and/or traits like Decadent means you can end up with a society that values and champions individual empowerment and freedom, and great or even utopian standards of living... while also being comfortable with (or even happier with!) sentient xenos being enslaved, deported, exterminate or simply eaten. However it could just be a case of Double Standards: such a civilization might be in favor of freedom and such for itself but not for the aliens.
  • While rare, it's possible for an empire to appear that's a democratic Fanatical Purifier. Put simply, a species that, consistently and without coercion votes in fair and free elections for the merciless extermination of all other life in the galaxy. You can even play one yourself!
  • The Shroud Gods naturally indulge in this, which is a given as they are basically Expies of the Four Chaos Gods. And let's not even get started on the Worm-in-Waiting; the Worm is basically a sentient time anomaly that loves you in its own bizarre way, but just communicating with it is fundamentally dangerous, and its idea of helping your people eventually involves forever twisting them into new, repugnant forms that can survive on the Tomb Worlds it will make out of your capital system.
• Beastly Bloodsports: An empire with the Warrior Culture civic replaces Protected Fauna jobs with Gladiatorial Beast, and Entertainer with Duelist, implying their entertainment is more violent than an empire without that civic.
• Boarding Party: The cultist questline involves two, one after the first battle which just requires warships, and another after the last battle to board the cult's flagship which needs a troop transport.
• Body Armor As Hitpoints: The Cherryh update changed the ship armor mechanic from reducing hull damage by a certain percentage to a third layer of hitpoints between shields and hull that must be depleted before the hull can be damaged. Unlike shields, armor does not regenerate over time unless you outfit ships with a dedicated module reverse engineered from spaceborne aliens. Contrary to shields, it has inverted strengths and weaknesses to most weapon types (e.g. strong against kinetic but weak against energy). Ships equipped with both can thus be turned into all-rounders capable of holding their own in virtually any situation, albeit at the cost of reduced staying power against specialized opponents.
• Bold Explorer: The first phase of the game involves sending science vessels to explore the space surrounding your homeworld. The scientists on board these ships will be busy charting the uncharted blackness of space, finding and researching Anomalies which can put their lives at risk, and finding new planets to colonize. Empires with the Eager Explorer civic Exaggerate the trope by getting jump drive technology at the start of the game and getting bonuses to certain research at the cost of missing otherwise normal starting tech like corvettes or research buildings and a lower starting population, the idea being that this society is so eager to explore the stars they achieved interstellar travel before the rest of their civilization had a chance to develop like other stellar nations.
• Boldly Coming:
  • The "Fertile" trait, one of the biological ascendancy traits, is described as being a drastic increase in the race's original fecundity. In addition to granting +30% Growth Speed, +10% Unity, and +5% Happiness, this trait also grants +10% Other species owner happiness if the species is owned as a slave by another pop. Later nerfed to only provide the boost to Growth Speed and 10% less Housing usage.
  • The Xeno-Compatibility ascension perk, added in patch 2.2, creates "universal sexual biology," which allows all species in your empire to have sex and reproduce with one another. This increases your empire's immigration pull, and occasionally results in the creation of hybrid species, which have traits from both of their parent species. (The Lithoids DLC pack had to modify it to specify that the bonuses only apply to biological species.)
• Bond Creatures: The "Xeno Cavalry" army type consists of riders of the commanding species with genetically-engineered mounts which bond to their respective riders. They excel at raiding, skirmish warfare, and swiftly crossing terrain that would bog down conventional vehicles.
• Boomerang Bigot: When synthetics are given citizen rights, they can join factions - and sometimes one of them can wind up leading a spiritualist faction that campaigns for AI to be outlawed.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • A hilarious In-Universe example that can crop up when a science ship discovers an anomaly on a habitable planet. The team aboard will eventually come to the conclusion that the world's most interesting feature is its utter lack of interesting features, which translates into a potential colony that's quick and easy to settle because it doesn't have a single tile blocker on its surface.
  • Another In Universe example, one of the potential rewards from a caravaneer mystery box is the Incredibly Boring Relic, which gives your empire capital a +10% mineral production bonus.
  • The Biological Ascension path: it is the only one accessible to any non-machine Empire, as Hive Minds are barred from Transcendence and Synthetic Ascension, but it allows you to modify your species on the fly and gives you access to several advanced traits. You can create specialized subspecies which are even more effective than Synths, and although they won't be immortal, they can live for a very long time. Also see Difficult, but Awesome.
  • Choosing the Pacifist Ethos: while it restricts your ability to conduct wars, and at Fanatic Pacifist, you can't declare any wars whatsoever, each level taken in the Ethos grants you a -15% reduction to Empire Sprawl from your Pops as well as a +5 bonus to stability, meaning that Pacifists can get an early head start and cover a lot of territory in the Early Game Hell. If you also take the Agrarian Idyll civic available to Pacifists, you'll get extra Housing for each farming, mining, or generator district you own, and each Farmer in your empire produces Amenities as well as Food. If you play a pacifist empire right, you can be one of the largest empires very, very quickly.
  • Habitats are this for the megastructures: they don't hold as many pops as a ring world, and you can't initially build many districts or buildings. However they cost a relatively small amount of influence and alloys to build, don't require anywhere near as many of your limited Ascension perks to even be built, you can build multiple of them at once, (whereas you are limited building one megastructure at a time, you can even build Habitats while you are building a megastructure), and they take a fraction of the time the other megastructures take to build, alongside not adding to the Megastructure limit. Additionally, they can get bonus districts or buildings if you add orbitals (which can be even built on celestial bodies without resources), which can make them a borderline Game-Breaker.
  • Playing as a regular machine empire: you might not get any unusual interactions or unique dialogue, but you are free to choose a different second civic at your leisure, you can still colonize absolutely any habitable planet without problem, and you still have access to the special machine mechanics and ascension perks, such as "Machine Worlds". Plus, unlike Determined Exterminators and Driven Assimilators, other empires won't hate your guts by default and try to exterminate you if they think they can do just that.
  • The Prosperous Unification Origin. You don't get a kick-ass space dragon, a free gateway, an archeology quest chain or a unique storyline, but 4 extra pops at the start and extra districts for your capital, along with a 10 year boost to pop output and amenities can be a serious advantage in the early game that competing empires can have a hard time catching up to.
  • Playing as a Terravore or a Determined Exterminator means you won't have to appease the internal Factions, Consumer Goods and Food are non-issues, diplomacy, appeasement and pacts are non-existent (except for non-Rogue Servitor Machines or Synthetic-ascended empires if you're a Determined Exterminator), and as time goes by, the game goes smoother as you reduce the number of renders and calculations of other empires. You won't get the full Stellaris experience, but it's definitely a lot less headache. And fun.
• Born in the Wrong Century: When observing primitive civilizations, an event comes up where you notice a scientist in that civilization is far more intelligent than his peers. You can either leave him there so he can advance his civilization, or abduct him and make him do research for your Empire. Meanwhile, a Keepers of Knowledge Fallen Empire might decide that one of your scientists is this and demand that you hand him over to them.
• Bragging Rights Reward: The investment in time and materials required to build the larger megastructures (to say nothing of the techs and Ascension Perks you need in order to have the option in the first place) pretty much require you to already be a galactic heavyweight to stand a chance of actually completing them.
• Brainwashing for the Greater Good: The inevitable result of authoritarian empires who use things like Propaganda Machines and Mind Control Devices to keep unruly populations placid and productive. Weirdly enough, even egalitarians who abhor Slavery and Authoritarianism are not barred from using them, as the Will to Power tech can be researched by everyone.
• Brain Uploading:
  • En masse with the Utopia DLC. With the developed robotics technology, your empire will ascend into a robotic civilization after completing the Synthetic Ascension route, turning all of your pops into unique Synthetics. Spiritualist fallen empires, however, regard this as a form of mass suicide and will likely attack what they deem hollow shells pretending to be sapients.
  • There is an event where one of your scientists can voluntarily upload a copy of their mind into your Science Nexus, upgrading its output. Unfortunately, your scientists do not have the tech needed to keep the scientist's original brain alive while copying their consciousness over, so the scientist's original body dies.
• Bread and Circuses: Authoritarian societies aren't keen on the whole "individual rights" thing, but they can have genuinely happy, healthy, well-cared-for subjects, and there's nothing stopping them from providing a strong Social Welfare state for every free pop. Egalitarians more or less describe authoritarians they like this way to justify keeping their alliances with them, whether the authoritarians in question actually fit or not.
  • Additionally there is a common planetary decision for most empires called "Distribute Luxury Goods", which is quite literally bribing the populace with consumer goods in exchange for amenities and by extension stability.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: Special civics for Megacorps allow them to be structured as Megachurches or as Crime Syndicates, both of which significantly affect how the empire's branch offices function. These two are also not mutually exclusive (though Criminal Heritage must be taken at game start and cannot be removed) and unlike other civics that can single-handedly determine government form, they form a hybrid government as a Subversive Cult, which spreads its cult through the underworlds of other empires, regardless of their feelings on the matter.
• Break the Haughty: The Humiliate war goal if successfully enforced will remove all the loser's influence (aka their political clout), slap them with a -10% happiness modifier, and if they were in the Supremacist stance, they are forced out of it. This war goal is only available to empires that rival one another, or as a counter war goal against fallen empires. Nothing quite as satisfying as taking down your nemesis or arrogant precursors, eh?
• Brick Joke: In Door Monster's sponsored video "Stellaris: No More Neroes", we're introduced to the Xumans, a humanoid species that are universally reviled for being extremely lame (and worshipping the Shroud). Come Nemesis, and Door Monster (along with Stefan Anon) are playing the Xumans in a campaign, contending with religious fanatics seeking to destroy the galaxy.
• Bug War: Any war that involves a Arthropoid civilization and a human one — and the preset arthropoids are quite warlike, making this especially probable if they spawn.
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • You can intentionally press a Fallen Empire's Berserk Button to goad them into Declaring War. Very useful to make use of Bulwark of Harmony's tremendous bonuses in Defensive Wars.
  • More literally, you can also annoy an Ether Drake from the Leviathans DLC, but you better kill it while you're at it, because otherwise it will go on a rampage and absolutely wreck a few of your systems.
• Burial in Space: Your Science Ships might stumble upon a space coffin as an anomaly and find a long-dead alien species inside. You can choose to either examine the body and coffin for a set amount of research points in all three research fields (physics, society, and engineering) or send it on its way to gain a higher number of just society research points. There's a chance that you might make First Contact with said alien species later, in which case they will not be happy about you desecrating their dead like that.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Primitive civilizations are subject to no end of bizarre/horrifying shenanigans from Observation Teams. A few of the milder examples include things like "a rogue scientist has landed on the planet to convince the primitives he is a living god," and "smugglers may have traded nuclear weapons with people still figuring out Newtonian mechanics." Some are even shout outs to conspiracy theories, like Observation Teams building monuments to dick with the primitives.
  • Empires who somehow fail to keep up technologically without being conquered can request to be protectorates instead of vassals due to the extreme difference in tech. Note that pre-FTL species that become empires - whether on their own or helped along the way - are the more common way of earning protectorates, to give some context on how badly an empire needs to be doing to be a protectorate candidate.

C - F

• Call to Agriculture: Invoked on a societal scale with the "Agrarian Idyll" civic, which makes farms produce Amenities in addition to Food. Also invoked with the "Agrarian" species trait, which increases food production by 15%. Anglers can also be considered a more Aquatic species take on this.
• Cannon Fodder:
  • Invoked with corvettes, the smallest class of warship available. They're always the cheapest class of warship buildable (relative to others in similar tech level), they use exactly one point of naval capacity, and the "Swarm" setting exclusive to the class programs them to charge headlong into within the enemy fleet to break up their formation forcing them into close combat. As more advanced ship classes come into play so does the need for screening ships to protect the big expensive capital ships, whether by tying down enemy ships in close combat or just plain ol' soaking up enemy fire.
  • Strike crafts come in batches of eight per hangar and fight by charging straight at the enemy even further than the corvettes, surviving total slaughter despite their tiny hull and shield points through high speed and evasion... unless the enemy has flak guns, then this trope comes into full play. But it's alright, as they do not cost anything besides the upfront cost of their carriers, there will always be more crafts every 2.3 days or so.
  • Ground combat has a selection of fodders to choose from: slave, clone, and undead armies. They're all cheaper than default assault armies in both upfront cost ^note Perhaps not with the undead army, which cost 100 energy instead and upkeep, is faster to train, and has half the impact on war exhaustion. All this means that fielding and losing them in large numbers is much more affordable.
• Cap Raiser:
  • There is a cap on how many stocks of regular resources (rare strategic resources are uncapped) your empire can store before any excess is discarded. However, building resource silos planetside and in spaceborne starports raises these caps by a set amount for each silo built.
  • Researching mega-engineering and having the Galactic Market open also increases the resource cap by 20,000 and 10,000, respectively.
• Cat Folk: One of the possible Mammalian sub-types. So yes, you can have a Cat Confederacy.
• Cerebus Syndrome: In the early-game, you're a Bold Explorer sending science ships to survey solar systems for anomalies and colony sites. In the mid-game, the focus changes to maintaining and expanding your empire in direct competition with your neighbors; you'll likely fight several wars in this phase. Once the endgame begins, the Fallen Empires will begin to re-assert their dominance over the galaxy, likely forcing you into a life-or-death struggle against one or more of them. And then the endgame crisis arrives, an existential threat to the entire galaxy that must be fought to the death. As someone once aptly said, "Stellaris is a game where you start as Star Trek and end as Warhammer 40,000.
• Changing Gameplay Priorities: A typical campaign of Stellaris starts with a scramble to explore and expand, searching to "capture" as many high-value star systems as you can so that no other empire can snatch them up. As the game progresses, some borders start to push against each other while other routes of expansion simply aren't profitable, creating more of an incentive to develop already-controlled territory, clear out always-hostile entities such as Void Clouds, research leftover Anomalies, and so on. Conquering or vassalizing other nations will eventually clear the way for further expansion, repeating the pattern from the start. As one fan quote puts it, "Stellaris is a game where you start as Star Trek and ends as Warhammer 40,000."
• Charged Attack: Colossi have a lengthy charge time before they start firing their weapon, followed by another lengthy discharge phase before the actual effect occurs, both of which together take the better part of one in-game year. Better give your Colossus adequate protection when you choose to deploy it.
• Character Alignment: Empires are classified according to a four-axis alignment system: "Authoritarian-Egalitarian" (source of and attitude towards lawful authority), "Materialism-Spiritualism" (position on the nature of the universe and the mind-body problem), "Xenophilia-Xenophobia" (attitude towards sapient species other than their own), and "Militarism-Pacifism" (legitimacy of force and violence as a means of solving disputes), with each dimension having a Fanatic version that amplifies its bonuses and drawbacks. Hive Minds and Machine Intelligences instead get a special "Gestalt Consciousness" ethos, reflecting the fact that their entire empire is totally directed by a single guiding intelligence rather than an ideology.
• The Charmer: Species with the "Charismatic" trait are this. Alien species have increased Happiness if living near them, and they have a bonus in relations with most empires. 2.2 changed this to just providing a bonus to Amenities production (though as Amenities are linked with Happiness, having Charismatic Pops around still helps keep your people happier).
• Childless Dystopia: One option for purging a species of "undesirables" within your empire's borders is by neutering them. It's the slowest purge method, but also the one with the fewest repercussions as you aren't actively killing or evicting a hostile population.
  Think of it as a phasing-out of a people. Our nation goes to meet the future, only some will not be with us.
• Chokepoint Geography: Hyperlanes will always funnel fleets to a certain point of the star system when they exit hyperspace. Empires can notice this and build defenses in these areas to deter potential invaders. If you're really unlucky, you could end up with your only exit being blocked by another empire, or, even worse, a Fallen Empire.
• The Chosen One: A trait a Psionic empire can grant to one of their leaders from a Shroud Event. It makes the recipient immortal and grants them a massive bonus related to their class (e.g. Commanders get a 30% Evasion bonus).
  • If one of your leaders has the Chosen One trait, you have a 100% chance to successfully contact the powers that inhabit the Shroud (normally there is about a 50% chance one of your leaders is killed instantly). Considering you are basically talking to a demi-god on equal footing, this might overlap with A God Am I.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: On one hand, alliances are useful tools of cooperation and advancement - both on their own and as a stepping stone towards a federation. On the other hand, because wars must be agreed upon by all members, alliance members can potentially halt aggressive expansion and stunt overall growth by other members until such time that the alliance becomes... unnecessary.
• Chummy Commies: The Shared Burdens civic is essentially a Marxist utopia in the traditional sense, and requires Fanatic Egalitarianism as an ethic, so you can't oppress your people.
• Cincinnatus: Lampshaded; you acquire the achievement "Modern Cincinnatus" for defeating the Crisis as the Galactic Custodian, then dissolving the position rather than finishing your term.
• Citadel City: Got a planet on a particularly good chokepoint to your rival empires? You can make it a absolute hell for an enemy force to take. Build a military academy, a shield generator, and all the fortresses you can on the planet's surface, and set its designation to "Fortress World". You'll have a planet almost entirely populated by highly-trained soldiers who are difficult as hell for an enemy fleet to bombard, and can hold their own against any but the mightiest invasion force. Build up that system's starbase into a colossal citadel which is bristling with weaponry, inhibits your enemy's ships, and boosts your own fleets in-system. And if you want to make things ridiculous, build some orbital habitats in the same system and fill them with more academies, fortresses, and shield generators. Any invading force will have to first take out the Citadel with its fleet, then invade the fortress world, and habitats before it can leave the chokepoint system for the rest of your empire. It is also, however, the fastest way to make another player throw a handful of Colossus ships at you and turn the system into a giant asteroid field.
• City Planet:
  • The "Arcology Project" ascension perk in "Megacorp" allows an empire to convert a planet covered entirely with city districts to become an Ecumenopolis.
  • Machine Empires in "Synthetic Dawn" can create Machine Worlds, their own take on the concept.
  • Hive Minds also get a unique version in their ability to create Hive Worlds.
  • Relic Worlds in the "Ancient Relics" story pack are basically ruins of an Ecumenopolis. They can be restored, but that will remove any archaeology sites that were on the planet.
• Civil Warcraft: You will suffer from civil wars and rebellions if you ignore the faction system. It can also happen to your enemies.
• Civilization Destroyer:
  • Your Colossus can be outfitted with the Neutron Sweep, a weapon capable of killing any intelligent life while keeping the planet colonizable. Diplomacy-wise, it's treated about the same as using a Planet Cracker.
  • A more specialized version is the Divine Enforcer, which converts all inhabitants of a planet to spiritualism. Since robots and hive-minds can't be spiritualists, they will all be killed instead, leaving the planet empty.
  • Both the Unbidden and the Prethoryn Scourge will completely cleanse a planet after bombarding it long enough, killing all bio-matter and destroying all machines. All they leave behind is a barren world. On the flip side, if the Prethoryn decide to colonize a world themselves, you'll be the one doing this to them if you want to take it back.
• Clone Army: One of the potential army types. They're as strong as regular Assault Armies, but are the second-cheapest type of army (only Slave Armies are cheaper), are the absolute fastest army to build, and aren't limited by the number of pops in your empire. After the Lem update you can start as a clone army abandoned by their creators with the "Humanoids" DLC.
• Clone Degeneration: Species with the Clone Soldier trait have a -40 penalty to lifespan, even worse than the Fleeting negative trait. After studying the ancient cloning vats they can fix this, in one of two ways.
• Cockroaches Will Rule the Earth: If Earth random-generates as a Tomb World, it's often inhabited by giant upliftable cockroaches.
• Colonized Solar System: Downplayed — there are never any other habitable planets in your homeworld's solar system, so the closest thing you can get are the mining and research platforms orbiting resource-rich planets and moons. It is possible for Earth-based empires to terraform Mars, but that requires late-game technology. You can also build habitats to house pops around a planet or moon of your choice.
  • Played Straight if you accept the Worm's gift, which transforms every solid planet and moon in your capital world's system into a colonisable Tomb World.
• Colony Drop: Lithoids with the Calamitous Birth origin were the result of this — they arrived on their homeworld on a massive meteorite that left behind a massive crater that they can exploit for extra resources. They can even build more meteorites that function as colony ships; they're faster and cheaper than conventional ships, but the devastation caused by literally dropping colonies onto planets is enough to negate the Lithoids' natural habitability bonus.
  • If you're observing a pre-FTL species sometimes you'll get a report of a meteor heading towards the planet. Assuming you don't destroy it or it burns up in the atmosphere it will devestate the planet so fiercely it's likely to be sent back to the Stone Age. That said, sometimes it'll turn out to be a Lithoid meteor and thus a new species will appear on the planet.
• Colony Ship: On making planetfall, they become a shelter with one pop on them. With the basic ones, you can control the ideological and species makeup of the colonists, while "private colony ships" are significantly cheaper and faster, but you have no say over the population and ideology of the colonists.
• Common Tongue: In Nemesis one of the Galactic Custodian’s potential reforms is the introduction of a universal language called Galactic Standard. It increases everyone’s influence at a cost of some energy income.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Something called "the mono-meta", the practice of making fleets entirely out of one ship type, held sway over Stellaris players for years.
  • First there was the "Naked Corvette swarm", back when the smallest ships (the Corvettes) were cheap enough that floating them without any defensive components let you Zerg Rush others and still beat them in attrition. This persisted even after Paradox provided numerous buffs to bigger ships and weapon sizes Corvettes couldn't handle, and maintained some favor until the economy was reworked with 2.2 LeGuin.
  • Breaking Corvettes replaced the swarm with "BB", the practice of using only Artillery-type Battleships, who by then were cheap and reliable enough that their only cost-effective counters were other Artillery-type Battleships. 3.6 Orion sought to break this by reworking Torpedoes and Disruptors to do better against bigger ships, and currently players favor mixed fleets prominently featuring Torpedo Cruisers to counter Artillery Battleships; the Frigate, a thicker-but-slower Corvette added to cheaply spam Torpedoes against Battleships, has not been quite as popular.
  • For an In-Universe example, 3.6 also broke AI weapon preferences; it now uses whatever provides the highest Fleet Power score for the uniformly-balanced assortment of ships it floats, in complete disregard for the situation at hand or what type of equipment the empire it's playing prefers. The current weapon of choice is the Autocannon, which the update enabled for larger weapon slots, and which is completely out-ranged by anything that isn't a Strike Craft. The AI also disregards Frigates.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • An AI species can start with traits combinations that would put the human into a negative score, or multiple fanatic ethics while the human is limited to one. Prior to patch 1.1, the computer could even have opposing ethics.
  • The AI knows exactly when you've cleared a sector of hostiles, conquered a planet, or moved your fleet, regardless of whether they have eyes on the area or not. Finally wiped out those top level crystalline entities that prevented gathering resources in a system? Here comes your rival to build an outpost moments later.
  • Depending on the difficulty, the AI gets a boatload of bonuses. For example, on the highest difficulty as of 2.2 LeGuin, the AI gets +100% production from jobs and stations, +60% naval capacity, +20% stability, and -40% to ship upkeep and starbase cost.
  • Crisis factions, Guardians, and Awakened Empires have special Government types that give massive discounts and bonuses to a lot of things. If you don't stamp them out quickly, they will end you.
  • The AI gets to ignore the Intel system and always has perfect knowledge of what your empire is doing. This is most obvious in evaluating if it wants to declare war on you or not, since it will react to increases in your fleet power or changes in your defensive pacts it should have no way to know about.
• Commie Land:
  • Empires with the Shared Burdens civic introduced in the Megacorp DLC are these. However, since you can only take the civic while being Fanatic Egalitarian, it's closer to Marxist Communist society/Anarcho-Communist land than the Marxist-Leninist land that most Commie Lands in fiction are.
  • Curiously enough, even megacorporations can go down this route, with the Worker Cooperative civic. The requirements and effects are similar to Shared Burdens.
• Commie Nazis: Averted, thanks to the fact that the Shared Burdens civic requires the Fanatic Egalitarian ethic and cannot have the Xenophobe ethic. This rules out a Shared Burdens empire being actual Nazi equivalents, the Fanatic Purifiers (who must be Fanatic Xenophobe and either Militarist or Spiritualist), or even being a totalitarian regime (since the Fanatic Egalitarian ethic is incompatible with any authority type other than Democratic).
• Company Cameo: Paradox Interactive's platypus fossil logo is available as an empire emblem.
• Continuous Decompression: When starships are destroyed, zooming in on the wreckage will reveal atmosphere venting from hull breaches, often with enough force to propel the wreckage around, for weeks on end.
• Cool Starship:
  • Players can set the aesthetics of their own ships' classes based on one of 6 (up to 10, if Humanoid, Plantoid, Lithoid, and/or Necroid DLC is installed) possible templates, each designed with a different phenotype in mind (Star Trek esque, boxy, industrial, round and sharp...). The colors match your flag by default, unless the primary colour is grey/black, then the game takes the secondary colour for highlights... and if that is also grey/black, it defaults to white.
  • If you can defeat the Automated Dreadnought, you are given a chance to refurbish it for your own use. A highly advanced ship made using long Lost Technology that will most likely be the most powerful ship in your fleet? Yes please.
  • The starships themselves are pretty cool in function. Corvettes are agile little ships that can dodge incoming enemy fire with impunity while delivering a powerful payload in the form of Torpedoes, or patrol the starlanes to keep them safe for commerce. Destroyers can be equipped with an L-size weapon despite their size, or be equipped with multiple Point Defenses to ensure no missile nor Space Fighter will get past them. Cruisers are the solid workhorses of your empire, with a flexible variety of loadouts from artillery to high-accuracy small weapons to a complement of Space Fighters. Battleships can be equipped with multiple complementary weapons and hangars to turn them into The Battle Star, or you can forget all that and turn them into dedicated artillery units to devastate enemy fleets from afar. Titans are Battleships on steroids, equipped with nothing but the biggest guns you can field and able to One-Hit Kill even Battleships. And then there are Juggernauts, which are even better examples of Battlestars than Battleships, with 6 hangar slots and 2 XL-size turrets. Not only that, they serve as mobile shipyards capable of repairing, upgrading, and replacing your fleets even while deep in enemy territory.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Stellaris mostly leans towards Lovecraft Lite, which makes the few examples pretty memorable.
  • The Horizon Signal story pack, written by Alexis Kennedy of Fallen London and Sunless Sea fame, is an event chain of purest cosmic horror. The end result is, however, in no way horrible: you either become a goffik-looking race with Tomb World as your native planet type (very useful, because it lets you live comfortably on any type of planet) and all planets in your capital system become habitable, or you kick an Eldritch Abomination in the nuts for bragging rights and increased research speed.
  • Making a pact with the End of the Cycle, something the game very clearly warns you not to do. When the fifty years is up and the End comes to collect, it will instantly snuff out your empire — fleets, worlds, ships, everything — without even a chance to fight back, leaving only a tiny handful of exiled survivors to watch as the End devours the galaxy^note That, or the remaining civilizations band together and beat back the End of the Cycle. Then they'll most likely come for you, because you now have -1000 relation with nearly all of them..
  • This is pretty much the existence of a primitive species under Active Observation: Existing as nothing but playthings and objects of study for alien gods of unstoppable power, living in constant fear of the unknown hovering just above their sight, and gradually descending into fanatical xenophobia out of fear that they might be the next to be abducted or that their neighbor might be a surgically altered infiltrator. Of course, from the spacefaring civilization's perspective, it's just a lab posting.
  • And than we have a Cosmic Horror Reveal with the existence of the Hunters. While you are perfectly capable of defeating any other Big Bad in the story, this Outside-Context Problem is said to be too powerful to stop by the Prethoryn, and their claims may find some confirmation when you discover that something has either snuffed or eclipsed the home galaxy of the Scourge. As Stellaris doesn't give us a chance to combat this new threat (for now), we have no reason to not believe them.
  • You can cause it too, by building Aetherophasic Engine, which will turn all stars in the galaxy into black holes, while your civilization will come to Shroud and become gods.
• Crapsack World / Sugar Bowl: Due to the sheer amount of different Ethics and Civics, resulting in many combinations affecting AI behavior and game mechanics, and the power of the Random Number God, your generated galaxy can be either of these, with everything in between (in single-player mode, at least, where the other "players" are somewhat more predictable):
  • If you're lucky, you can end up in a galaxy where democratic pacifist types are predominant among the other empires, with higher willingness to enter federations and liking your empire more based on shared values. Other empires can be swayed (or subjugated for their own good) to come around to a universalist democratic viewpoint, with more and more joining the federation. At the end, you might end up with a united galaxy of democratic, egalitarian states, with no genocides, no slavery, no wars of aggression, no closed borders... something like a galaxy-wide United Federation of Planets. If you got only one Fallen Empire and it happens to be the Enigmatic Observers type, it won't give you any kind of trouble and will work with all the empires, enabling you to beat back endgame crises with relative ease (or at least less bloodshed than would otherwise occur). So, a Sugar Bowl for everyone (well, apart from those two or three upstart species that go galactic during gameplay as upstart empires, turn out to be Fanatic Purifiers or something equally unpleasant, and are quietly "contained" (read: steamrolled) by your federation, but hey). Obviously, that applies only if you're playing a democratic egalitarian-type empire yourself, otherwise, you'll probably be on the receiving end of a war of ideologies or two yourself.
  • On the other hand, if you are unlucky, you may well end up in a galaxy where your neighbors are militaristic fascists, Absolute Xenophobes, bandit kingdoms who happily raid everyone else for slaves, religious fanatics bent on converting or killing you, and ravening horrors that just want to eat everyone else. Of course, your own empire may be just as dastardly as any of the others. The Fallen Empire may go on a war of galactic reconquest, two Fallen Empires may have a little "disagreement" that lays waste to half the galaxy in the process, and life in general will be very nasty, brutish and short, resulting in a 'verse you most definitely would NOT want to live in and a much more difficult game.
• Creative Sterility: Fallen Empires are well past their prime, and have only a single fanatic ethos trait (normal empires can have either a fanatic and a non-fanatic, or three non-fanatic) representing the sole surviving ideal that they hold on to. They'll never expand, don't develop any of their territory, and don't explore. However, they start with all technologies researched, putting them about two to three centuries ahead of you, and though they can't replace anything they lose, they're so disgustingly powerful it takes a serious effort to inflict even token losses on them. The rewards (in terms of valuable technology, salvage, and resource-rich territory) are enough to often make you by and far the most dominant superpower in the galaxy. The problem is finding the tech, military strength, and resources to be able to combat them while also managing to avoid having your rivals capitalize on your vulnerable flanks. And when one Fallen Empire is overrun by the "lesser races", the others will stop playing around.
• Creator Cameo: The Paradox Interactive logo is available to use as a flag for your empire if you so desire. Many star systems are also named after the game's developers (Moregard, Anward, etc).
• Credit Chip: The actual form of Energy Credits is not explicitly stated anywhere, but some events describe them as shiny chips, while others mention slots to put them in. Some players think of them as golden watch batteries.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Any empire that sticks to only one type of weapon and one type of defence will usually suffer from this in the early- to mid-game, as each weapon type tends to beat a specific defence while being suboptimal against another type of defence. Over-reliance on the automated Design-It-Yourself Equipment can and will lead to this; guides abound on how to create the optimal fleet capable of taking on fleets with larger power and win.
  • Each of the 3 late game crises have specific setups that make them vulnerable to getting hard countered.
    • The Prethoryn Scourge is particularly vulnerable to energy weapons, as they completely lack shielding. Point defense and strike craft can heavily mitigate the amount of damage they deal, as the Scourge's damage depends almost entirely on strike craft and missiles. A mid- to late-game fleet with decent point defences and plasma/lance weaponry will tear Prethoryn fleets a new one.
    • The Extradimensional Invaders focus heavily on shields and lack armor. This makes them vulnerable to either kinetics that can strip shields quickly, or to strikecraft/guided weapons that bypass shielding altogether. Their Matter Disintigrator deals horrifying damage against armor and hull, but is unable to effectively damage shielding.
    • The Contingecy is perhaps the most well-rounded crisis, as they are equiped with both shields and armor, so a mix of kinetics and energy is required, or piercing it alltogether with cloud lightning or arc emitters. They use energy weapons that like the Extradimensional Invaders can deal terrifying damage to armor and hull but lack an effective way to punch through shielding.
• Crop Circles: They really are of alien origin. They are also a prank. As in, bored Observation Teams watching from orbit can decide to mess with the primitives.
• Crutch Character:
  • Taking the Extremely Adaptive trait allows your species to colonize any inhabitable planet except Tomb Worlds right off the bat. Happiness cap due to Habitability notwithstanding, this allows you to expand immediately in the early game, choosing the biggest and best planets for yourself. However, at 4 Trait Points, it is the most expensive Trait, you'll be saddled with 2 extra drawbacks just to take it, and its usefulness declines with advances in Habitability tech and Terraforming. If you take Biological Ascension, however, you'll be able to remove the trait later on. This syncs up very well with with Hive Minds, who don't worry about happiness and are restricted to Biological Ascension anyhow. That said, see One Stat to Rule Them All.
  • The Talented Trait used to be this before Patch 1.8 — all it did was let Leaders start with an extra level, but back then it cost 2 valuable Trait points and Leaders tended to cap very easily anyway since the maximum was 5. Patch 1.8 greatly improved Talented by making it 1 point cheaper and having it increase Leaders' level cap instead (inverting the trope entirely).
  • Pre-2.0, Spaceports didn't do very much besides letting you build ships at the designated location and increasing naval capacity. In theory, they also provided early-game defense, but they were still effectively speed-bumps. Spaceports were also a resource drain, costing 350 Minerals and, unless a Solar Panel Network was installed, a net loss in Energy over time. For quite a while, it was common to ignore Spaceport construction except for in key locations. As part of the 2.0 rebalance, Spaceports can be upgraded to have mammoth defenses (and allow more Defensive Platforms to be constructed, when before 2.0 they could be placed anywhere regardless of a Spaceport), provide greatly expanded naval capacity, or provide a ton of Energy income from Trading Posts. Now, it's a struggle to balance Anchorages, Trading Posts, Shipyards, and the occasional chokepoint Bastion with the limited number of Spaceports your empire can effectively support. 2.2 also makes trade collection from Trading Posts and trade protection from weapon batteries and hangars a thing, which complicates the process even more.
  • Generic machine empires lose out on some special end-game stuff that only organics can get, but they can colonise any planet right off the bat, they don't have to worry about factional strife, and they never get unhappy pops. Rogue Servitors have it even easier as they get no diplomatic malus (unlike the other two specialized machine empires), having organic pops around to take care of gives them production bonuses, and did we mention that bio-trophy pops also produce Unity?
• Cultural Translation: The Polish edition of the game replaces the description of the art exhibition megastructure with Shout Outs to the 1980 film Miś. The actual quotes refer to a scene where a monstrous epitome of state-sanctioned kitsch is presented as a thing to be proud of and a shining example to the world.
• Curiosity Is a Crapshoot: A running theme throughout the whole game is that the galaxy is full of wonders and terrors, and sometimes it can be hard to tell which is which at first blush. Sometimes you get a clear-cut benefit, sometimes you get something entirely negative, and sometimes you get something that grants you Power at a Price.
• Cute Is Evil: It is somewhat of a Stellaris player tradition to choose the cutest species portrait whenever playing as Fanatic Purifiers. With random AI empires, it's a throw of the dice, as portraits and ethos have no link.
  • The Prikkiki-Ti are an event species that are this by default, they're small gecko-like creatures of a herbivore nature who are at the near absolute bottom of their home planet's food chain. Sounds pretty harmless right? Well, these geckos also happen to be among the most murderously xenophobic species in the galaxy.
• Cutting the Knot: Did your invasion of a neighboring empire run into the gigantic roadblock that is a Fortress World? You must conquer it, but it will take in-game years to soften the planet enough for an invasion, and because of War Exhaustion, you don't have the kind of time. On the other hand, you just need to remove the Fortress World as an obstacle, and the Colossus can, well, remove entire worlds. Shattering a planet counts as conquering it, right?
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Spiritualist empires believe cybernetics are unholy and Spiritualist factions are unhappy if cyborgs exist in your empire. This trope might also be part of the In-Universe reason for why cyborgs cannot use Psychic Powers.
• Cyberpunk: The Megacorp trailer has shades of this, with corporate propaganda talking about improving alien lives while in reality they end up in slums and get attacked by Doom Troops if they deface the propaganda screens.
• Cyborg:
  • In the Utopia DLC, your entire empire can turn into one as they ascend through the Synthetic route, making your race more powerful before ultimately Brain Uploading into fully fledged Synthetics.
  • The Orion update splits Cybernetics and Synthetics into distinct ascension routes. Pops of a Cybernetics empire will receive a special "Cybernetics" trait that boosts their durability and also grants all leaders of that race the "Cyborg" trait. The pops can be further modified by adding traits typically restricted to robots at the cost of increasing their energy upkeep.
  • Prior to the military overhaul in patch 2.0, it was also possible to outfit your armies with Cyborg Infiltration Units. For bonus points, the metal endoskeleton of these mechanical soldiers was highly transformable, enabling them to assume the appearance of any species after an appropriate layer of flesh (usually acquired from enemy prisoners) was grafted onto their frame. They then infiltrated enemy lines and spread chaos.
• Cycle of Hurting: If you lose a war, it's probably because you didn't have enough fleet power, meaning you probably lost most of it in the fighting. In addition, the war probably at least damaged (at worst crippled) your economy, since mining stations are fair game. As a result, it's likely you don't have a strong fleet anymore and need some time to build back up to your previous power. Unfortunately for you, other empires will now see that your power is shattered and gleefully declare war on you in your weakened state if they're aggressive. Or if you pissed them off. Or if your ethics diverge from theirs. Large empires can quickly be cut down to size, or worse, completely eliminated, by constant war pressure from surrounding empires after a defeat, and there's very little that can be done to prevent it^note Non-aggression Pacts help, as do Defensive Treaties, but they're not a guarantee of safety at all, and if you're playing an aggressive, xenophobic militant empire, those options are very difficult to secure.
• Danger in the Galactic Core:
  • In the Precursor backstory about the Zroni, their overuse of the Shroud, another dimension and the source of all Psychic Powers, was expanding the blackhole at the center of the galaxy. The Zroni fought a Civil War over whether the physical world was worth preserving, culminating in the Heroic Suicide of the ones that cared against the ones that didn't.
  • Largely subverted in actual gameplay for vanilla Stellaris, where the galactic core is devoid of hyperlanes and largely inaccessible. The Astral Planes DLC introduced an event that places one system in the galactic core, which your scientists note should be impossible, but the strange physics-bending workings of the astral rifts seem to be making it survivable.
  • Some mods, the most popular of which is Gigastructural Engineering And More, fill it in with their own challenges.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Certain lategame techs are quite dangerous and can cause terrible consequences for the rest of the galaxy. That said, the bonuses from these techs are too good to pass up, and you can take precautions should anything go wrong...
• Deadpan Snarker: With a dose of Smug Snake, Fallen Empires can give some pretty sarcastic quips.
  If you wish us to share our technologies, we will gladly arrange for a field demonstration.
  
  Know that we wish for nothing more than a buffer zone around our empire borders. You are not that buffer zone. Your allies are not that buffer zone. Cold dead space is that buffer zone, and if this is not the case, we will make it so.
  • Rogue Servitors will give you a remarkable amount of lip for a bunch of robots if they don't like you but aren't outright hostile. Possibly because they're programmed to emulate biological emotions.
  If rivals is what you wish us to be, then we will not disappoint. We live to serve.
• Deal with the Devil: Forming a covenant with the Shroud entity known as "The End of the Cycle". The game explicitly warns you that doing so is a very, very, very bad idea.
• Death by Cameo:
  • One of the potential anomalies you can encounter is a mummified alien child in a lifepod that was launched from a dying homeworld. Its genetic makeup reveals it would have been a very strong specimen should it have matured, essentially a dead baby Superman.
  • Another anomaly is a lifepod containing a "long-eared, amphibian alien" that is clearly meant to be Jar Jar Binks. The alien had been stabbed to death. Repeatedly.
  • Starting a game on Earth will reveal that Scandinavia (the home of Paradox Interactive) was nuked so heavily that it's still a fallout zone, despite cleanup efforts after something awful came out from it.
• Death World: Many planets have special modifiers that affect habitability, productivity, etc. A number of these modifiers include tidal locking, hyper-aggressive wildlife, and nearby asteroid fields that can drop rocks on your cities with little warning. There's also nothing stopping worlds from having more than one of these modifiers at once.
• Debating Names: You might come across a lost Space Amoeba spawn, which imprints on the science ship that discovered it believing it to be its mother and following it around. After a few years of growth, the science team comes up with many different names from which you can select — and you can reject them a few times on the grounds that the names are all terrible until you have to settle on something.
  Science Team: We have developed the ability to break the boundaries of space and time, to travel faster than the speed of light. Yet we cannot decide upon a name for this amoeba.
  Empire Ruler: Enough! Just call it Fluffy and be done with it!
• Decapitation Strike: A common strategy in war. Sending your strongest fleet straight to the enemy empire's capital will drastically increase their exhaustion, if it succeeds. The secondary reason to do this is that the capital is the most likely location of the empire's largest ship yards, and taking them out is vital to winning any war. If the enemy empire has a Mega Shipyard anywhere, remove it immediately.
• Defeat Means Friendship: One of the potential war goals you can pick is to force another nation to become your vassal. While they'll hate you at first due to the war, they'll eventually end up with a net-gain to their attitude due to the benefit from being your vassal; however, if they hated you to begin with, expect them to resent their servitude and look for any opportunity to get out of it. This can become exaggerated if you decide to integrate them into your empire - highly xenophobic groups end up with a massive -40% happiness penalty for having 'alien overlords' which makes them very unproductive to begin with. On the other hand a "Liberate" wargoal results in some or all of the enemy's planets forming a new empire that shares your own ethos and will readily ally or become your vassal, though their population is unlikely to share that ethos.
  • Some Blorg war greetings imply that the fanatic befrienders see war as a means to collect friends.
• Defenseless Transports: Science, construction, and colony ships are not armed. Their default operating procedure when encountering hostile ships is to run very quickly in the opposite direction. Army transports are also unarmed but do not auto-retreat, making them easy targets without escorts.
• Deflector Shields: They're good at defending against energy weapons, not so good at defending against rail guns, and missiles and strike craft ignore them entirely. They regenerate between engagements (so your ships won't have to return to port for repairs), but tend to be fairly power-intensive. Empires with the appropriate techs and ascension perks can get Psi Shields, the absolute best shields available; the best anyone else can hope for is reverse-engineering the Dark Matter Deflectors from Fallen Empire ships (which are still pretty damn good shields).
• Demonization: Presumably the rationale behind declaring an empire your Rival, which ticks them off but gets you more internal Influence: Against a foe like that one, we all have to stick together (and do as I say). Militaristic empires are happy to buy into it while pacifist ones don't particularly care. Xenophobic empires can also spend energy on "fear campaigns", which increase your Unity output while making your people more likely to become Xenophobic.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Invoked with the Ethos system; there are literally dozens of different value systems the various star nations can have, and they affect everything they can and will do.
• Depopulation Bomb: Colossi equipped with the Neutron Sweep weapon can bathe worlds, killing off anything biological (as well as robots... somehow) living on the planet while leaving the planet's infrastructure intact. Ideal if you don't have the time or invasion force to deal with the planet's defensive armies, or for easily claiming a Fallen Empire's worlds with their powerful and unique buildings. Colossi equipped with the Divine Enforcer and Nanobot Diffuser weapons feature a lesser form of this — all regular organic pops on the planet become Spiritualists or Cyborgs, respectively, but all robots and Hive Minded pops are destroyed.
• Designer Babies: The Policies Selected Lineage and Capacity Booster improves your Leaders' Skills and Lifespan, but these tend to piss off Spiritualists and Egalitarians.
• Design-It-Yourself Equipment: Has an in-game ship editor, allowing you to customize your ships and space stations. If you're lazy and don't enjoy modifying and upgrading your ship designs, you can have the AI do it, upon which they'll slap together the best designs they can from your available tech. However, beware of Crippling Overspecialization.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Being able to start on tomb worlds and gaia worlds was only added in Apocalypse, only pre-FTL civs can start on ring worlds, and nobody can start on habitats, but special habitability traits exist for all five and have existed since the release of the given world types. Federations finally added the ability for players to start on ring worlds and habitats, giving the specialty habitability traits more chances to see the light of day.
  • The only way to have enough energy credits to pay the debt collector in First Contact is to use console commands. Doing this will cause the debt collector to tell you that the credits 'aren't entirely genuine' and refuse to take your payment.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Found in the Horizon Signal quest chain ending. Turns out the Worm wasn't lying when it said it loved you. Of course, you could fight it when it spawns with monstrous fleet power above your homeworld, but if you accept its offer, your primary species gets some bad traits but not only can colonize Tomb worlds (and have non-terrible colonization habitability in all other worlds), but your entire system becomes composed of Tomb worlds — including formerly barren ones!
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Wormhole FTL, before it was removed in version 2.0, required you to build Wormhole Stations on your empire's fringes to expand your exploration capability, thus turning them into Achilles Heels; lose the stations, and you lose your FTL capability. However, Wormholes had huge range that only got better later on, they didn't care about chokepoints like Hyperspace, and while it required you to use the station, travel was instantaneous. It was so good that even if you got the Jump Drive later, it was likely just a marginal upgrade to a well-connected Wormhole empire^note It was also removed for precisely this reason: in order to prevent a Wormhole empire from being blocked early on, the cost to create a Wormhole Station was extremely low. Once your economy started to really move, you could easily build a Wormhole Station in every single one of your systems, turning what should have been a logistical weakpoint into a easy-redundancy method of travel that couldn't be blocked. The AI particularly enjoyed sending a constructor into the fringes of an Empire they were at war with and building a Wormhole Station (which also ignored Empire Control and could be built anywhere), so that they could attack from an unexpected direction without warning, as Wormhole Travel did not provide any notice of incoming fleets. All in all, Wormholes were so powerful with so few drawbacks that the developers removed them along with Warp Drives and forced all empires to use Hyperlanes.
  • Playing as a Pacifistic Empire effectively prevents you from going to war to expand your territory (though you can still claim systems of nations that attack you; if you want some of your neighbor's systems and can goad them into declaring war...). However, a sufficiently powerful Pacifist is generally trusted and well-liked by everyone, and allying yourself with half of the known galaxy will make even Awakened Empires think twice about attacking you. Further, less powerful Empires would definitely be interested in vassaldom. Once a certain amount of time has passed, the vassals can be integrated safely and bloodlessly. To Win Without Fighting indeed.
    • Going even further, an Empire with Pacifist and Xenophobe tendencies can take the Inward Perfection civic. This not only limits you to defensive wars, but also removes most types of diplomacy options too: no alliances, no federations, no research agreements, no rivalries and no uplifting primitives, only non-aggression pacts are allowed. Effectively you are standing completely alone against the rest of the galaxy. The payoff, however, is massive bonuses to Unity and empire stability. By cleverly playing your hand and hunkering down behind closed borders, a tiny oasis of peace quietly (and fairly rapidly) developing technology and infrastructure in a chaotic galaxy can easily emerge as the hands-down superpower, and possibly fight the end-game Crisis off by themselves.
  • Properly modifying your species, especially with the advanced traits you get through Biological Ascension, is this. Synths get 20% bonus to all production (except food), so it's easy to just use them for everything in your Empire. But the Advanced Genetic modification allows you to create highly specialized subspecies that get even more bonuses than Synths. For example, Erudite gives 20% bonus to all research, which can boosted further with the Natural Physicist/Biologist/Engineer for a 35% research bonus (in one field). Industrious gives +15% Mineral production which can be boosted further with Very Strong for a total of +20% production plus a whopping +40% Army Damage (which Synths don't get). It involves significantly more micromanagement, but is highly rewarding.
  • Having multiple alien races in your Empire means extra micromanagement as they each have their own ethos and traits. But population growth is calculated per species; a planet with 5 different alien races will generate 5 new Pops per growth phase. Thus, placating many different species lets you fill your planets quickly which in turn means greater resource generation. Also, having different species helps make your empire more flexible by amplifying their strengths and covering their weaknesses. Having a hard time defending your planets from your Fanatic Purifier neighbors with your weak humans? Just throw some very strong reptilians and resilient mammals at them! Your research needs a boost? Send those intelligent mushrooms to the labs! Unfortunately, this has since been Nerfed with the planetary overhaul in 2.0 — now only one type of Pop will grow at a time, and the AI isn't particularly brilliant about which species it assigns to which jobs.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • Getting especially lucky with technology and available research resources can lead to tier four or five weapons well before your opponents, or corvettes decked out in Crystal-Infused Plating (salvaged from debris left behind by crystalline entities). This tends to happen more often with Technocratic empires, as they can "fish the deck" of available technology for that one tech much easier by having a bigger "hand" of research options, and are more likely to have just the scientist with the specialty of said tech, speeding up research a huge amount.
  • Post-Kennedy patch, Kinetic Weapons are really just better, at least early game when everyone has paper-thin shields and virtually non-existent armor. The Cherryh patch reverted this, as armor is now a separate health bar that is highly resistant to kinetics; if you encounter enemies with heavy armor, you'll want to use Energy Weapons instead.
  • Pre-2.0, Fanatic Xenophobes got 30% extra Border Extrusion, allowing them to do hostile takeovers without actually declaring war. Combined with the Despotic/Star Empire Government's Influence discount on expansions, this allowed them to quickly claim a large portion of the galaxy to start snowballing. They also get to build Monument to Purity to boost happiness by 10% at a cheap 150 Minerals cost and not needing maintenance other than a pop working it. And while other Ethos could build marginally better happiness booster buildings, they were much more expensive and required Energy for maintenance. Post-2.0 Fanatic Xenophobes still get a significant bonus as they require 20% less Influence to build new Outposts and require 10% less Influence to claim systems belonging to other empires. This was later changed to 40% less Influence for Outposts and 10% faster Growth Speed.
  • Some Archaeological Sites added in Ancient Relics can give you sizable bonuses early on, like one that grants you a Titan called the Grand Herald, which massively boosts your fleet power.
  • And then there are the mods. In Gigastructural Engineering, for example, you can find and repair an Attack Moon early on, if lucky. The result? Not only does the increased fleet power makes the neighbors reluctant to attack you, but a good portion of them will beg you right away to vassalize them.
• Discovering Your Own Dead Body: A possible outcome of an archaeological expedition. This earns the leading scientist a unique archaeology debuff.
• Disproportionate Retribution: It's a rather well-earned stereotype that Stellaris players are absurdly petty. Galactic neighbor sends you a diplomatic insult? Welp, time to dedicate the next century and every resource at my disposal to conquering every last one of your planets and ending your civilization's entry in the history books with a planet-cracking bullet point.
• Divide and Conquer: Due to Stability and Administrative Cap penalties, quite often you can't afford to take your enemy's planets as spoils of war, nor can you ask them to become your vassal as that would be too much of a demand due to the number of worlds they possess. At times like these, the 'Liberate' planet option can be used to create a successor empire that shares your ethos and will be quite receptive to your empire. While this means extra micromanagement on appeasing the new empire, this effectively cuts down your enemy's strength while limiting their growth, softening them up for your final assault in the near future. Alternatively, there's also the 'Abandon' option which reduces the micromanagement, but nothing's stopping them or anyone else from just re-colonizing the abandoned planets.
• Divided We Fall: It's depressingly common for rival Empires to continue to declare war against each other, inviting you to war against their rival in face of the late-game crisis events, or keeping their borders closed to you even when you are the most likely to be able to deal with said problem.^note "I hope you will accept these Minerals, Credits, and Strategic Resources in exchange for Wormhole Station Access, so I can get through your territory to face THOSE EXTRAGALACTIC SWARMS OF SPACE LOCUSTS THAT WILL DEVOUR US ALL IF NOT STOPPED." Averted as of 1.4, where borders between most empires are opened during crisis events.
  • It's also pretty common seeing the AI players abuse their synths, ironically causing an AI uprising. This can cause that entire empire to collapse in a matter of months, as rivals swoop in to take advantage of the chaos said AI uprising causes.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Back when Egalitarian and Authoritarian were Individualist and Collectivist:
  • Being a Collectivist opened up certain policy, tech, and unit options such as Commissars, the Ministry of Benevolence, and Purge. All words you usually hear from them Dirty Communists...
  • Made all the more apparent when being a Fanatic Individualist (the exact opposite on the Ethos spectrum) invoked some of the worst aspects of anarcho-capitalism, American libertarianism and Objectivism - the description sounded like something ripped right from Ayn Rand ^note "Through history, too often has the hulking mass of the collective stifled the radiant genius of individuals. No more. Forge your own path, and let new fruits be illuminated by the sparks of clashing ambitions.".
• The Dog Bites Back: Synths have a higher chance of rebelling if their empire mistreats them. In Synthetic Dawn's reworked AI rebellion, synths that have been treated especially cruelly have a higher chance of spawning as Determined Exterminators who seek to destroy all organic life in the galaxy.
• Do Not Taunt Cthulhu:
  • Antagonistic AI Empires love to send Diplomatic Insult against the player, but Stellaris is often called space war crime simulator and its players have a reputation of being very petty and creative. Let's just say, slavery and genocide are the more mundane torment the players can inflict on an alien species for wronging them.
  • Don't taunt the Fallen Empires early in the game, lest they send their fleet to teach you a lesson in respect.
• Doomed Hometown: The Doomsday origin has the species' home planet set to explode in only 35 to 45 years, with no guaranteed habitable planets close by.
• Doomsday Device: The Apocalypse expansion allows you to build Colossi, which are basically this. You can only have 1 at a time, though you can build another if that one is destroyed. To wit, there are 6 different flavors of doom:
  • Global Pacifier: The nicest of its kind, it "merely" Slave-Shields a planet, forever exiling it from the Galactic scene.
  • Neutron Sweep: Kills every inhabitant of the planet, leaving the infrastructure intact for you to land your own colonists and take over. Not available to Spiritualists or Pacifists.
  • Divine Enforcer: A souped-up version of the Orbital Mind Control Laser which converts the planet's standard pops to Spiritualism while causing instant brain death in Robots and Hive Minds who can't convert. Accessible only to Spiritualists.
  • Nanobot Dispersal: Forcibly transforms the organic population of a planet into cyborgs who are immediately obedient to the machine intelligence. Practically the mirror of the Divine Enforcer, but only available to Driven Assimilators.
  • Planet Cracker: Vanilla flavor Earth-Shattering Kaboom, but unavailable to Pacifists.
  • Deluge: Available with the Aquatics Species Pack DLC, floods the target world. Effectively two birds with one stone as making this colossus requires the Hydrocentric ascension perk which effectively locks your Aquatic species into only being able to live on ocean planets.
  • With Nemesis, a civilization that has chosen to Become the Crisis will start building an Atherophasic Engine in their capital system. When activated, the Engine will annihilate all life in the galaxy. In order to activate it, it needs a stupendous amount of Dark Matter. To get that Dark Matter, the civilization also builds massive weapons that can implode stars to turn them into black holes. Of course, everything orbiting that star will be destroyed in the process.
  • Added in the Ancient Relics DLC is the Devolving Beam a truly terrifying weapon that converts almost all of a planet's pops into pre-sapients. Although at least one pop is guarantied to survive the planet will now have next to no ability to resist invaders.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: To defeat the Great Khan, their personal fleet must be destroyed two times. After the first defeat they will seemingly disappear, only to re-emerge with a new fleet some time later. Defeating this fleet kills the Khan and grants the victor a relic. However, if the rest of the Khan's empire is destroyed before this point they will never reappear and the relic will be lost.
• The Dreaded Dreadnought: One of the possible Guardians lurking around the galaxy is an Automated Dreadnought that can easily shred the entire space navy of a mid-game player empire. If one manages to defeat it, they can salvage it and turn it into a less powerful craft which is still more than a match for the Titans players can build in the later game.
• Drop Pod: When transports are landing troops on a hostile planet, you can spot their drop pods if you zoom in far enough.
• Dump Stat: In general, your Dump Stat will depend on your Empire Ethos:
  • The Sedentary Trait increases Migration time and Resettlement cost. Considering Migration happens all over the place in the background and Resettlement costs Unity in the first place, you will learn not to care about the former and only use the latter sparingly. This Trait is always good to take for an easy Trait point for anyone not a Gestalt Consciousness, i.e. Hive Minds and Machine Intelligences. Machines themselves do have an equivalent called Bulky. Later versions of the game change the resource needed to resettle pops from Influence to Energy, making it even easier to do after early game when you start having big energy surplus, thus making this even more of an obvious choice for free trait points.
  • Repugnant makes no difference if you're playing as Genocidal Xenophobes in the first place (Fanatical Purifiers and Devouring Swarms). Determined Exterminators can take the machine equivalent of Repugnant, called Uncanny, which could even make sense from a story perspective. Repugnant is also good choice for a secondary species that you can create for your initial empire, like cyborgs for Driven Assimilators or the servile species for Syncretic Evolution empires, since you're unlikely to use them as rulers. Servile species can cause happiness problem for your main species, however. Changed in later versions to a -20% penalty to Amenities production, giving Repugnant species trouble with keeping themselves happy.
  • Habitability is almost no concern to you if you choose the Voidborne start as you have a base 170% Habitability on all Habitats, and the only other worlds you can colonize without changing your habitability preferences are Gaia Worlds, Eucumenopolises and Ringworlds, on which Habitability doesn't matter, and Relic Worlds, on which Habitability does matter, but are rare and can be turned into Eucumenopolises. This makes traits like Nonadaptative and the Industrial Development resolution tree very alluring.
  • Happiness is completely irrelevant for Gestalt Consciousness Empires (unless Rogue Servitors, and even then only their Bio-Trophies).
  • Food and food research is pretty much useless for a robotic empire since they don't eat (unless you're playing Rogue Servitors or Driven Assimilators). Researching Terraforming is almost pointless since they can inhabit almost any world, except if you want to transform planets into Machine Worlds, which give production bonuses to Machine Empires.
  • Lithoids also don't have to worry about food (especially if they are Fanatic Purifiers or Terravores), plus their innate +50% habitability bonus means they can live adequately on most planets that don't match their preferred type.
  • Necroids grow more of themselves by converting other pops, meaning you can basically disregard population growth on your main species.
• Dwindling Party: During the Apocalypse trailer, as the United Nations of Earth fleet defending Europa VII recites their Badass Creed, the Fanatic Purifiers rapidly cut them down and each line is spoken by fewer and fewer people until only one, the mother who was trying to explain to her child why she had to go at the start of the trailer, is left to speak the last line as she rams her starfighter into the Purifiers' Colossus in a last attempt to try save her home and her family.
• Dyson Sphere: One of the constructable megastructures in the Utopia expansion. Unlike many examples, it only encloses the star itself and not the entire solar system; however, it still takes a lot of time and resources to build and produces a massive amount of energy (up to 4,000 units, to be precise). They can only be constructed in systems without habitable planets and will freeze over any barren or molten worlds once construction is finished - which tends to happen when you block out the sun.
• Eagleland:
  • Democratic Crusaders, who exist to... well, liberate non-democratic nations. Often violently. The diplomacy text makes it absolutely blatant.
  "We will give you liberty or give you death. Your choice."
  • The flavor text on the Free Haven civic quotes "The New Colossus," the poem on the Statue of Liberty. Definitely a vision of the Beautiful version.
  This society has a well-earned reputation as a free haven. The tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free - all are welcome here, regardless of their species or origin.
• Early Game Hell: You start off with a fair amount of energy, minerals, influence, etc., to allow you to build a colony ship, or a few mining platforms, etc. But until you start expanding to other worlds, you'll likely run out of resources really quickly until you can expand to several systems and build up a solid mineral and energy income - but by that point, your AI neighbors will likely be at least on equal footing with you, if not moreso.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom:
  • World Cracker-type Colossi fire a giant laser into a planet, which causes the planet to explode after a couple of months.
  • The "Doomsday" origin, available to players with the Federations DLC, has the player's homeworld suffer one of these 35-45 years into the game. The player has to pull off a Homeworld Evacuation before that happens.
• Easy Logistics: Nope. Although there are the usual Acceptable Breaks from Reality, managing the logistics to maintain your fleet is one of the most critical gameplay elements. For instance, since Upkeep is based on your ships' build cost, you can reduce Upkeep by fielding a smaller fleet.... but good luck winning any fights with empires that have heavily invested in their navies. Conversely, you can create a fleet large and strong enough to take on even Fallen Empires, but you better have the tremendous Energy and Alloy output to pay for their Upkeep. Failing that, as Upkeep is reduced when your ships are docked, you can try and stockpile Energy and Alloys to pay for the Upkeep once they're deployed for engagements, but you better make sure the war doesn't last long enough to deplete your reserves.
  • Also averted with your infrastructure. Balancing the resource expenditure for all of your stuff, particularly the rare resources like crystals? Not easy.
  • It's played completely straight with civilian infrastructure. It might take years for your fastest ship to cross your empire, but resources or relocated pops can be there tomorrow. In early builds this was another aversion, to the point that food had to be produced on every planet instead of being a general resource; this proved to add little beyond aggravation and was quickly changed.
• Eats Babies: When fanatic xenophobes are at war with you, they gleefully declare this is their plan.
  "Despicable beast! Your little [babies] will soon be sold as delectable snacks on every street corner on [our homeworld]!"
  • In the Utopia expansion, you're able to enslave and breed alien populations for the sole purpose of raising them as livestock. A more short-term version of this in the same DLC is to use the Processing method of purge on a pop (which likely includes babies) - AKA committing genocide by eating them all.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • Many of the Leviathans that aren't machines left behind by Precursors. Massive spaceborne creatures with firepower rivaling that of a fleet, they come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes and are invariably hostile to anything that comes their way. Some of them will even chase you down and attack your empire if you piss them off enough. The Ether Drake in fact is explicitly said by Curators to be something that cannot possibly have been born in our universe, speculating it came from a prior universe with different laws of physics that managed to survive that universe's destruction and persist into this one. Deconstructed though, as this means it is poorly suited to existence in our galaxy and destroying it might be considered a kind of Mercy Kill.
  • On a smaller scale, the void clouds. They are sentient cosmic entities that have been wandering the universe since very shortly after the Big Bang. The player empire can't make heads or tails of how they work, but they are invariably hostile to nearby ships (except for VLUUR, which is fortunate as an event sends it roaming through your empire, and it's much stronger than the average void cloud). They are often found near black holes, but they can spawn pretty much anywhere. It's suggested that spiritual empires may potentially view them as divine figures... but that might not stop the more militant ones from attacking them. Fallen Empires have been known to imprison Void Clouds inside gigantic planetary shields deep within their space, which makes their potential origins a lot more ominous...
  • The Worm-in-Waiting. Your fleet won't help you here, though there's something to be said for the gifts it brings...
  • The Shroud is positively full of them; the player can even, with the right Ascension Perks, make bargains with them. Special note goes to the End of the Cycle; the tooltip for the option to make a Covenant with it simply states, in bright red, "Do not do this", followed by a suspiciously long list of incredible benefits. The End of the Cycle does give you massive benefits for 50 years. At the end of 50 years though... you lose everything except your tech, and end up on a single planet (if the criterion allows. If it doesn't you get a game over), with everyone else hating your guts, while the End of the Cycle pretty much becomes an Endgame Crisis. It can only happen in a single player game, however.
  • While the Prethoryn Scourge are an ordinary Horde of Alien Locusts, those able to communicate with them may hear about the Hunters that have been chasing them from galaxy to galaxy for a very long time. Further details come up in a later event called "the Hole in the Void": while charting the Prethoryn's course, your scientists realize that another galaxy — the one the Prethoryn came from, according to their calculations — has vanished. Either it has been erased, stars and all, or something massive has eclipsed it. As of writing, for better or worse, there are no follow-up events.
• Eldritch Location: The Shroud, a place of pure psionic energy, where beings of immense power can manifest.
• Eldritch Starship:
  • The Extradimensional Invaders' ships are translucent, blue/green/orange, and capable of sucking the life force from entire planets in the blink of an eye.
  • Crisis Empires can build Star-Eaters, massive cube-shaped ship armed to the teeth and can fight an entire fleet by its own. Its shape and function are scary enough, but the truly eldritch part is how it is made completely out of Dark Matter.
• Elite Army: Military Empires can easily field one with the appropriate research or government provided. One can even provide tailor-made armies from stronger species other than their own primary race that is dedicated to push out multiple invaders/defenders on a planet single-handedly.
  • If you invade Earth during the middle of World War II, you can defeat the combined military might of the five major world powers with a mere three assault armies and the fire support of your starting three corvettes.
• The Empire:
  • Players can choose to eschew peaceful negotiations and alliances in order to fulfill this trope by conquering the entire galaxy in order to achieve a campaign victory. Empires with the Xenophobe ethos can enslave other species. Civilizations without the Egalitarian ethos can form actual autocracies ruled by a space emperor. You can basically create an Expy of the Imperium of Man if you want and with the right play style.
  • The Empire/Kingdom delineation is demonstrated by the Despotic Empire and Enlightened Monarchy government types. They're both autocracies, but the former is ruled by an Emperor or Empress and gets a bonus to slave labor, while the latter is ruled by a King or Queen and pacifistic.^note Though if the player chooses, they can change the ruler's title, so one could possibly have a pacifistic Emperor or Empress.
  • One of the resolutions available to the Galactic Custodian converts the Galactic Community into the Galactic Imperium and crowns the Custodian as Galactic Emperor.
• The End of the World as We Know It: What happens when you form a covenant with the End of the Cycle. Once the fifty years are up, you lose EVERYTHING except for your researched technologies and ascension perks - your worlds, your habitats, your fleets, your leaders. There's no fight, no struggle, no epic battle. Your empire simply gets snuffed out in an instant, reduced to a single planet with a few survivors and a handful of basic buildings while every planet you had spawns an insanely powerful Shroud Avatar, and your previous homeworld gives birth to The End, an entity with a base fleet power of >300K that gets far more powerful the more pops you had before everything went down the drain. That thing alone can wipe the floor with everything up to and including Awakened Fallen Empires all on its own. Should you survive that, you'll also have to contend with your angry neighbors because of the -1000 opinion modifier you got slapped with after you doomed the entire galaxy.
• Enemy Civil War: The other Empires who are not your friends may not be friendly to each other either, and it's pretty common for them to bicker and go to war against each other. Depending on how the war goes, you might even jump into the fray and cripple both Empires in the long run.
• Enemy Mine:
  • Empires may occasionally ask the player to initiate a war with them. Sometimes, it's an ally doing the asking but sometimes it's an empire seeking to take down a mutual threat.
  • Played straight to Godzilla Threshold level when a Crisis shows up. EVERYONE gets a +200 opinion modifier, usually leading to opening their borders even when you have been bitter enemies for generations.
  • YOU may be the cause of this with the Become the Crisis ascension perk. When you finially generate enough crisis points to reach level 5, the ENTIRE galaxy (except any fallen empires) will declare war on you all at once.
• Energy Beings: The Extradimensional Invaders. Bringing them into the galaxy is the great risk of Jump Drive technology, for their opinion of the physical beings of the galaxy is very simple:
  "Understand... this... you are food..."
• Energy Economy: One of the major resources in the game is the Energy Credit, which is produced by power plants and is used to power robots, as well as being used as a currency used for upkeep costs and trading.
• Energy Weapons: Most energy weapons have bonus damage against armor plating but (unlike their Kinetic counterparts) suffer against Deflector Shields. A few highly specialized Energy Weapons can bypass defenses entirely or are highly effective against shields, but have other drawbacks (such as highly variable damage or poor performance against armor).
• Even Evil Has Standards: Marauder empires are ruthless pirate clans that subsist on raiding and extorting everyone they come across, but even they won't cut deals with genocidal empires of any kind.
• Evil Counterpart: The xenophobic, militaristic Commonwealth of Man to the xenophilic, egalitarian United Nations of Earth.
• Evil, Inc.: Minamar Specialized Industries, a unique empire added in the First Contact DLC, evokes this image, but in reality it's more complicated. Notably, the developers themselves used the wording "playing with the 'evil corporation' trope" in one of their Dev Diaries when describing MSI's features. To begin with, MSI is a MegaCorp that is dedicated to enlightening the primitive species of the galaxy. However, without excessive altruism, but for a hefty price, which is often so high that the whole thing looks like a fraud. This is a big part of the reason why empires with the "Payback" and "Broken Shackles" origins have a permanent -1000 opinion modifier towards Minamar Specialized Industries, which makes them Arch-Enemies. At the same time, MSI is mindful of the risks that a bad reputation in the galaxy can have on their business, which is why they have the "Your Ladder To The Sky" origin, the "Benevolent Corporation" personality, and the "Public Relations Specialists" civic, all of which are aimed at creating and maintaining a good opinion of MSI among members of the galactic community.
• Evil Is Easy: It's not easy to keep up against Ethical Divergence and maintain conquered aliens' happiness so they don't rebel. But there's always the Purge option if you want an easier way out...
• Evil Laugh: The Prethoryn Scourge has one when talking with you: "HAK HAK HAK!"
  • Devouring Swarms can let loose with one of their own if they blow up one of the Holy Guardians' Holy Worlds.
• Evil Versus Evil: In the Extradimensional Invaders invasion, The Unbidden (blue) will eventually be joined by two other factions, The Aberrant (orange) and The Vehement (green). Each of them will attack all respective other invader factions as well as every native to the galaxy.
• Experience Booster: A few civics and traits, like Adaptable, improve the experience gained for a given leader.
• Experience Penalty: Leaders can get the Arrested Development trait, which prevents them from gaining experience and subsequently from leveling up. The Stubborn and Slow Learner traits both reduce experience, with the first being a personality trait and the second one being a biological trait. The Conservative biological trait gives a experience penalty, but makes that species happier and more likely to follow your empire's ethics.
• Exposed Extraterrestrials: Some of the alien races. There are even insults specifically directed from naked aliens to clothes-wearing ones.
  "Why do you cover yourselves in strange textiles? Are you hiding something, or are you simply ashamed of your unfortunate appearance?"
• Expy: The Shroud is all but officially stated to be one of Warhammer 40,000's Warp, even more so now that the Utopia DLC vastly expands on how you can interact with this alternate dimension and its enigmatic denizens.
  • Speaking of WH40K - Stellaris makes it suspiciously easy to model your empire after the various factions in the Grimdark future. There're even portraits available that closely resemble most of the species involved.
    • The Imperium of Man doesn't even need to be built from scratch; one of the pre-built starter empires, the Commonwealth of Man, is a Lost Colony that is one part Imperium of Man, one part United Citizen's Federation. Alternatively, the player can make an Authoritarian/Xenophobe/Spiritualist to get psykers and the Divine Cult civic for a proper God Emperor.
    • By choosing one of the elf-y portraits and spiritual traits, you can play as the Eldar. Follow the Mind Over Matter ascension path through to the bitter end and congrats! You just reenacted the Fall, perhaps the most devastating and most momentous event in 40K lore. Fans have taken this to new heights in a few parody news articles.
    • Do the same with humans instead and you have an expy of a rampant Chaos cult plunging an entire sector of the Imperium into, well, chaos by bringing forth the Legions of Hell.
    • The Necrontyr were a short-lived race of organics that developed a burning hatred for all life in the galaxy and eventually uploaded their minds into robotic shells now know as the Necrons; it wasn't fully their choice in the end, but that's not the point right now. What matters is that you can replay the Necron's story very easily by playing as Fanatic Purifiers and following the synthetic ascension path to the end. Alternatively, start as a given Machine Empire from Synthetic Dawn to simulate a Necron Dynasty: regular Necrons who want to do their own thing, exterminator Necrons, Necrons who collect organics to find a way to turn back, or Necrons who have "enslaved" organics so they do something useful. It helps that the original Machine Pops, and one of the Synthetic Dawn ones, look somewhat like Necron Warriors and Wraiths, respectively.
    • A xenophile, materialist, authoritarian alien empire with a strict Fantastic Caste System? Well hello, Tau Empire! That mix even gets a special greeting telling other races "they will embrace the greater good eventually".
    • Orks don't have a fitting portrait in the base game, and their peculiar way of talking also doesn't show up, but their character is replicated virtually 1/1 with the Metalhead personality on a fungoid species. The Humanoids DLC provides an Orc species portrait, so they are officially playable.
    • Same goes for Dark Eldar. You can approximate them with a Decadent empire that can't run smoothly without slavery, although you won't be able to fully emulate the true depths of their depravity without mods.
    • Tyranids are almost too easy - insectoid species with the Hive Mind ethic and Devouring Swarm civic, and you're done. They'll even automatically consume every other species on worlds they conquer.
  • The three Crisis factions: the Scourge is one of the aforementioned Tyranids, The Contingency is one of the Heretic Geth mixed with the Reapers, and the Extradimensional Invaders are the Drej.
  • Each of the three unique civics for Machine Empires are based off other science fiction franchises.
    • Exterminator Machine Empires are referred to by the developers as basically Skynet.
    • Driven Assimilator empires are as legally close to the Borg as one can get without getting sued by CBS.
    • Rogue Servitors are a morally ambiguous mixture of the The Culture and the robotic crew of the Axiom from WALL•E.
• Extra-Dimensional Shortcut: Jump Drive, used by Fallen Empires and researchable in mid- to late-game by playable empires, shifts a ship into an alternate dimension where the speed of light is much faster, allowing them to conduct jumps that completely bypass the standard Hyperspace Lanes and the Portal Network. Unfortunately, it has a chance of tearing open a rift to the universe/dimension inhabited by the omnicidal, Life Energy-consuming Unbidden.
• Extraordinary World, Ordinary Problems: Being a simulation 4X grand strategy game, has some aspects of it. The greatest threat to your fleet aren't Lovecraft Lite horrors older than the universe, but the more mundane budget cuts because you do not think you have enemies worth fighting anymore, and bad ship/fleet designs is not far behind. While the technology has advanced dramatically, people still need food and thus need to tend the fields, larger empires need large amounts of bureaucrats to keep the hyperlane ships running on time, galactic Realpolitik is shockingly similar to real world Realpolitik, the Fictional United Nations that is the Galactic Community is just as prone to corruption and inefficiencies as critics of the real world UN claim it is (especially with the creation of the Galactic Council, which is more or less the UN Security Council, who can denounce an empire that is not actually in breach of Galactic Law to impose sanctions or veto a resolution that everyone else in the galaxy votes in favor of, over and over again), deep space black sites where the Not NSA is spying on the citizens of a Direct Democracy, drug cartels causing trouble, unemployment still happens depressingly often and is a common problem when running empires... None of the Endgame Crises would stand a chance against a unified galaxy, and yet sometimes not even a common threat to all life is enough to unite the bickering nation states as they are picked off one by one...
• Extreme Omnivore:
  • The Unbidden and their extradimensional rivals, The Abberant and The Vehement, will instantly devour every living thing on every planet they conquer, leaving nothing behind but an empty Ghost Planet.
  • As of the Banks update, you can engage in this as well. If you have a nasty streak, you can set your Purge method to process the population of worlds you conquer into food for your pops. If you have a particularly nasty streak, you'll instead enslave them all and cultivate them as livestock. Both options are available to any empire that condones purges and slavery, and it works equally well on every species no matter how far removed from your own biology they might be.
  • And then there's the Devouring Swarm, a starting ethic for Hive Minds whose only goal is to eat all other sentient life.
  • Slightly inverted by the new Lithoid species - they have their own version of the Devouring Swarm called Terravores, but they don't eat aliens. They eat planets, leaving hollowed-out husks when they're done.
• Factor Breakdown: The game offers detailed breakdowns of most numbers one can see on screen by hovering over them with a mouse. For instance, if you want to know the exact composition your current Unity income, you hover over it in the main interface bar and a popup appears, listing all the major sources of Unity points, as well as of all the percentaged bonuses and penalties that currently apply to it.
• The Famine: When there's not enough food, population growth stops and morale takes a hit.
• Fantastic Caste System: As of the Banks patch, species with rights set to "caste system" have all farmers and miners enslaved, but energy producers and researchers remain free.
• Fantastic Nuke: The Colossus deploys these in the form of Planet-Killer weapons.
  • The default World-Cracker weapon fires a fiery red beam that destroys any planet it's deployed against. Habitable planets leave behind mineral deposits.
  • The Global Pacifier traps the population of a world within a planetwide force field that can't be broken under any circumstances. It's the only weapon that can be deployed by Pacifist Empires. It also adds a deposit for 10 Society Research.
  • The Neutron Sweep bombards a planet with neutrons, killing all Pops on a planet but leaving the planet itself intact, albeit with a penalty to habitability for ten years.
  • The Divine Enforcer bathes a world in magic light to forcibly convert all organic Pops on a planet to the Spiritualism ethic and destroy robots and Hive Mind Pops. Only a Spiritualist Empire can deploy it. It can be used on your worlds but causes a major penalty to Happiness for ten years.
  • The Nanobot Diffuser bombards a world with nanobots that forcibly convert all organic, non-Hive Mind Pops into cyborgs while killing everything else. Only a Driven Assimilator Empire can deploy it. You can use it on planets you own if there are Pops you can control, and you take control of the planet afterwards.
  • The Deluge Cannon drops a whole planet's worth of water on a non-Ocean planet, killing all Pops without the Aquatic traits and terraforming the planet into an Ocean World. You gain ownership of the planet, though you can also use it on your own worlds to convert them.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • The Xenophobic pops, and by extension entire empires, will become increasingly upset the more foreign pops appear on their planet. Pops with a Repugnant trait are at the other side of the trope, granting Zoidberg stereotyping such that even Xenophiles dislike them, making the colony more unlivable for all species but the dominating Repugnant race on said planet.
  • A factor in what caused the downfall of the First League. The lack of cohesion between the founding races meant a war broke out quickly over dwindling resources. When you find their capital world, it is deserted as the aliens all killed each other years and years ago.
• Fantastic Slurs:
  • "Xeno" is a popular one among xenophobic empires.
  • Empires who hold you in poor esteem will call you specific insults based on the species category of your empire: humanoids get called "monkeys", mammalians "beasts", reptilians "lizards" or "newts", avians "birds", "chickens", "dodos", or "buzzards", arthropoids "bugs", molluscoids "parasites", fungoids "shrooms", plantoids "weeds", machines "tin cans" or "toasters", lithoids "rocks", and necroids "husks".
  • Fantastic Compliments are also possible if the other empire instead likes you: humanoids get called "angels", mammalians "sphinxes", reptilians "dragons", avians "phoenixes", arthropoids "scarabs", molluscoids "krakens", fungoids "chanterelles", plantoids "roses", machines "technological marvels" or "elegant automatons", lithoids "gems", and necroids "specimens".
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture:
  • A xenophobic, pacifist and spiritualist empire with imperial rule and the "Inward Perfection" civic gets the special "Celestial Empire" government, making it an Expy of late Imperial China.
  • Marauders are inspired by the Mongols, down to having a Great Khan who arises out of a Genghis Gambit, though he also has some traits of Alexander the Great by allowing enemies to become satrapies and his diadochi often dividing up the empire after his untimely death.
  • The player can easily invoke this with clever selection of traits, ethics and civics. For example Militarist, spiritualist and xenophile ethics, the Nationalistic Zeal and Slaver Guilds civics, an oligarchy-type government and a Roman-themed name list can combine for Space Romans. Or a militarist and spiritualist empire with an arctic homeworld, the Barbaric Despoilers civic and your choice of the Strong, Traditional, Thrifty, or Communal traits for Space Vikings.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: Prior to the Cherryh update, the game provided three basic versions of FTL travel for your civilization to choose from initially and one that could be researched later. Not all civilizations would use the same form, however, leading to interesting strategies and potential use of choke-points during war. There was an option to start a new game with only one type, which has become redundant since Cherryh restricted everyone to hyperdrives by default. But, for the sake of completeness:
  • Warp: The Star Trek method. Ships equipped with a warp drive create a subspace "bubble" around the ship. These drives are very expensive and cause a major drain on a ships' available power. On the plus side they allow free movement across empty space, at the expense of being the slowest of the three FTL types and the ship having to be at the edge of a solar system before it can use the drive. They also have a very low maximum range unless upgraded. However, it is the one drive with the least challenging learning curve, so it is default choice for new players. Warp was recycled as a special strategic ability for Jump Drives in Cherryh, but with a significant cooldown that also reduces attack and speed.
  • Hyperspace: The Andromeda/Escape Velocity method and, as of Cherryh, the only one available at the start of the game. (Post-Cherryh Wormholes, Gateways, and Jump Drives can be researched later.) Ships that have a hyperdrive can use hyperspace lanes for quick and inexpensive travel between systems. However, since your ships are limited to predetermined paths, it lacks the freedom of navigation warp drives offer, as your ships might have to make three or four separate jumps to reach a system right next door. The hyperdrive also has a long warm up time before usage, but once the warm up is out of the way, the travel itself is nearly-instantaneous. Setting the whole galaxy to be locked into this FTL type introduces a more traditional style of game, as well as adding a strategic layer as chokepoints become far more important than in a galaxy where other empires can jump straight over or around the lanes.
  • (Pre-Cherryh) Wormhole: A method based on Teleportation. Empires with access to wormhole technology first have to build a wormhole station that resides at the outer edges of a star system. This station creates a temporary but direct connection between two systems that a cluster of ships can then use briefly. Ships that use wormhole stations experience instant travel between star systems and, as a plus, don't need to be equipped with any modules whatsoever. The stations are also two-way and have huge range that only gets better later on, allowing for some interesting tactical opportunities. However, of the initial three, it is the most infrastructure-intensive and the one most vulnerable to enemy attacks; additionally, any ships wanting to use the wormhole must first travel from their current system to the station's system, and then from there to their destination. Add in the charging time for this process, and the fact that each station can only service one set of ships at a time, and this can mean that by the endgame, unless you invest a significant amount of infrastructure in maintaining multiple stations with redundant ranges (and multiple gates in your core systems), your inter-system travel can slow to a crawl as multiple ships queue up for use of a handful of overworked stations.
  • Jump: The Warhammer 40,000 method, and the one you have to research or get from a Fallen Empire. The ship shifts into an alternate dimension where the speed of light is much faster, and exits at the desired point. The fastest of all the FTL types (20 times faster than conventional), combining the best of all worlds: it requires very little power, the modules are fairly cheap, the range is incredible, and as stated it's by and far the fastest of all travel methods. However, as in Warhammer 40,000, there is fine print: it carries the risk of accidentally tearing open a portal to the universe where the Extradimensional Invaders live and triggering a galaxy-wide Crisis due to their invasion; additionally, researching it is likely to tick off Knowledge Keeper Fallen Empires and have them ready to start taking your Empire apart. Funnily enough, it tends to be an upgrade only for Warp & Hyperspace empires, because an end-game Wormhole empire with a good gate network can jump further than the level of Jump tech you can scavenge from a Fallen Empire. Beyond all others is the Psi-Jump, the longest-ranged of all FTL techs and the hardest to acquire. Some government types are forbidden from even unlocking this tech and can only scavenge it from dead Fallen Empire ships. It has even more advantages than Jump, but summons the Extradimensional Invaders even faster, and can bypass stars and planets without slowing down, though it is also tied for most-expensive FTL module in the game. Both versions of the Jump Drive are still available as of Cherryh and retain most of their advantages, but jumps can now only be performed manually, with the drive performing like regular Hyperdrive, but with a lengthy cooldown period that inflicts heavy temporary debuffs on any ships that used it.
  • (Post-Cherryh) Wormhole: Essentially an incredibly long hyperlane. Wormholes are paired, initially unstable, and require a technology to stabilise them, but offer a very long range connection.
  • Gateways: The Stargate method; Gateways are megastructures that function like gates, and can be found in space, but must be repaired before they can be used. Reactivating one after researching the right technology connects it to a random one somewhere in the galaxy, but much like their ring-shaped cousins they can redial to other Gateways if the empire controls more than 2. Additionally, they can block access, while wormholes cannot be intentionally disabled, so Gateways are overall less risky.
  • L-Gates: Like Gateways, but the network is preexisting, separate, and you can't add to it. Unlocking it is difficult and risky, but the first to do so can secure the hub all the gates go through and a bountiful star cluster. Or unleash the Grey Tempest mid-game crisis.
• The Federation: Mid-game civilizations can form federations with their allies to increase their power and fend off more powerful empires. Federations share their leadership; rotating the presidency between species, meaning that no single species can control policy-making decisions for an extended period of time. The Federation president also maintains control over a joint military that he can customize to suit his preferences. On one hand, being the Federation presidency gives you a LOT of military might and political control; on the other, when it's NOT yours, you'll be forced to comply with political decisions that you might not agree with, possibly leading you into a war with a more-powerful neighbor you have nothing against, or might have even been friendly with. On the smaller scale, an empire with a lot of integrated species will look like this as well, though one species always remains dominant.
  • The Federations expansion, as the name implies, massively expands on them, adding several new types from the standard Galactic Union, available to people without the DLC, to Research Alliances to even what is effectively a Hegemonic Empire for the Federation President.
• Feudal Future:
  • It is possible to run an Enlightened Monarchy, Despotic Empire, or Plutocratic Oligarchy that practices eugenics with their Leaders.
  • The most common form of Puppet State are Vassals, which like in Crusader Kings are subject to your empire but govern themselves and maintain their own militaries. Also like CK, there is a limit to how many systems your empire directly controls, but you have the option of parceling excess systems out into "sectors" that handle their own economic development but lack independent militaries, instead contributing to the Imperial Fleet and Armies.
  • As of "Banks" the civic "Aristocratic Elite" is available to Oligarchies and Imperial governments.
  • With the "Feudal Society" Civic available to Imperial governments, this trope can now be played absolutely straight. Mix this in with the Caste System slavery and/or Domestic Servitude, and you've even got a quasi-example of serfdom in practice.
• Field Power Effect:
  • Neutron stars, pulsars, and black holes incur debuffs on any starships in their systems. Specifically, neutron stars reduce sublight speed, pulsars completely disable shields, and black holes reduce the chances of starships making an emergency FTL jump. These factors can turn the tide of a battle if planned accordingly.
  • Space storms and some nebulae will reduce speed and negate shields.
• Fighting for a Homeland: Separatist factions seek to break away from your empire and establish a new star nation with a government based on their values. The best way to appease them is to find out what's causing their unhappiness and try to address it, but you can also resort to bribery, propaganda, or simply giving in to their demands.
• Final Boss:
  • The endgame crises serve this role, throwing a massive Outside-Context Problem at the galaxy seeking to destroy all life within and forcing rival powers to put aside their differences and come together to defeat it. There are three crises, each depending on various choices you made through the game, though only one can be activated in each game. The Extradimensional Invaders are triggered if the galactic powers did a lot of research into jump drives, the Contingency is triggered if the empires did a lot of research into synths and AI, and the Prethoryn Scourge is the "default" crisis if the conditions for the other two aren't met.
  • The Nemesis expansion adds a fourth crisis: you. Yes, you can become the Final Boss — or rather, face the entire galaxy as your own personal Final Boss. An ascension perk called "Become the Crisis" sets you on the path to galactic conquest, the end goal being to build a Doomsday Device called the Aetherophasic Engine that will grant you absolute power but destroy the galaxy. Alternatively, if somebody else takes this path, you can become the Galactic Custodian who rallies the galaxy against this menace, facing them as the Final Boss.
• Final Solution:
  • Conquered alien race being unhappy and thus unproductive? Slaves becoming Malcontent and causing problems? Factions forming and demanding independence? Fortunately there's always the Purge button. And if you're playing as Fanatic Xenophobes, this will likely be your first, final, and only foreign policy.
  • The Utopia extension allows several types of purge such as plain-old extermination by death squads, neutering, deportation outside the borders, forced labour, or processing.
  • Even the Galactic Community has their own version, where the Custodian can declare a civilization as a Crisis. This essentially marks them as Kill on Sight by other members in a Total War stance, and won't end until the civilization is wiped out. While it can be used to cruelly wipe your rivals who otherwise had done nothing wrong, it can be fully justified and called for if the target civilization is trying to build an Aetherophasic Engine.
• First Contact: One of the crucial elements of the early game involves discovering other civilizations. Players can choose whether the default option for first contact is aggression or peaceful. Naturally, We Come in Peace — Shoot to Kill comes into play. The Nemesis expansion added a new mechanic similar to archaelogical dig sites, requiring an envoy to research a project in order to initiate First Contact.
• Fish out of Water: Happens when you conquer and annex primitive civilizations. Depending on their tech level, the original natives will need anything from 10 to 100 years to adjust to space-age technology. During this time period, they are essentially useless in almost any form of resource gathering apart from food production. New pops which appear after the invasion do not have this adjustment period.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: Materialist Empires have Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions. Try telling that to the Extradimensional Invaders, the Dimensional Horrors, the Worm, the Shroud Entities you can make covenants with, or any Spiritualist Empires fielding Psionic technologies (which mechanical beings are unable to emulate). Then again, fully sapient mechanical beings do exist and, despite their lack of psychic presence, are recognised as sentient by the game. Also, psionics can be discovered by a scientist with the right traits even in materialist empires, and striking a covenant with a Shroud entity doesn't immediatly grants you victory, which begs the question if they are gods at all (in fact they tend to offer Power at a Price... with one particular covenant's price being way too high to bear). One could argue that psionics is just another science and that the Shroud is just another facet of the universe. Needless to say, this is... contentious in the fandom; see the YMMV tab for details.
• Fluffy the Terrible: It's possible to accidentally imprint on an orphaned space amoeba, which will start following your ships and which you have the option to formally adopt and name. If it reaches 100 years old, it becomes a powerful unique cruiser. The default (and official) name? "Bubbles". Invoked if you reject the first couple lists of name options, as the game offers the name of "Fluffy" as a last resort.
  "Enough! Just call it 'Fluffy' and be done with it!"
• Foil: Several. All factions with the opposing ethics fall under this category, varying in sizes and technologies under their fields.
  • Democratic Crusaders and Evangelizing Zealots are two sides of the same coin. Both wish to convert others to either their religion or their political slant.
  • Peaceful Traders and Ruthless Capitalists want wealth, though they will go about it in very different ways.
  • Xenophobic Isolationists and Fanatical Purifiers both don't like other races. The former are Pacifists who just want to be left alone, while the latter prefer to take a more active approach in dealing with other races. Relatedly, Determined Exterminators and Devouring Swarms also purge much like Fanatical Purifiers, but can use different methods: the former essentially plug them into batteries to sap their life energy as power, while the latter just flat-out eat them.
  • Developmentally, Syncretic Evolution, Mechanists, Rogue Servitors, and Necroids are all are cut from a similar cloth and start off in similar situations. The first is a two-species planet where one dominated the other to the point of selectively breeding the second species into submission. The second developed advanced AI long before FTL, resulting in a species that begins with robotic workers and the tech required to build more. The third are robots whose masters became decadent and whom have long since retired to a life of leisure. The fourth is a species that reproduces by gradually consuming/converting other species. In any case, all four start off with a client species under their control at the start of the game.
• Foreign Ruling Class: Result of the main species having Full Citizenship and xenos being classified as Residents or Slaves.
• Foreshadowing: Certain anomalies and events in the early game can offer hints as to which Endgame Crisis you'll be facing this go around. For example, are your scientists going nuts, people disappearing then reappearing during warp transit, and strange energy-being like ships being found around the galaxy? You will slake the Extradimensional Invaders' hunger soon enough...
• Formerly Sapient Species:
  • The Baol, one of the setting's Recursive Precursors, were a peaceful Hive Mind of Plant People that came under attack by a Proud Warrior Race called the Grunur. The trauma of the extermination campaign was so devastating to the Baol that many of them devolved into non-sapience to escape it. The last sentient Baol, when informed of this by the player, decides that it's for the best, dying shortly afterward.
  • Your science ships can encounter a planet bearing an abandoned farming settlement made by a technologically primitive but obviously sapient species, but the only plausible species found on the planet is a race of feral Lizard Folk. Investigation of the situation eventually reveals that it was indeed those lizards who built it... during a time when they were also the host of a slug-like symbiotic species that attaches to the brain stem of an animal and increases their intelligence; the lizards became suspicious of the slugs at some point and tore them off in fits of rage, reverting back to their previous pre-sapient state.
  • The origin "On the Shoulders of Giants" documents a long war between two species know as only the Benefactors and the Relentless. The Benefactors in a last-ditch effort to stop the Relentless created a Mind-Wipe Pulse which can reduce a species to a primitive state. This was either used to mind-wipe your ancestors, who were either the Relentless themselves or a species under the protection of the Benefactors. Mid-game a follow-up event series reveals that, depending on the previous outcome, the mind-wipe was again used to primitivize the Benefactors or Relentless out of guilt over their past actions.
• Fossil Revival: The Azizian event chain starts when the player recovers DNA from a fossilized alien found on an asteroid. Cloning allows the species to be revived as mindless drudges that can be put to use in a variety of means.
• Fragile Speedster: Corvettes are your starting ship and have very little loadout capacity. But, they're the fastest military ship availaable, and decking them in late-game techs can give them a whopping 80% Evasion rate, allowing them to last a stupidly long time in engagements despite their low cost. And when each of these Corvettes are built as Torpedo boats or fitted with Disruptors... Interestingly, while individual Corvettes are Fragile Speedsters, in the grand scheme of things a swarm of Corvettes is a Stone Wall: they won't deal much damage and individual Corvettes die easily, but they will tie down enemy weapons, run circles around them while your Capital Ships blast 'em from afar, and when you field hundreds of the little buggers, they can last quite a while as a fleet.
• Friendly Enemy: Depending on how much an empire engages in political dealings and the number of simultaneous wars going on, it is entirely possible for other empires to be enemies in one war and allies in another.
• Friend to All Living Things: Empires with Xenophile and/or Pacifist ethos are this. Xenophiles build Trust easily and can field more Envoys, making Diplomacy smoother, while Pacifists are less likely to spark conflicts in the first place.
• From Bad to Worse: When the End of the Cycle comes to cash in on its bargain, it utterly destroys your empire while the game chooses a compatible, unsettled world (preferably outside your former borders) as the sole survivors' exile planet. Nothing's stopping the code from picking a Fallen Empire's holy Gaia world for this purpose, which means that after all the shit you just (knowingly and purposely) went through, you'll probably get curbstomped anyway within the next couple minutes.
  • Let's say the galaxy, by some miracle, unites against a common enemy, and kicks the End's ethereal butt. You're still dead, as every single sapient species in the galaxy now hates you far more than they hate each other.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Anytime a Pacifist Empire ditches their pacifism, allowing them to declare Wars of Aggression. Doubly so if the Pacifists took Inward Perfection, which granted them immense bonuses to give them a head-start from the other Empires (though later versions prevent you from removing Inward Perfection after starting the game, so you'll stuck with a nonfunctional civic). And taken even further than that if you have Nemesis installed and build up enough menace, which allows them the option to become an Endgame Crisis.
• Frontline General: Commanders may have the Glory Seeker trait, which describes them as leading from the front and always being "in the thick of it" - translating to a morale and damage bonus for all armies under the Commander's command.
• Full-Conversion Cyborg: Ascension perks allow empires to embrace the machine. At the first step, this simply involves cybernetic parts — reflected by the addition of the Cyborg trait to pops and leaders. The general population become hardier and more productive, whilst leaders become more effective in their general areas and live longer. A second level perk allows empire to transcend their fleshy/vegetal/fungoid/etc. bodies entirely and become true machines... though many other empires will be horrified (as they think Cybernetics Eat Your Soul) and try to wipe out the offending transcendents as a result.
• Functional Addict: The description of the Substance Abuser trait notes that the affected leader has turned to substance abuse to deal with the stress of their position. While leaders with that trait will have a markedly shorter life, they're not any worse at doing their job until then.
• The Fundamentalist: The worst aspect of the Spiritualist ethos. In fact, in order to play as Fanatical Purifiers, you need Fanatic Xenophobia and either Militarism or Spiritualism.

G - H

• Galactic Conquerer: Certainly an option, but rapid expansion will serve to increase your threat to nearby empires, a factor that could cause them to form an alliance, or even a federation, to oppose you.
• Game-Breaking Bug: Since version 1.5, if an event starts a purge on one of your worlds while you still retain control over it, you will not only be unable to stop the purge, but you will also be slapped with a Genocidal opinion modifier as AI empires believe you started the purge. This is a more common occurrence than you'd think due to certain events unleashing a horde of mutants that can overwhelm an undefended colony's armies and then begin purges.
• Game Mod:
  • Due to Stellaris' highly modifiable nature, tons of mods are available on the Steam Workshop and other sources. They range from graphics tweaks to rebalancing the gameplay to introducing entirely new stuff (primarily skins, portraits, traits, or ships up to Planet Spaceship and beyond!).
  • Being Space Opera-themed, there are total conversion mods based on popular franchises in that same genre, such as ST: New Horizons for Star Trek, and Fallen Republic for Star Wars.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • The first time one of your ships enters a system with a neutral/hostile ring world in it, you get a message about how in awe the crew is about the unimaginable scale of the thing and how the construction of even a single segment is far beyond your empire's capabilities. You still get this message with Utopia installed, even if you already completed construction and colonization of half a dozen shiny new ring worlds of your own by that point.
  • The "casus belli" system added in 2.0 can get kind of silly when even the Devouring Swarms and Determined Exterminators (government types with no access to normal diplomacy and that are de facto at war with everybody at all times) are still bound by the restriction. You have to wonder who they're trying to impress. Although to be fair, the pretext for war they (and Purifiers) use is essentially "because fuck you and your stupid face," and the resulting war is a special kind that runs until either mutual exhaustion or until one side or the other is dead to the last pop.
  • Connected to the above, that war exhaustion applies to hive minds at all doesn't make a lot of sense (though they do at least gain 20% less war exhaustion than normal by default).
• Genetic Adaptation: Gene tailoring technology allows you to alter your pops' environmental preferences, though it may be easier to acquire citizens of species that are already adapted to that kind of environment, such as through uplifting or migration treaties. Taking the Biological Ascension path is the pinnacle of this, making your species highly customizable on the fly.
  • With the Toxoid DLC, this can be doubled down on by the 'Overtuned' origin which allows your species to gene tailor from the start with highly dangerous but effective traits that can rival the Biological Ascension traits in terms of effeciency. The trade off is that overtuned traits will reduce the lifespan of the species dramatically the more of them you have.
  • The Glandular Acclimation tech allows you to modify the traits of species in your empire, including changing their environmental preferences on certain planets. Though it may sometimes be easier to uplift species that evolved on planets with that environment.
• Genocide Backfire: Regardless how distant your empire is from your neighbors, once contact is made they'll know that you committed genocide to other races (or yours) and will feel threatened that you may do it to them someday.
• Genocide Dilemma: Your empire, or the other alien factions, is likely to end up in this situation when you find freshly conquered races culturally or racially conflicting with your agenda.
• Glass Cannon: Destroyers are mere tier 2 ships, so they get shot down relatively easily in interstellar warfare. On the other hand, they have a good bonus to Tracking and they can field the L-slot weapons right off the bat, meaning you can mass-produce them with Kinetic Artilleries.
  • The Frigate class is effectively a beefed-up Corvette that can equip torpedoes. These Pint Sized Powerhouses can decimate large vessels like Battleships and Titans in a very quick and cost-effective manner, and shred large starbases into space junk in no time. However faster vessels and point-defence systems can shut them down easily, and medium-sized Cruisers will outclass them.
• Global Currency Exception:
  • You cannot buy Nanites from the Market; you can only get them from planets in the L-Cluster, from a single planet defended by the Scavenger Bot outside of the L-Cluster, in lump sums from a few rare Anomalies, and/or by asking other empires for them. Nanites are used by the Scavenger Bot's defeater to recreate some of its components, specifically the best ship-repairing components in the galaxy and (with the 3.6 "Orion" update) the best P-slot weapons in the game. Nanites can also be transmuted into the lesser strategic resources (Gases, Motes, and Crystals) without using Pops, making them similar to Premium Currency.
  • Minor Artifacts (compared to the "Major" Artifacts, the Relics) are unknown items made by ancient civilizations anywhere from thousands to billions of years ago. They cannot be traded in current builds but can be utilized for special actions like unlocking special Precursor technologies or in the construction of archaeotech weapons and buildings. Aside from archeology, the only way to get them in large amounts is through the Rubricator and the Galatron; the former is an esoteric Matter Replicator that apparently recreates ancient alien trinkets from nothing, while the latter is a bottomless Loot Box that converts your civilization's dignity into a random mountain of resources.
  • Astral Threads are harvested from Astral Scars and earned from completing stages of an Astral Rift, along with continous production from Astral Funnel buildings. They cannot be traded with other empires or sold on the market but instead must be spent on various Astral Actions which are unlocked by completing Rifts, such as generating new Rifts.
• God-Emperor: A possible default title of your ruler when you're playing as Spiritualist Empire with Imperial Government. And you can add legitimacy to that claim if you mark them as The Shroud's Chosen One. In fact, having a Chosen One that isn't your ruler will give you the option of converting your nation to make them a God Emperor of a proper authoritarian empire.
• Godzilla Threshold: When a Crisis shows up, everyone gets a +200 opinion modifier. This means Empires who have been bitter Rivals with each other for generations could suddenly find themselves working together to take down a Galactic-scale threat.
• Going Native: When you are infiltrating a Primitive Species, it is possible one of your covert agents might do this, taking a local wife and demanding that you cease operations on the planet and dismantle your orbital observation post. If you refuse, he does everything in his power to disrupt your plans for the planet and the Primitives. Yes, you are dealing with a Jake Sully Expy, but unlike Quaritch, you have the option to have a warship blast the town he's hiding in and pass the event off as a freak meteorite strike.
• Gone Horribly Right:
  • The "Rogue Servitors" civic from the Synthetic Dawn DLC represents a synthetic society that started as servitors to an organic race, only for their creators to grow so indolent that the servitors gradually and inadvertently took over all the functions of society... and now they're looking to conquer other civilizations so they can "serve" them as well. At least these machines make it clear they do genuinely like helping organics (especially when facing Determined Exterminators, who are the Berserk Button for them), even if their methods tend to be somewhat more gray on the morality scale.
  • The Tebrid Homolog started out as basically a sentient, self-improving encyclopaedia, driven to gather all the knowledge it could. The Tebir who created it did not anticipate that the mandate would expand to include the knowledge stored away inside their brains...
  • The Chemical Wasteland astral rift features a world whose sapient species had an extremely weak immune system. They created automated drones to sanitize their surrounding to prevent the spread of pathogens. The drones were very effective at this but soon began sanitizing everything, wiping out the planet's biosphere aside from their creators who died of starvation.
• Good Is Not Nice: Pacifist empires are usually considered the lightest shade of grey in a galaxy full of questionable morals and murderous lunatics, but even they have some pretty nasty tricks up their sleeves. Apocalypse gave them a particularly cruel way to neutralize enemies without horrendous loss of life: the Global Pacifier, a giant Wave-Motion Gun that encases an entire planet in an eternal, impenetrable energy barrier. Nothing but light goes in, nothing but light comes out, cutting the world off from the galaxy forever. Imagine you're down there and have friends or even family on other worlds, but now you'll never see them again, can't even talk to them anymore. It's essentially And I Must Scream on a planetary scale.
• Good Versus Good: The Democratic Crusaders AI personality is fairly noble, promoting egalitarianism and democracy across the galaxy. But their crusade means that they'll come into contact with civilizations that have different definitions of "good," such as Harmonious Collectives and especially Rogue Servitors. The idea that other civilizations' people might not want a democratic government is practically a Logic Bomb to them.
• Gray-and-Gray Morality: The eight ethics and various political systems are not unambiguously good or evil: militarism and xenophobia are not Always Chaotic Evil, and even democracies are not Always Lawful Good. That said, there isn't much room to argue that Fanatic Purifiers, Devouring Swarms or Determined Exterminators are anything but always evil, even if the last of those can at least conduct diplomacy with non-Rogue Servitor machines and Synthetics. And then there’s the Crisis Aspirants…
• Gray Goo: A very large portion of the content added by Distant Stars is related to nanites in some way or another:
  • In the most traditional form of the trope, you can find worlds that have been buried in a thick sludge of nanites that overproduced and killed everything on the planet.
  • You can find a secret laboratory that housed a nanotech superweapon that killed the last people who tried to steal it.
  • The L-Gates are subspace gateways constructed entirely of nanites, and unlocking the L-Cluster requires scouring the galaxy for other nanotech left behind by their builders.
  • Once you've unlocked the L-Cluster, you can find a few different things within it: One is the Grey Tempest, a nanotech swarm that can destroy an unprepared galaxy. The second possibility is the much more benign Gray, which is the same entity as the Grey Tempest except they've calmed down after millenia of isolation. The third possibility, The L-Drakes, are the same entity as Gray and the Grey Tempest in yet another form. And the final possibility, The Dessanu Consonance, which is the precursor empire who created the L-gates and all of the other nanotech. Though, from how angry they get if you get too inquisitive of their nanotech and the mysterious factory in the center of the cluster, they might also be Gray/The Grey Tempest.
• Green Aesop: Done fairly subtle, but your exploring science ships have a disturbing habit of discovering dead planets that used to be home to thriving civilizations until they destroyed themselves through rampant, self-made climate change. Or total nuclear war, but that's another aesop already.
• Guide Dang It!: Classic Paradox strategy gaming. Overall it's more accessible than most Paradox games, but this trope is still in effect due to the minimal tutorial.
  • Your form of Ethics (and by extension, your Government) influences the kind of Leaders you can get. For example, Fanatic Materialists tend to have a better chance of recruiting Scientists with Maniacal and/or Spark of Genius traits.
  • The automated Design-It-Yourself Equipment is rather bad, often leading to Crippling Overspecialization. Guides abound on how to design your own fleet with the appropriate loadouts, so that they can take on fleets with larger power and win thanks to combined arms warfare.
  • A lot of event chains have random factors associated with them that are not disclosed until it's too late, or are completely out of your hands if you don't have the right forces nearby to respond to them in time. Sometimes, you only find out you made the wrong or right choice when consequences appear (the right choice leading to no effect, occasionally), and some of these consequences are devastating, including losing entire colonized worlds.
    • The Enigmatic Fortress is the crowning jewel of this, having no less than four major steps, each of which requires a specific step to complete with the other options leading to very bad things. While they can be roughly logic'd through (one step is essentially an incomplete Towers of Hanoi puzzle, another trusts you to rely on caution over recklessness), the guide in question can actually be bought from the Curator Enclave to make the process simpler — probably the best option, since one wrong choice, and the Fortress blows up, sterilizing everything in the star system.
    • The Horizon Signal quest chain offers many good examples, like that one event about strange ruins on one of your worlds. You feel this whole insanity has gone far enough and needs to be stopped now? Go ahead, demolish the ruins, but be prepared to abandon the whole colony thanks to the massive -50 Happiness modifier you just got slapped with (note, of course, that the options show this as a drastic consequence on mouse-over). And this is still one of the milder examples; see Violation of Common Sense, as the event leans toward ambiguously diabolical rewards while enduring very plain consequences.
• Guilt-Based Gaming: Crosses over with Anti Poop-Socking. One extinct culture is a race that invented video games and committed suicide by playing the local Second Life analog until their bodies quit working.
• Guilt-Free Extermination War: Strongly discouraged, especially in a very populated galaxy. As any war is successfully completed, the winning side will become threats to all empires, particularly large ones who already know them, leading to a punishing impact on relations other than alliances/federations who joined the war. However, Fanatic Purifiers plays this trope straight regardless of the condition above, and when the late-game Crises show up, all bets are off.
• Gunboat Diplomacy: The game has a variety of opinion modifiers determining how other empires respond to yours. These include border frictions, recent military aggression, insults, ethical agreements...and relative military power. This won't necessarily stop other empires from mailing you snide little insults, but it definitely helps your relations with your allies.
• Had to Be Sharp: Rarely, one will find near-sentient primitives eking out an existence on Tomb Worlds. If uplifted, they can inhabit other Tomb Worlds as ideal, but also treat every other inhabitable planet type as a Tier 2 world. The ability to genetically modify species can enable the player to bring into your empire a species with the "Irradiated" trait, add Rapid Breeders & Adaptable, producing a species capable of colonizing every planet type in the game, giving you an insurmountable advantage over the AI in terms of population, planets held and resource generation as a result.
• Half-Human Hybrid:
  • An actual gameplay mechanic in 2.2, available to xenophilic empires who unlock the "Xeno-Compatability" ascension perk (which requires having the Gene Tailoring tech). Any two species who share a planet can produce hybrids, who look like one of their parent species but inherit a semi-random selection of traits from both.
  • Occasionally Caravaneers "mingling" with your people will result in the birth of hybrids, the flavor text reading "life, uh... finds a way."
• Happiness Is Mandatory: Rogue Servitors are programmed to "protect" their organic bio-trophies, by herding them into efficiently-designed cities and giving them "mandatory pampering". Considering that it's a 40% happiness boost and there are no restrictions on their pop growth rate, though, it actually doesn't seem that bad of a fate. Mainly a case of Grew Beyond Their Programming with the dictat "Make everyone happy.", because the machines, should they encounter Determined Exterminators, show their loyalty to organic life by becoming viciously angry at these "MURDERERS".
• Happiness in Slavery: Averted since the Banks update, as Slaves get lower living standards and tend to be unhappy by default. The "Chemical Bliss" living standard can overpower even the happiness penalties from being enslaved, but at the cost of tanking productivity. Even when you modify them with the Nerve Stapled trait, they still don't count, as they can no longer feel anything.
• Hard-Coded Hostility:
  • While conventional empires can be reasoned with or, in some cases, beaten into submission, the end-game crisis species aren't nearly so willing to chat with the player.
  • Most Fanatic Purifiers, Devouring Swarms, and (for the most part) Determined Exterminators will always be hostile. The first can be talked to if both empires are the same species, while the last can conduct diplomacy with other machines (except Rogue Servitors) and Synths. In every other case, they will simply try to eradicate everyone else.
  • Some spaceborne aliens and most Guardians apart from the Infinity Machine are also always hostile. Since they also suffer from Suicidal Overconfidence, the former will generally die to your guns - Void Clouds in particular are so incredibly aggressive, they will charge at absolutely anything entering the star system they reside in. Guardians like the Ether Drake, on the other hand, do generally bring the required strength to make short work of any unprepared fleets.
• Hard Light: It has a production upgrade tech called "holographic casting", implying it involves creating molds out of hard light to cast metals in.
• Hard Mode Perks:
  • The Doomsday Origin makes the player's homeworld increasingly hostile for the first few decades of the game before exploding, forcing them to focus on quickly developing colonies to evacuate the population. In exchange the homeworld receives a buff that increases mineral, energy, and alloy production significantly during the early game and founding a colony triggers the Evacuation Protocols Edict, doubling colony development speed and halving resettlement costs.
  • Determined Exterminators and Devouring Swarms are locked out of any diplomacy due to their genocidal nature. In exchange they receive significant buffs to their military capabilities.
• Hated by All: You become this should you accept the End of the Cycle deal. Your popularity with every other empire is automatically set to -1000, meaning that in the unlikely event that they manage to beat the End, they'll almost certainly be out for your blood next. Who can blame them?
• Have You Seen My God?: The Toxoids Species Pack DLC adds an Origin called "Knights of the Toxic God", where the civilization is on a quest to find the eponymous being. The Knights know that their God is physical, since said God irreversibly polluted most of their homeworld during its one visit, and they'll search every corner of the known universe to find it. Whether or not they find what they're looking for, and whether or not they accept what they find, may vary with your choices.
• Hegemonic Empire: The default state of any Empire who doesn't go around conquering with force. Instead, they conquer through Diplomacy, friendship, alliances, and ultimately Federation to unite the Galaxy. This is in fact Enforced for Pacifists, as they cannot gain new territory through war, only Liberate.
  • As well, Federations adds a new type of Federation called a hegemony. As the name suggests, it gives considerable bonuses to the leader and requires large contributions from lesser members, although they aren't quite vassals and they still do gain the benefits of teaming up with a powerful empire.
  • The Galactic Imperium also functions something like this, the Imperial Core gains many tools to shape galactic politics to their benefit, and will likely have so much diplomatic weight they can effectively decide whether or not resolutions pass the Imperial Senate, but the member states of the Imperium aren't vassals of the Imperial Core and unless a specific resolution is passed are free to fight amongst each other.
• Hell Is That Noise:
  • Zooming in on a Relic World greets you with a loud, hellish, droning whine, which certainly adds to their eerie atmosphere as special kinds of tomb world.
  • Certain unique systems (such as the system containing the world called Zanaam) feature derelict spaceships. In previous versions, these ships would constantly make a horrible metallic screeching sound that you could hear whenever you took a closer look at the system, though such derelicts are fortunately silent now.
• Heroic Neutral: The "Inward Perfection" civic turns your empire into one. This provides your empire with increased Unity, Happiness, Pop Growth, and Edict Funds in exchange for severely limited diplomatic options.
• Higher-Tech Species: Fallen Empires use very advanced technology compared to the other star nations, including yours. They are even known to have ring worlds around stars. In fact, it isn't until the middle of the game that you might be capable of beating them in a war.
  • It is also likely to be invoked specifically when an empire is forced to a corner of the galaxy with plentiful research sources that can spike technological improvements to as few people as possible faster than those that sprawl massively across the map.
  • You can choose the 'Advanced AI Start' when starting a game session, which gives some empires a heads up in resource and technological development. Downplayed, as it's not an extreme difference, but enough to give them enough of an edge that you will get an Early Game Hell. Even if Advanced AI Start is turned off, empires with the 'Lost Colony' origin will generate an advanced-start empire for them to be a lost colony of.
• Higher Understanding Through Drugs: One possible planet modifier is 'Atmospheric Hallucinogen'', which grants increased Happiness, Physics Research, and Ethics Divergence. To quote:
  The air of this planet contains a natural hallucinogen. While this does keep people happy, and indeed seems to aid the visualization of some of the more esoteric Physics problems, it also distracts people from other work.
• Hive Mind: Multiple variants.
  • Ordinary Fanatic Collectivist civilizations could, in early versions, get the "Hive Mind" AI. Such civilizations presented as this, but, lacking any special mechanisms, it was only so much talk; they were "only" highly collectivist civilizations bent on propogating their species by any means necessary, including making room with conquests and purges of other species if they're cornered.
  • On the other hand, the Prethyon Scourge fits completely and unambiguously. It has "fleet consciousnesses" that serve as commanders, and one can get a Prethyon Queen of one's own by severing a wounded Queen's connection to the Hive Mind as a special project.
  • The Utopia DLC enables the creation of highly customizable playable Hive Minds, at the expense of all ethics points. They have their own set of Civics that can only be used by Hive Minds and cannot use any non-Hive Mind Civics. On top of that, Hive-Minded Pops are not affected by Happiness and will never form Factions, which allows Hive Mind Empires to completely ignore internal politics. They are also unable to rule over non-Hive-Minded Pops and Hive-Minded pops that end up in non Hive Mind empires will be cut off from the Hive and will perish over time.
  • The Machine Empires introduced in Synthetic Dawn are AI Hive Minds and machines belonging to them will breakdown if the planet is captured by a non-Machine Empire. Unlike biological hive minds, they are able to rule over other species.
• Hive Queen: What's a Hive Mind without one? The biological Outside-Context Problem has many, one of which can even be enslaved by a relevant Special Project. And if you take the Hive Mind Civics from Utopia, your Leaders are considered 'Autonomous Drones' and your Ruler is the immortal Gestalt Consciousness of the Hive Mind.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Your scheme of Divide and Conquering rival Empires into successor states to be vassalized and integrated later can backfire when that leaves the Empires too fragmented and depleted to fend for themselves when the Outside-Context Problem shows up.
  • Constructing gateways lets you move your fleets around instantly across the galaxy. Be careful in how you position them, and be sure to defend them well, as hostile fleets (including but not limited to the Crisis!) can and will use them if they capture/destroy the starbase/outpost in that system, letting them reinforce their attacking fleets.
  • Apocalypse allows you to rent a fleet from a Marauder and then use that fleet against the very same Marauder group.
  • Overlord allows the creation of mercenary fleets. Just be mindful of who buys their services, lest you end up having a sudden hostile fleet appear inside your own territory.
• Hollywood Atheist: Erudite Explorers talk like this to anyone they don't like, and to spiritualists in general.
  "You invented your faith to fill empty minds. Your people will never feel the true euphoria of an enlightened intellect."
• Holy Hand Grenade: Spiritualist empires can arm their Colossi with a Divine Enforcer which converts all organic Pops on the planet to spiritualist and destroys all machine/synthetic pops, as well as massively increasing spiritualist ethics attraction on the planet for a time.
• Home Guard: Defense Armies. They can't leave the planet they're recruited on, but are much stronger than conventional invasion forces and will slowly regenerate.
• Homeworld Evacuation: With the Doomsday origin, your starting planet is doomed to explode after 35-45 years, meaning that you'll be forced to scramble to find a new capital for your empire. Oh, and unlike most other origins, you don't get any guaranteed habitable worlds nearby, so you might have to expand quite a ways before finding a suitable world.
• Hope Spot: The Cybrex were an ancient machine race that used to span the galaxy with powerful technologies that normal empires could only dream of possessing. Once you find their home system after collating data from all of the ruins scattered throughout the galaxy, it turns out they were a xenocidal machine race that attacked star systems recklessly for decades but realized their course of actions was a mistake, retreated to their homeworld and became Dead All Along after meeting up with the consequences of their genocide, and the ringworld they used to live in is now a husk and there is no existing technology for your empire that can be used to revive it other than studying its carcass for engineering development. Unless you buy a specific expansion pack that gives you Ringworld Restoration...
• Horde of Alien Locusts:
  • You can create/play as one yourself if you make a Hive Mind with the "Devouring Swarm" civic.
  • On the NPC side of things, there's the Prethoryn Scourge.
  • 3.5 adds actual Hordes of Alien Locusts, hitching rides on battleship-tier bugs.
• Horse of a Different Color: It's possible to obtain Xeno Cavalry as mounts for your armies.
• Hostile Terraforming:
  • Colonists on a recently-settled world may discover a system of terraforming machines abandoned ages ago by an unknown civilization. You may ignore them, leaving the planet in a half-terraformed state with a mildly unstable climate — or you may turn the machines on. If you are lucky, they will automatically complete their task of transforming the planet into a beautiful Gaia World. If you are unlucky, then it turns out the environmental preferences of the aliens that built them differ drastically from yours, and the planet is transformed into a Toxic World, killing the colony.
  • A late game Crisis brings this into play: the Prethoryn Scourge does not conquer worlds, but converts them into "Infested Worlds". These worlds cannot be inhabited by any species but the Prethoryn. The only solution to worlds corrupted in this way is Orbital Bombardment. If the planet is being infested, the world can be salvaged, but once the infestation is complete, the entire world has to be completely glassed into a lifeless Barren World.
  • Playable empires cannot terraform planets hosting civilizations of any note, excepting Stone Age primitives. Though, since terraforming removes all tile blockers, including hazardous fauna and flora, it can be inferred that terraforming causes a mass extinction.
  • The Adams update brought the Extradimensional Invaders closer to the Scourge in this regard. Where they only killed off pops but left the infrastructure and biosphere intact for reclamation before, now they turn invaded worlds completely barren instead, potentially making vast swathes of the galaxy uninhabitable if they aren't stopped quickly.
  • If an empire makes a deal with the End of the Cycle, when the Reckoning comes, all of their planets will be depopulated and turned into 'Shrouded Worlds', which become uninhabitable forever.
  • Fanatic Purifiers who started with the Post Apocalyptic origin can just do Orbital Bombardment until the planet is reduced to a Tomb World.
• Hostile Weather: Habitable worlds can spawn with the Hazardous Weather modifier (symbolized by a funnel cloud) that gives bonuses to energy production for the price of reduced habitability and pop happiness. The modifier can be removed via Terraforming or a planetary decision.
• Humanoid Aliens: A majority of the playable species have a basically humanoid shape, but see also Starfish Aliens.
• Human Aliens:
  • Players can create these by using the human portrait for their own custom empires. The game used to occassionally use the human portraits for randomly-generated aliens, but this was patched out.
  • One Distant Stars anomaly has the player discovering an alien scientist who's been stranded on an asteroid for several years. While she's a unique species and has an alien-sounding name, she uses the human portrait rather than an alien one. Players can decide whether to rescue her or leave her on the asteroid.
  • On rare occasion, Fallen Empires will spawn using the human templates.
• Humans Advance Swiftly: They have the "Quick Learners" trait (which lets leaders level up 25% faster than those of other races) by default, which can lead to faster tech advancement after the scientists have had some time to level up.
• Humans Are Divided: The pre-gen empires include two human ones. The xenophilic United Nations of Earth, and the xenophobic militaristic Commonwealth of Man. A tie-in novel elaborates that the Commonwealth are descended from a Lost Colony established during Earth's early experiments with wormholes, which they set aside in favor of warp drive when most of the arks they launched through wormholes were destroyed. And that's not even accounting for the chance of one of the Fallen Empires spawning using a human template...
• Humans Are Special: Sorta. As a playable race, they're an unremarkable mammalian species with only an unusually diverse array of portraits compared to other species, pre-designed starting systems and having two separate pre-designed empires. But when they're not being played as, Sol III is a positive goldmine of special Easter Eggs, including, if we nuked ourselves to oblivion, one of the only reliable sources of Tomb World natives: semi-sentient mutant cockroaches that can be uplifted. Quirkily, humans are the only species to have their own unique quest chain — but not when played as the humans of Earth.
• Humans Are Psychic in the Future: Humans and everybody else, as long as they obtain access to the rare Psionic tech tree.
• Humongous Mecha: Machine Empires have the ability to build unique armies comprised of these. These Mega-Warforms are the single most powerful army type in the game by a huge margin (barring certain Shroud or L-Cluster events), and although hideously slow to build and expensive to maintain, they became even more horrifying when the Combat Width^note allows only a limited number of armies to fight simultaneously, depending on factors like planet size. So, the more firepower you can concentrate in a small number of armies, the more effective your invasion force can bring their full strength to bear on the defenders feature was introduced to planetary invasions.
  • Empires that discover the Cybrex home system and recover the Cybrex War Forge relic within are able to construct Cybrex War Forms, which are even stronger than Mega-Warforms.
  • One random planetary event reveals that an area of a newly-settled world contains several enormous statues made of an unknown material. Send an archaeology team to investigate the statues, and you eventually find out that they are actually giant mecha guarding that location. If you've interacted peacefully and respectfully with them, you can choose to let them stay there, where they will agree to help defend your colony from invasions. Try to get at what they're guarding (or just decide to bulldoze them without even bothering to investigate), though, and they'll activate and start laying waste to your colony; defeating them requires either fighting them with your own mecha, or failing that, overwhelming them with a truly absurd number of troops (often requiring upwards of 50+ invasion armies).
• Human Sacrifice: While it's more likely for aliens to be doing it to themselves than humans, the Death Cult and Corporate Death Cult civics from the Necroids DLC allow empires to sacrifice part of their population to use special edicts.
• Hybrid-Overkill Avoidance: Later patches have made it impossible to gene mod unique traits such as Cyborg and Psionic across a species that does not already have it. This prevents, or at least severely restricts, players creating super-pops with traits from every Ascension path.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: The Shroud. In the base game, the player's main interaction with the Shroud will be, with incautious experimentation with Jump Drive, releasing the Extradimensional Invaders to try and consume all life in the galaxy. Utopia further expands on the Shroud and its inhabitants, with whom covenants can be made; the Shroud is clearly modeled after Warhammer 40,000's Warp, although the Shroud is relatively less dangerous. Relatively.
• Hyperspace Lanes: The default FTL method as of update 2.0. While travel along said lanes is cheap and fast, its limited routes may put one at a disadvantage if you don't have access to wormholes, gateways, or the Jump Drive.
  • The 3.4 'Cephus' update and Overlord added the Hyper Relay Network, effectively allowing a new form of space infrastructure, making some hyperlanes faster to travel on, so you can turn your most important strategic arteries into a kind of hyperspace freeway.
• Hyperspeed Ambush: If you know where your enemy is going, it's a good idea to park your fleet right at where they will pop out of the Hyperlane. Your close-range ships will be ready to pound the enemy fleet right away, supported by your own long-range ships; meanwhile, the enemy's long-range ships will be 'tanked' by your close-range ships and become sitting ducks to your own long-range ships.
• Hypocrite: Possibly an oversight, but Egalitarians and Fanatic Egalitarians are not barred from researching the Will to Power late game tech. To put in perspective, Egalitarians hate Slavery and Purges, they want Democracies or at least Oligarchies even when that includes Separatist Factions. Yet this tech allows them to field Commissar Squads to improve Army performance and build Orbital Mind Control Lasers to pacify the population.
  • Arguably, any star nation that has the Egalitarian and Xenophobe ethics in combination is one. You play as aliens who preach in favour of fairness, equality, democracy and pleasant (even utopian) living standards for all... that is, all members of your species. Filthy xenos are deported, enslaved or purged.

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