Stellaris / Tropes I to Z

This page covers tropes in Stellaris.

Tropes A to H | Tropes I To Z |

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I - M

• I Am Not a Gun: If you play as a Species with the "Clone Soldier" origin and the Pacifist or Fanatic Pacifist ethos.
• I Will Fight No More Forever: If you colonize a Tomb World, on occasion the residents will turn Pacifist after taking in the horrific devastation around them. Particularly poignant if you're playing as a Militarist species.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Played with. Besides the usual difficulty settings (which give the AI bonuses at higher difficulties), there are options to select the number of AI empires spawned at the start of the game session, and how many of those empires have an "advanced" start^note In other words, they've been on the galactic stage longer than you, so they have an advantage in terms of expansion. Generally speaking, it is a different experience starting in a game with few AI empires and few (or no) "advanced" starts, as compared to a game with many AI empires and "advanced" starts.
• Immortal Ruler:
  • Gestalt Consciousnesses have "rulers" that are actually manifestations of the Hive Mind as a whole, making them effectively immortal.
  • Similarly, Machine Intelligences have individual units chosen as leaders and given more autonomy; barring a horrific miscalculation by the Intelligence or a fatal programming error in the units acquired from biological empires, they are immortal. The ruler never has such errors.
  • Synthetic Ascension makes all leaders and rulers immortal machines. If the ruler's term is for life, they become this trope. They can still die in combat, however, if they're in a Federation that chooses presidents with a last-man-standing arena match.
  • Contact with the Shroud can turn one of an empire's Leaders into an immortal Chosen One, potentially including your ruler. If said leader isn't the current ruler, you will be given the option to convert your nation into a Authoritarian aristocracy under the rule of the Chosen One, who becomes the new immortal God-Emperor.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Governors with the Righteous trait or the identical Non-corruptible if they are Gestalt are described as such. They reduce crime on planets in their sector by 25, and are unable to get the Corrupt or Corrupted Drone traits.

  "This leader is incorruptible and harbors strong convictions regarding what is right and what is wrong."

• Individuality Is Illegal:
  • Modus operandi of civilizations with the Collectivist and especially the Fanatic Collectivist ethos, until they were replaced in 1.5 with Authoritarian ones. The in-game quotes demonstrate this:
    "Society has long since evolved past the insignificant rivalries and concerns of the individuals. We are numerous but one, and the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. We stand truly equal... the purpose of the individual is simple: strengthen the collective. To enter the blackness of space we move as one, and we shall not be weakened by wanton separatism."
  • Conversely and interestingly, a Direct Democracy can also potentially veer into this arena depending on additional ethos, traits, and policies, potentially even resembling something like a Hive Mind.
• Industrial World:
  • Planets can be designated with specific focuses by the player. Forge, Industrial, and Refinery Worlds fit this trope best, giving bonuses to Alloy, Consumer Good, and Strategic Resource production respectively. Flavor text mentions how the surfaces of these worlds are entirely filled with factories and noxious fumes.
  • Machine worlds are planets where only robots or cyborgs can live. They cannot support farms, but all pops on the planet are more productive and take up less space.
• Infinity -1 Sword: Kinetic Battery and Artillery since the 1.4 nerf. They come only in Large size, but unlike Mega Cannons and Lances, that means they can be fitted en masse on Battleships, while Cruisers and Destroyers can also use them. Late game, this will be your bread-and-butter weapon to Alpha Strike the hell out of enemy fleets.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • The Extradimensional Invaders' weapon, the Matter Disintegrator, is definitely this. They have good range, do more damage to hull than other energy weapons, and are more accurate, but they can only be obtained by researching debris from Extradimensional Invaders (and even then, it's just a chance). Their performance against shields is still poor, however, and state-of-the-art heavy energy weapons still have better damage and range.
  • The XL weapon slots offer the heaviest firepower a weapon techline can offer. Sadly, only Kinetics and Energy variants are available for now with no equivalent form for Missiles. The Arc Emitter has huge damage randomization, but its 100% Accuracy, Shield, and Armor penetration makes it ideal as Alpha Strike weapon. Evasion, Shields and Armor won't protect against it, and when there are 100 Battleships firing in unison, the random damage becomes irrelevant. Then there is the Focused Arc Emitter, which is the regular one on steroids.
  • The Jump Drive and its upgrade the Psi Jump Drive are the best FTL methods bar none. Mind the fine print, though.
  • The targeting and evasion modules obtained by defeating the Enigmatic Fortress are the best in the game, hands down.
  • Defeating the Ether Drake gives access to Dragon's Hoard (yes, the planet is really named that), a molten world which produces 30 Energy Credits and Minerals each when mined. It also gives access to two things down the line: Dragonscale Armour, which is the strongest armour possible, and the ability to find, and hatch, a dragon egg. The baby space dragon is nowhere near as powerful as its parent, but it's still nearly in line with a Fallen Empire Titan.
  • Empires delving into Psionics can obtain Psi Shields and the Psi Jump Drive. The former is even stronger than the Dark Matter Deflectors used by Fallen Empires, while the latter is the single best FTL Drive in game, hands down.
• Inhumanable Alien Rights: Rights in an Empire are set by species. In Xenophobic Empires, you're allowed to enslave, massacre, or simply eat any filthy xenos in your Empire. Even if you don't have the Xenophobe Ethos you can still turn a non-primary species into second class citizens by forcing them to live in impoverished conditions, denying them some or all positions in the military, forbidding them from colonizing other planets, forbidding them from traveling freely altogether, forbidding them from inhabiting certain worlds, forbid them from reproducing enough to make new pops, or kicking them out of your empire altogether.
  • If you don't want to uplift or protect a pre-sapient species in your Empire you can kill off their pops when convenient, kill off their pops systematically, or allow your citizens to hunt them to extinction.
  • While you can give Artificial Intelligences full citizen rights, you can also force them into slavery or simply make it a capital offense to create, or be, an advanced AI.
  • If you combine the Xenophobe and Egalitarian ethos then it can get quite jarring, because your primary species enjoys a free democracy and utopian living standards... while also enslaving and deporting filthy xenos.
  • Enforced if you play as Fanatic Purifiers, Devouring Swarm, or Determined Exterminators: you can only purge them efficiently or work them to death, devour them for an influx of food, or plug them into battery stations to gain Energy Credits, respectively.
• Insignificant Little Blue Planet: Sol - and therefore Earth - appears in 50% of games where the player is not playing a civilization originating from the Sol system. Earth and its native life can be found in one of five different conditions:
  • The planet is inhabited by Humans in a Medieval Age, with Authoritarian, Spiritualist, and Xenophobe ethics.
  • The planet is inhabited by Humans in the midst of a global war, with the threat of nuclear weapons on the horizon, and Materialist and Fanatic Militarist ethics. You can choose to invade the planet in the middle of this global war, just as The Race did, and you'll even get an achievement for it.
  • The planet is inhabited by Humans in Fragmented Nation States, just like in Real Life. Your survey ship detects a clutter of primitive satellites, sublight exploration probes throughout the system and the remains of manned missions to Sol IIIa^note the Moon. You can build an Observation Outpost. Some time later, the planet may descend into Nuclear War. Afterwards, the planet becomes an uninhabitable Toxic World with Nuclear Devastation.
  • The planet is inhabited by Humans on the cusp of becoming a spacefaring civilization, under a world government called the United Nations of Earth, with Xenophile and Fanatic Egalitarian ethics. This civilization will become properly spacefaring, in all likelihood, within a century of game start^note No primitive civilization is allowed to develop FTL within the first 25 years of gameplay, but after that the mean time to happen for advancement to the next age is 100 years.
  • The planet is a Tomb World and a nuclear wasteland, inhabited by a pre-sentient race of arthropoids (who strongly resemble cockroaches) that can be uplifted.
• Instant-Win Condition: If you hit either the Domination, Conquest, or Federation victory conditions, then you win then and there. This is relevant if you've contracted with the End of the Cycle, and thus have fifty years of supreme superpower before the bill arrives - or if the bill has already come due, because the End will usually attack the other empires before killing you.
  • Finishing "Become the Crisis" event chain will destroy the galaxy, with you leaving its dead husk and becoming the Shroud entity.
• Intellectually Supported Tyranny: You can have a materialistic imperial government type, named Despotic Hegemony, with a research speed bonus and absolute disregard for political rights.

  "This government is a materialistic form of hereditary autocracy, where citizens are viewed as little more than cogs in the state machinery. Efficiency and technological progress are valued above all things."

• Intelligent Gerbil: The game lets you create your own alien race and empire from scratch, and the options range from Earth humans and Rubber-Forehead Aliens on one end to Starfish Aliens (including sentient plants and fungi) on the other. In between, there are numerous options for customizing your species based on real-world Earth animals, from foxes to butterflies to peacocks, though they're mostly cosmetic given that you set the species' traits separately. A gecko-based species◊ has become particularly iconic within the fandom, associated with the genocidal Fanatic Purifiers that wish to purge the galaxy of all other alien species/xeno filth. If you have Cities: Skylines installed, one of the options is Chirpy, the mascot of that game's Twitter knockoff Chirper.
  • This is followed to the spirit if not to the letter by the "lithoid" class, the majority of which consists of anthropomorphizations of various types of rocks and minerals found on earth.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • There are many modifiers that affect your ships' performance against the various Endgame Crises. Most of them can be seen and even attained long before the crises actually show up in the lategame.
  • Empires with the "Lost Colony" origin can easily find their original homeworld by opening the species tab and clicking on their "Go to Homeworld" icon.
• Interstellar Weapon: The infamous Gigastructural engineering mod allows one to build a Nicoll-Dyson Laser (imagine a Dyson Sphere, but instead of absorbing all the output of a sun, it gets pointed in a specific direction) capable of destroying all a star system's planets from a distance.
• Inverse Law of Utility and Lethality: While all military ship sizes are completely customizable, their design is limited by the number of slots provided in each section of a ship. So one ship can suffer Crippling Overspecialization with a build powerful enough to wipe an entire battleship fleet but too inaccurate to stand against a swarm of smaller corvettes and fighters that followed them.
• I Owe You My Life: One anomaly on a toxic planet can reveal an ancient warship that the planet's atmosphere is slowly corroding away, starting a special project for a construction ship to repair it with new components must be done in a limited time frame. If successful, an onboard AI program will reawaken and relay that it had spent the past 4800-ish years stuck there and that it was only days away from being irrevocably degraded. Sensing that it has new parts from you, it will consider you its new makers and join your empire out of gratitude for rescuing it as a special Commander along with its ship if you allow it.
• I Shall Taunt You:
  • The Insult diplomatic action, used to reduce Opinion. While useless for most Empires, Pacifists can use this to goad the target to declaring war on you. And you'd want to, as Pacifists suffer a happiness penalty for declaring war, while Fanatic Pacifists are outright forbidden from declaring war.
  • Patch 2.7 adds envoys that you can send out to harm your relations with other nations. This is usually used when you want to declare someone your Rival.
• Jack of All Stats:
  • Post-Heinlein patch, Kinetic weapons deal increased damage against Shields while having some Armor Penetration and high rate of fire. This means they can engage smaller crafts thanks to their high rate of fire, excel in stripping enemy Shields, and can still fight against heavily Armored ships as opposed to their previous incarnation where they were practically useless.
  • Matter Disintegrator weapons ignore 50% of Shield and Armor, making them pretty good all-around weapons.
  • Destroyers and Cruisers have a good flexibility of weapons and modules, allowing them to take on small and large targets, and can even be fitted with the Large Kinetic Artilleries for Alpha Strikes.
  • Missiles post-Banks patch get a slight damage bonus against shields (but not as much as kinetic weapons) and slight armor penetration (but not as much as energy weapons). Prior to the patch they had neither of these bonuses, which had left them more in Master of None territory.
  • Averted in later versions of the game, as weapons have been sorted into various specialties; currently, no one type of weapon is good against all forms of defense.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Keepers of Knowledge used to not like it if you research some techs they consider forbidden. Seeing how 2 out of 3 endgame Crises are caused due to you delving into such techs, they had a very good point.
• Just a Machine: The view of Spiritualist civs on AIs, which lack a psychic presence. Even if they're the result of Brain Uploading, the Spiritualists regard the original species as having committed mass suicide and place no value on the lives of the newly-minted machine species.
• Kaiju:
  • A type of planetary modifier is "Titanic Life", reflecting giant creatures that inhabit its biosphere. If the right quest chains are followed, such a planet can even allow "Titanic Beasts" as recruitable armies (although in limited numbers). Those that follow the Psionic ascension path can get a giant Psionic Avatar from Shroud events. Machine Empires top them all, however, with the Mega-Warform, Humongous Mecha that you can build an infinite number of, assuming you can handle their construction and upkeep cost. In terms of raw power, however, absolutely nothing trumps the Nanite Warform, but you can only get one if you're lucky with the L-Gate event chain.
  • Other events that can give you giant-sized armies include: finding a giant frozen space slug (lets you make giant slug armies that are about as strong as Titanic Beasts), finding the Cybrex homeworld (allows you to build Cybrex Warforms, which are even stronger than Mega-Warforms), and finding the Sentinel archaeology site (creates several Humongous Mecha defense armies on that planet that are roughly on par with Mega-Warforms. Just don't tick them off, or they will level your colony).
• Kaizo Trap: Did you really think that excavating the Rubricator, a Relic which can replicate Minor Artifacts (which is normally not a renewable resource), would be that easy? Of course not. You have defeat the Smaug-expy Shard before you'll get it, and there are only vague hits towards what will suddenly appear when you finish the excavation.
• Karma Houdini: Usually happens in late-game; an Empire can engage in extremely deplorable acts, but once they're sufficiently powerful, none of the other Empires will dare to attack them despite having extremely low opinions of them.
• Keystone Army: In Apocalypse, if a Great Khan dies, the empire they built disintegrates.
• Kick the Dog: Plenty of ways to do this, though Purging tops it all. That and using Armageddon Orbital Bombardment on a planet, slowly killing their population one by one, until none remains.
• Kill It with Water: The Deluge Machine Colossus weapon, which dumps something like an entire moon's worth of water onto a planet in one go. Any non-Aquatic pops on the planet (including robots) instantly drown, all districts are destroyed and all buildings on the planets are broken (but can be repaired), leaving behind a factory-fresh Ocean world for your own Aquatic pops to move in and settle.
• Killer Rabbit: Nothing prevents a species with one of the "cute" portraits from being a bunch of Militaristic Xenophobes who will rain fire down on your worlds if you show the slightest weakness. One empire that can generate from an event are a species of Fanatic Purifiers that look like cute gecko people.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Kinetic weapons, like the other two types, come in several varieties such as autocannons, mass drivers, and rail guns. Notably, Kinetic Weapons deal additional damage to shields and comes off very effective against unarmored targets. Late in their progression they even gain long-range artillery that fares better than traditional laser weapons. One can even pursue improving said guns further through late-game repeatable upgrades.
  • BFG: In addition to the long-ranged Artillery, the Mass Accelerators (aptly named the Mega and Giga cannons) are the apex of Kinetic weapons in general. Puncturing enemies at an exorbitant range while large enough to make it an Alpha Strike, but too large for Cruisers to carry around.
  • Played even straighter post-Kennedy patch. Kinetics gain even more bonus damage towards Shields and some minor Armor Penetration, while Energy weapons get penalty to Shields. This significantly boosts Kinetics' usefulness especially in early to midgame, as most ships rely on Shields in those periods. Even lategame, they're still useful as your bread and butter weapon, while Energy is usually reserved as an Armor-melting option once Shields are down.
  • Downplayed post-Cherryh with the overhaul of the armor system — now that armor manifests as another form of shielding, kinetic weapons were rebalanced to be effective against shields, but poor against armor. A fleet bristling with kinetic artillery is still extremely effective, however.
• Kirk Summation: If an Insult isn't referring to your species' appearance, it will likely be a criticism of your ethos and culture.
• Klingons Love Shakespeare: One possible anomaly involves your scientists stumbling upon a broadcast of one of the lost plays of a well-known playwright, evidently preserved for posterity by an alien fan who saw the original. For the two human empires, the playwright is explicitly named as Shakespeare himself.
• Knowledge Broker: The Curator Enclave sells information on uncharted stars, intel on certain Leviathans, access to their database which significantly boosts your research, and can assign one of their peerless scientists to work for you. All for a nominal sum of credits.
• Land of One City: Empires with the Life-Seeded civic start on an idyllic Gaia World, but their primary species can only colonize other Gaia worlds, the rarest planet type in the game. Such empires can go on to claim neighboring star systems and build space stations as normal, but won't be able to properly expand onto other worlds until at least the mid-game when advanced Terraforming technology lets them make their own Gaia Worlds, or advanced gene-editing lets them change their core species' planetary preference. Since by then regular empires will have settled upwards of a dozen planets, Life-Seeded empires will have a challenge keeping pace with their rivals.
• Language Drift: Downplayed, where First Contact with a Lost Colony is significantly easier than with a fully foreign empire... But a formal First Contact mission is still required before understanding develops.
• Last Stand: An Empire on the eve of conquest will gain the 'Would be Annexed' condition, which will require extra Wargoal points to spend on.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The Enigmatic Observers Fallen Empire may do this by quoting Shakespeare when you initiate diplomacy. They will also directly tell you not to break the fourth wall.
  Observer: "All the world's a stage. And all the [Species] are merely players. You are a player, are you not?"
  • Another example occasionally comes from probing the Shroud;
    Suddenly, in painful moment of clarity, the nature of our existence is laid bare. A multiverse where thousands of galaxies like our own are locked in endless cycles of conflict.
    It begins, it ends, and then it begins again. Each time with trillions of lives hanging in the balance.
    "So it is," a voice whispers, "and so shall it always be."
• Leeroy Jenkins: Part of the Horizon Signal questline can turn one of your Commanders into this, describing now that they've seen the end of their life, they're more willing to take risks and charge blindly into the fray. Mechanically, it gives said Commander increased speed.
• LEGO Genetics: High society development and researching certain technologies allows your race to be modified on the fly, allowing traits to be added or removed modularly to individual planets at a time. Complete the biological ascension path, and you get much more control over the Traits — even down to changing their aesthetic-only portraits. Entire species can transform from Nerve-Stapled, functionally crippled species into an exact mechanical clone of another species in the span of a few months.
• Lemony Narrator: Some of the technology descriptions and event pop-ups, in a Paradox tradition, can be somewhat sarcastic.
• Leitmotif: Faster than Light's main melody shows up in many other songs throughout the game.
  • The motif in Creation and Beyond at 4 minutes is also quite common.
• Lethal Joke Character: In a game of Galactic politics and power plays, Fanatic Xenophobes get significant enough relationship malus that they will usually have trouble in foreign relations. The lethal part is they get a massive Influence discount when expanding their territory, so they can quickly expand and secure enough territory to start snowballing. And once they have snowballed enough, they won't even need to care what the rest of the galaxy thinks.
• Life in Zero G: Biological species with the "Void Dwellers" trait and the "Habitat" climate preference have evolved to live in artificial space habitats, and therefore suffer large penalties when settled inside gravity wells (i.e. on planets or moons).
• Lighter and Softer: The dev diaries explicitly described the First Contact story pack as "utopian" compared to some of the previous DLCs they released, which revolved around things like space vampires, galactic conquest, and toxoid species. Instead it just has two origins involving a greedy MegaCorp enslaving pre-FTL civilizations.
• Living Battery: Generic Machine Empires' main option to keep conquered organics around is this, via the Grid Amalgamation slavery option (also serves as a Shout-Out to The Matrix). Alternatively, they can be put through Chemical Processing, which will kill the pop for larger energy yield.
• Lizard Folk: Reptilian races, although some portraits resemble amphibians, dinosaurs and even turtles.
• Longevity Treatment: There are a variety of technologies that add extra years to your Leaders' life expectancies, it's also possible to use gene tailoring to add the Enduring (+20 years) or Venerable (+80) traits to one or more of your species.
  • There's also an event where you find a tree floating in space with sap that can extend your leaders' lifespans, or be distributed to the whole population for a boost in morale.
  • It's also possible for certain leaders to become immortal through events or other special conditions.
• Long-Lived:
  • Species with the "Enduring" trait live 20 years longer than "average" (80 years), putting their life expectancy at around 100; meanwhile, the "Venerable" trait adds 80 years to their lifespan. Inverted with the "Fleeting" trait, which reduces average lifespan by 15 years. This is further inverted with the "Substance Abuser" debuff that Leaders gain at random, which shortens their lives by 20 years, or the "Maimed" debuff that archaeologists can get if they seriously screw up on an expedition (reduces lifespan by 40 years). There's also certain Technologies, Policies, and Government types that also boost lifespan. All of these modifiers can and will stack. With no debuffs, some random quest rewards, and some applied science, you can get Leaders that live for twice their species' default lifespan.
  • Lithoids, due to their mineral biology, live 50 years longer than average. Necroids, who are essentially undead, live for 80 years longer than average. Both of these can stack with other methods of life expansion.
  • Synth Leaders (acquired through research) are true immortals, and you can get them anytime after the tech is done or through a rare Anomaly reward as early as Year Five.... Empowering one of your leaders as The Chosen One through a shroud event will also make them immortal.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Neither pacifist nor xenophile empires can cleanse worlds of pre-sentient critters by force. What they can do is terraform them, which removes any and all tile blockers - even the rudimentary intelligent ones.
  • There are two triggers that make Awakening a near-certainty: when you conquer a Fallen Empire, or when you capture one of their planets. But see, they can't Awaken mid-war, so you can declare war that will never end with every Fallen Empire to lock them out from ever Awakening.^note Of course, declaring war against every Fallen Empire at once qualifies for Too Dumb to Live - unless you are powerful enough to actually take them all on, in which case you probably don't need to use this loophole in the first place - so you have to declare war with Fallen Empire A, smash all their stations and forces without capturing their planets let alone actually conquering them, and repeat the process with the other Fallen Empires. Once you're done depleting their forces, you can conquer them one by one, and since other Fallen Empires are still 'at war', they can't Awaken.
• Loot Box: Parodied with the Reliquaries you can purchase from the Caravaneers, particularly the empty lootbox that, after opening, gives you a sense of pride and accomplishment.
• Lord British Postulate: Even the End of the Cycle can be beaten back by the galaxy's remaining civilizations with luck, focus, a well-unified galaxy, and lots of firepower. (After which, the "fool of an empire" that summoned it will probably be conquered or purged for their crimes.)
  • Some players have even purposely summoned the End of the Cycle with the intention of the galaxy surviving AND them being able to rebuild their Empire from Exile. Of course, any chance of success means meticulous planning and luck from the moment the player first presses the unpause button.
• Lost Colony: One of the pre-gen empires, the Commonwealth of Man, is a human lost colony that ended up in Deneb during an experiment with wormholes. While the United Nations of Earth ended up xenophilic fanatical egalitarians, the CoM instead became xenophobic fanatical militarists.
  • The Federations DLC added this as a possible origin for player empires. If chosen, an advanced empire of the same race will spawn, with a special dialogue choice upon the player empire meeting them.
• Lost Technology: A lot of Origins have the civilization sitting on some kind of lost technology that they can no longer comprehend.
  • The Remnants live in the ruins of what used to be a City Planet, and the ruined arcologies contain technological secrets.
  • Void-Dwellers have lived in space since time immemorial, and their capital hab has an Arcane Replicator that provides for their initial industrial needs, but that they lack the knowledge to copy. They also don't quite know how to build new habs yet at the start (though it's initially a moot point, because the Arcane Replicator isn't providing enough alloys for any such project).
  • The Shattered Ring origin has a civilization born on the remnants of a Precursor Ring World. They've lost the technology to construct new rings, and the advanced resources they rely on come from an Arcane Generator left behind by their forerunners.
• Lovecraft Lite:
  • Hyperspace beings invading our universe to feed on the Life Energy of its inhabitants? Eldritch Abominations wreaking havoc on entire solar systems? Ancient alien races who show up one day out of the blue and sterilize one of your colonies because you accidentally "contaminated" one of their holy worlds? The Stellaris universe can be a pretty scary place. Good thing you've got Frickin' Laser Beams to fight them off.
  • The Prethoryn look like something right out of the Cthulhu Mythos. They can also be wiped out with due application of Five Rounds Rapid.
• Love Potion: A planet modifier called "Atmospheric Aphrodisiac" exists, which according to the in-game description "seems to put people in the mood to reproduce". Accordingly, it boosts habitability and growth speed due to doing lots of excercise, but it also reduces government ethics attraction, because people are busy doing things other than their jobs.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • The spawn location and distribution of neighbors has a major impact on chances of success. Sometimes the player will have room to expand over a massive section of the galaxy with no resistance; sometimes they'll be hemmed into their starting cluster by multiple hostile empires.
  • Obtaining the Galatron relic. It only comes out of Reliqueries with a 1 in 200 chance and you can only buy 6 reliqueries per game, meaning each player has a roughly 3% chance of finding it.
  • Higher non-scaling difficulty settings turn the game into this since starting locations and the attitudes of AI neighbors are random. As of 3.2, starting out next to a genocidal empire on Grand Admiral can result in a Hopeless Boss Fight unless you're exceptionally skilled and know it's coming.
  • The Precursors that the player spawns next to can absolutely break or make a game. Some Precursors are worse than useless and confer no practical bonus. Others will give you an entire free sector with a unique world that gives massive bonus, which will help you balloon out of control in the early game.
• Macross Missile Massacre: Like the Kinetic and Energy weapons, your race can start a technology with these. Missile weapons are the Master of None, it does not ignore armor and it comes with a specific variant that ignores shields. Unlike the other two weapon types; Missiles can't be dodged, instead they are destroyed individually with point-defenses if one should pursue in attacking others with missile technology. Swarmer Missiles are essentially this trope. Equipped in large mounts, these not only serve to destroy small ships at an effective pace, but are also designed to overwhelm point-defenses. Subverted when you look closer at their stats; Swarmer Missiles simply have huge Evasion to ignore Point Defenses.
  • Reworked with the changed mechanics of the Cherryh update — missiles are now perfectly accurate and can reacquire targets that dodge out of the way and completely ignore shields, but can still be shot down by point defenses. Three variants of missile exist: conventional Missiles, which are more effective against unarmored hulls; Torpedos, which are slower but more damaging than missiles and are highly effective against armor; and Swarmer Missiles, which are less powerful than the other types but can soak up a lot of fire from point defenses, paving the way for more effective varieties of missile or strike craft.
• Made a Slave:
  • Empires are allowed to enslave parts of their populations. Xenophobes are only allowed to enslave aliens, but Authoritarians can enslave anyone, including their own kind.
  • The 1.5 patch made these policies apply per species and the Utopia extension allows several types of slavery, such as the classical work-slave (in mines, plantations and houses), indentured workers permanently indebted to their employers,BattleThralls, or even livestock - genetic engineering even allows for assigning traits such as "Delicious" and "Nerve Stapled" to species, which make them more nutritious, and as docile and unthinking as cows, respectively!
• Madness Mantra: The Worm and its disciples: "WHAT WAS, WILL BE! WHAT WILL BE, WAS!"
• Mad Scientist: The "Maniacal" trait on a scientist indicates this. They can unlock some unique, if morally dubious, technologies if given a position as a department head. Including an unprecedented x5 modifier to researching Psionic technologies.
• Magikarp Power:
  • Living Metal is a very hard to find Strategic Resource^note It can be found in 3 ways: on or near worlds in Fallen Empire space, as a rare anomaly on any possible world outside a regular empire's core system, or with 100% certainty on destroyed Contigency Hubs/the Contigency Main Core. Its minuscule buffs do little with ships that rely heavily on shielding, but on a Engineering-focused empire provided with Crystalline technology beforehand, its regenerative capabilities proportionally grows along with the ships built with it, allowing ships, even a corvette, to withstand powerful hits from a Fallen Battleship and live to take another shot.
    • As a mutual effect from Living Metal, Hull points usually hits this in the tight spot. There is no conventional way of improving hull points without encountering crystal entities or strategic resources, and the only option to increase hull independently is through repeatable research which requires Cruiser technology, let alone the lots of research from the tech needed for the effect to be useful enough. An Engineering-focused empire can take advantage of this, but must also keep up with kinetic weapons and armor if one should pursue so. Once done, hull regeneration will be large enough^note Hull regeneration does not cover hull points in a static number, instead relies on the maximum percentage of the hull to suffice every attack thrown at your ships, especially from Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors-weapons by more powerful empires, completely obsoleting armor and shields altogether.
    • With Utopia installed, Living Metal also helps with the construction of megastructures. Even a single Living Metal mine can shave years off the construction time, allowing an empire to reap the benefits of the installation much quicker.
  • Authoritarians don't get much at the start aside from Slavery and Purge, which may anger your neighbors (and if said neighbors include the Enigmatic Observers...). But late-game, Authoritarians get several vital technologies that reduce Ethics Divergence, which can and will make your population (including conquered xeno races) conform with your Ethics, and thus eliminating much of the Factional internal strife.
• Magitek: Psionic technologies require psychic organisms to work, whose power is then amplified by the requisite infrastructure.
• Majority-Share Dictator: Once a single empire in the Galactic Community has more diplomatic weight than the rest of the members combined, there's nothing the rest of the galaxy can do but watch as they pass whatever resolutions they want, up to and including declaring themselves Galactic Emperor. A similar scenario can occur for any federation where votes are determined by anything other than one-member-one-vote, although in that case empires can still choose to leave the federation as long as it's not a Hegemony.
• Mana: Influence is rather difficult to obtain, with only a handful of monthly sources. In contrast, they are used to fuel Edicts, the 'spells' of the game, maintain Alliances, and build some of the most advanced structures. From 1.4 onwards, fewer buildings have an upgrade cost, which allows for more common colonization and more frontier outpost projects. From 1.5 and the change of Faction system, happy Factions also provides Influence. As of 2.7, Influence is also used in the Galactic Community.
• Martial Pacifist: Nations with the Pacifist or Fanatic Pacifist ethos cannot declare wars of aggression. They can only declare war to retake lost colonies, to contain Fanatic Purifiers and other Absolute Xenophobes who are too insane and unreasonable for any diplomacy to work, to stop the rampage of an Awakened Ascendancy, or (for non-Fanatic Pacifists) to create client states of a similar ethos. The galaxy is just too dangerous to go without a military, though. Space Pirates, spaceborne lifeforms, conquest-hungry neighbours and far worse things render self-defence a necessary investment.
• Master of All: Synths gain 20% bonus to ALL production (except for food, but they don't need to eat).
• Matter Replicator: The Resource Replicator structure enabled by the Matter Generation technology. It can create a substantial amount of material by consuming an even greater quantity of energy.
• Mecha-Mooks: Robotic Armies and Android Armies are available to those who have the right technologies. Machine empires can research more powerful mechanical armies, all the way up to Mega-Warforms.
• Mechanical Insects: With the Synthetic Dawn expansion, each major species archetype (mammalian, fungoid, etc.) will build robots loosely themed after themselves. As such, the insectoid model resembles a floating, mechanical arthropod. However, the plantoid and necroid models also use arthropod-like forms, standing on multiple legs.
• MegaCorp: A possible government type, if you choose the Oligarchy authority and "Corporate Dominion" civic. There's also the "Trans-Stellar Corporations" tradition, that unlocks private colony ships. For the more spiritually inclined, there is also a "Mega Church" alternative. Megacorps in general are promoted to their own individual goverment type in the heavily trade-focused Megacorp expansion.
• Mêlée à Trois: An event called War in Heaven becomes one of these with two fallen empires fighting each other along side their respective allies while all the factions that decide to stay neutral form an alliance to fight both fallen empires.
• Mercenary Units:
  • The Apocalypse DLC has Marauders who will hire themselves out as mercenaries after the mid-game year, until the Great Khan arrives and all fleets hired out defect to him.
  • Overlord DLC allows regular empires to convert their fleets to mercenary enclaves that can be hired by other empires, and they pay dividends to their patrons.
• Metal-Poor Planet: A possible negative modifier that can occur after surveying a habitable world. Since you're already an interstellar polity this isn't a necessarily debilitating situation as you can import minerals from elsewhere, but it does mean such a planet can have fewer mining districts than usual and they'll be less productive than usual.
• Mid-Season Upgrade: Existing spaceships can have their designs revised and be upgraded with new technology as it comes out, though refitting ships requires returning them to a shipyard. These upgrades can represent a crucial shift in the Balance of Power during a war when one side makes a technological breakthrough that significantly improves their combat ability, but beware that larger fleets require more yard time to implement all these upgrades, potentially leaving their foe a strategic opening.
• Might Makes Right: While this has always been the case one way or another from the day the game was released, the expanded federation mechanics that were introduced with the Federations DLC alongside the 2.6 update signed it into law. One of the many things you can adjust in your federation is vote weight, with one option being "by diplomatic weight". Diplomatic weight represents the sum total of your technology level, empire size, military strength and economic power, which means the moment this law is enacted, it puts the most powerful federation member on the fast track to total domination. If you manage to get more powerful than the rest of the federation combined, you can do whatever the hell you want regardless of the others' opinion on the matter, up to and including turning nominally democratic federations into autocratic dictatorships with your empire as the eternal leader. Sure, the other empires can leave your "federation" anytime they want, but given how strong you are compared to them, this might not be the most prudent decision...
  • The same update also introduced the Galactic Community, a council of every empire in the galaxy that chooses to participate in it. Everything there is governed by its members' diplomatic weight, which can result in one single super-powerful empire passing or repealing galactic laws with impunity despite the entire rest of the galaxy opposing the motion. This council is called the Galactic Senate, so naturally the resolution to shrink the Galactic Council ^note a council of the most powerful members of the Community with special powers down to one member has the description: "I AM the Senate!".
• Mighty Glacier: Battleships come with plenty of Large weapon and module hardpoints, a whopping 80 Armor, and are the only ships capable of mounting the XL weapon hardpoints. They also have near-zero Evasion, and Large weapons will have trouble hitting the smaller ships, allowing Corvettes to heckle them with Death of a Thousand Cuts. And if these Corvettes are geared with Torpedoes and Autocannons, they can cut a Battleship into pieces in a short time.
• The Milky Way Is the Only Way:
  • Even with access to wormholes, gateways, and Jump Drives, there is no mention of intergalactic travel featured in gameplay (with the Prethoryn Scourge being the only exception via Informed Ability). On the other hand, you can choose the size and shape of the starting galaxy and start in a random sector as well as renaming star systems, subverting this trope.
  • The Distant Stars update added the L-Cluster, a small cluster of about a dozen stars set somewhere outside the galaxy that can only be accessed by researching the mysterious L-Gates, interstellar gateways found around black holes that have been modified by nanotechnology. Aside from the addition of the L-Cluster, there's still no means of leaving the starting galaxy.
• Minmaxer's Delight: A few negative traits are very easy to work around and show up a great deal in optimized races.
  • Sedentary (or Bulky for robots) has no real repercussions for non-slavers and non-Authoritarians because they don't forcibly resettle pops anyway and migration, even with a penalty, can take care of the rest. In 2.0 the resource required to resettle pops was changed from valuable Influence to comparatively cheap Energy, so it's even less important to have this malus since lategame empires can simply hoard Energy. In 2.2, however, this can be a bit problematic, since new colony's early growth now relies on migration, and slow migration means that it'll take more time to get pops up to where you can upgrade the administrative building to level 2, to stop that completely.
  • Pre-2.2, Slow Breeders is commonly taken due to having almost no drawback past the first ten or twenty years, where excess food production will easily outweigh the penalty to growth rate. Robot or slave-heavy empires can turn this into an advantage since it limits their founder species population, which is beneficial to them. Post-2.2, however, this is probably one of the worst traits you can pick, due to population growth being massively important. With the addition of the Necroids DLC, Slow Breeders has come back around to being an advantage for those taking the Necrophage origin, since they reproduce best by converting existing pops into their species (so your main species isn't going to be reproducing normally anyways).
  • Weak is a almost free pick for any race who picked Syncretic Evolution or plans to rush robots since their founder species will never be gathering minerals or fighting in armies anyway. One potential disadvantage marking this lower than the other traits is that it will discourage Militarism.
  • Luxurious for Machine Empires, due to the fact that +20% pop assembly cost only amounts to +0.6 mineral per Replicator job, which you can easily overcome with good mineral income. The fact that it's the only negative Machine Empire trait that gives +2 trait points is even better. Post-2.7, Luxurious became more detrimental as robots now require alloys in their construction, and losing 0.2 extra alloys per month per Replicator adds up quickly.
• Misunderstood Loner with a Heart of Gold: The rare (due to fairly specific requirements) Fanatical Befrienders, an Ascended Meme from the pre-release Twitch streams. They love other aliens and would absolutely love to be everyone's friend, but unfortunately, are rather repugnant and natural introverts.
• Mobile Factory: The "Federations" DLC introduces Juggernauts, massive ships even bigger than the previous DLC's Titans with two Wave Motion Guns, hangar bays, and a pair of shipyards that can build smaller ships.
• Money for Nothing: Zig-Zagged. Energy Credits are absolutely vital in the early game, as they fuel your Mineral-mining Space Stations and Fleet. But once you reach mid-game, you will most likely have a strong Financial (read: Energy) production base, so you'll be swimming in Energy in no time and might even hit the resource cap. There's also only a few things that require energy to build, and Minerals are much more important. However, once you get into wars, you'd better have enough Energy income to pay your Fleet upkeep, and some late-game tech options (Terraforming in particular) require huge expenditures of Energy. The various enclaves will let you exchange Energy for Strategic Resources, increased Research speed, or improved Unity generation, as well as other services. 2.2 also adds the marketplace, both internal and galactic, so you can exchange Energy for other goods.
• Monstrous Humanoid: Or Monstrous WhatEverYourSpeciesIs-oid. The "Xenomorph Army" is a group of super-strong, super-ravenous genetically engineered abominations that can be raised and unleashed on the enemy, while carefully observed by knowledgeable scientists from heavily armored bunkers behind the frontline.
• Mook Commander: Titans have a slot for an aura that can buff friendly ships in the same fleet or debuff nearby enemy ships.
• More Dakka: Autocannons in general. They are fast, simple and accurate, but are strictly short-range and are primarily designed to rip a Zerg Rush of Corvettes and Destroyers a new one. Small or Medium weapons en masse on certain ship sections also count, but not always, ranging from Mass Drivers, Laser Cannons, and Missile Launchers.
• Most Writers Are Human: Humanity has no less than three different pre-set empires (though one is technically a machine empire with human subjects) and three name lists, as well as the widest variety of appearance options for pops and leaders. Sol and Deneb (the preset humans' starting areas) are unique star systems, and Earth itself is host to a number of unique events and geographical features.
• Multiple Government Polity: Any Federation or Empire with Vassals is likely to be this unless one empire liberated or released the others. Even then they can vary a great deal in civics and may ethically diverge.
• The Multiverse: Certain events and archaeology digs relating to the Shroud suggest that each Stellaris campaign is part of a united multiverse, and the Shroud is connected to them all.
• Mundane Utility:
  • Machine empires can build the Prediction Engine, which is stated to have been made in vain to predict organics, but it proves adept at manipulating their stock markets.
  • Planet-cracking colossi can be used essentially as enormous mining equipment, cracking worlds of little or no strategic or economic value (eg. habitable worlds so small that colonizing them isn't worth the research and unity penalties, and barren worlds with no deposits) into mineable asteroids with anywhere from 1 to 16 exploitable mineral resources.
  • Colossi equipped with the Neutron Sweep can be used to streamline the process of reclaiming worlds affected by the Prethoryn Scourge, as they can instantly cleanse the surface of any Prethoryn presence without any penalty, leaving behind a Barren World that can be terraformed, instead of a long and intensive orbital bombardment.
  • Colossi equipped with the Deluge Machine can instantly terraform any livable planet in the game to an ocean biome, including empty planets with no pops on them or even your own non-Ocean worlds containing Aquatic Pops (neither of which carries penalties unless the Galactic Community forbids terraforming, since you're not killing any sentient beings with it). Granted, if you're far enough into the game that you have a Deluge Machine, the cost of terraforming is likely no more than a drop in the bucket for you.
• Multicultural Alien Planet: Zig-zagged. There is considerable variation in most species portraits and the Leaders or Planetary population tabs will usually display a wide range of skin/scale/fur colors, but each FTL-empire starts out as a One World Order whose population all share the same ethical values, including either human empire.^note the second one being a Lost Colony on Deneb It is possible for populations to change ethics but more likely on colonies than homeworlds. Pre-FTL species are implied to comprise a number of planetary nation-states but become unified after uplift, discovering FTL on their own, or invasion of course. Further, while it's possible to place multiple species on the same planet, the only way for two species to share the same homeworld is through the "Subterranean Civilization" event chain. The Utopia DLC introduces a trait (Syncretic Evolution) that lets the player start with a second, dim-witted but strong species on their homeworld to act as menial laborers. The First Contact DLC introduces empires with the Broken Shackles origin, where the starting planets begins with many different species, the result of a successful mutiny aboard a slaver ship that subsequently crash-landed upon a planet.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • The Shroud event chain begins with the empire in question gaining Psionic ascension. The empire can then be contacted by something called "The End of the Cycle" which, when you form a pact with it, greatly enhances the empire. Fifty years later, the Reckoning arrives and the empire disappears. Its planets become uninhabitable and the leaders, ships and starbases destroyed. The Shroud's fleets gather in large numbers with nigh-unstoppable fleet power. If the empire is lucky, they gain a new home named 'Exile' from an uncolonized planet, but they have a -1000 diplomacy modifier with every other empire and are left for last as the Reckoning destroys everyone else in the galaxy. If you happen to be controlling the empire, the only option in the dialog box reads "What have we done?"
    • Not that the game goes out of its way to warn you. The option for making an alliance with "The End of the Cycle" states 'do not do this', but this serves as Schmuck Bait to curious players lured by the promise of greatly enhancing their empire. The Shroud-Marker modifier for the planets under the control of empires that make deals with "The End of the Cycle" warns 'Something very bad is going to happen here'.
  • If you encounter the "42 Years and 3 Days" anomaly and choose to observe the discovered timer, chances are that at the end of the 42 year and 3 day long countdown, a random primitive civilization will be destroyed, their world turning into a Tomb World. If this happens and you happen to be controlling a Xenophile empire, the option "WHAT HAVE WE DONE?!" is available in the dialog box.
• My Greatest Failure: A Commander who survives a defeat after failing to protect a planet may gain the Unyielding trait over their regrets.

N - S

• Named After Their Planet: Played straight for the most part in regards to randomly-generated species, though there are exceptions.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: Exaggerated with Fanatical Purifiers empires. Despite the clear plans to seize world domination and wipe out or enslave a number of peoples, for most of its existence, Nazi Germany pursued an active diplomatic policy and to some degree relied on its Axis allies during the war years. Ideologically, their counterparts here, Fanatical Purifiers, are significantly more radical: they are completely obsessed with their views to the point of total fanaticism, they seek to obtain the widest possible "living space" (which, if they are not stopped, will make up the entire galaxy) as well as to exterminate absolutely all other races without exception, and most importantly - they will NEVER maintain diplomatic relations with ANY other race.^note  although, they are still able to conclude a truce, in case they cannot immediately carry out their intentions.
• The Necrocracy: The Necrophage empire origin, which creates Necrophage species, which are more or less Our Vampires Are Different, Recycled In Space. Their defining gameplay trait is that their population grows very slowly on its own, hampering your economy, unless you go out and start converting other species into Necrophages, which happens at a much faster rate. That a Necrophage empire can only fills Ruler jobs and Leader positions with Necrophages lands them squarely in this trope's Half-and-half flavour.
• Negative Space Wedgie: The Extradimensional Portal, heart of the Extradimensional Outside-Context Problem.
• Nerf: Due to continuous patching and rebalancing, a lot of strategies both economic and military that were overpowered going in have been reduced in effectiveness over time. One example that stands out as of version 2.2 is that, due to the removal of planetary tiles, hosting multiple species in your empire has lost most of its gameplay appeal. Where previously each species would grow a pop independently, which allowed for fully settling a new world in record time, now there's only a single "tile" for pop growth that all species have to share, so although the improved immigration stat does speed up pop growth a bit, it's nowhere near as effective as it used to be. Which species is in line to grow is also randomized, so the new mechanic can actually make things worse by consistently choosing a Slow Breeder species as your next pop.
• Neutrals, Critters, and Creeps:
  • Spaceborne aliens can block early game expansion until they are dealt with. Whether through the eagle or the dove is up to the player and their ethics. If they are killed they can provide some resources, provided the killer has researched the relevant situation log notification.
  • A hazard tile on some planets represents hostile wildlife with a puma-like alien monster. It also features their diminutive, friendly cousins with a Cute Kitten badge ("Alien Pets") under the Resource Modifiers section.
  • Fallen Empires are very powerful remnants of Precursor civilizations who have reached their twilight years. While they generally won't start anything, they each have a Berserk Button that will goad them into conquering you (such as encroaching on their territory or settling on their holy worlds).
  • It also has the requisite roving bands of space pirates. An early-game quest involves locating and destroying their space station.
• Neutron Bomb: In the Apocalypse expansion allows empires to build a Colossus Kill Sat, which can be equipped with one of several Weapons of Mass Destruction. The Neutron Sweeper option kills all intelligent life on a targeted world and similarly fries any robots' circuitry, but leaves the planet's infrastructure intact for later resettlement. That said, it does apply a negative habitability modifier to the planet for a few years, representing the effects of lingering radiation and damage to the biosphere.
• New Tech Is Not Cheap: While the majority of the tech tree already follows this line through the classical Technology Levels, the game provides this trope in three flavors:
  • All better technologies are a degree costlier than its previous technology. Building upgrades are sequentially expensive than the initial building on the planet. While in space, ship components are individually segmented allowing a more efficient build if the player decides to ignore the less practical automated designs.
  • Repeatable upgrades are the time-sink of this trope, with each level costing much more research points than the last. Once researched, upgrades will immediately buff all ships throughout the empire without needing a refit.
  • The larger your empire becomes, the more costly each tech becomes. Every planet adds 10% to the base cost, and every pop you control after your first 10 adds 1%. Post-2.2 this is changed to if you go over your Administrative Capacity. However, you can increase that Capacity to help counteract that with some technologies and civics.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Messing around with certain late-game technologies, such as jump drives, can have disastrous consequences for the entire galaxy.
  • Uplifting primitives with extremely different ethos, especially ones like Militarist or Xenophobe, is a dangerous game. They might adopt their uplifter's ethos, partially or fully. Or they might not, and be uplifted as a vassals so treasonous and scheming that Crusader Kings players may feel a sense of deja vu.
  • Bringing about the End of the Cycle is definitely this, and everyone else will hate you for it. (-1000 Reaction)
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The Prethoryn Scourge sterilize every planet they conquer, rendering it uninhabitable. But one of the victory conditions is to control 40% of all habitable worlds, and if you were already close to this goal when the swarm invades, having them reduce the total number of habitable planets (and thus increase the percent that you have) can be the final push you need for a win!
  • If you as a large, xenophobic (or biologically incompatible) warmongering nation on one side of the galaxy starts forcing refugees out of their homes, it can either cause a minor crisis in another empire... or, if the refuge is going through a major expansion period due to settling new planets or building habitats, you just gave them a free, potentially massive economic boost as manpower floods their open job market, for the low, low price of being nice.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot:
  • Given that any pop can become any type of army, it is entirely possible for your (mid- to late-game) empire to create AI soldiers with Psychic Powers who ride to war on giant custom-designed mutant war beasts, or robot-xenomorph hybrids supported by clouds of killer nanites, or any number of insane (but awesome) combinations of troops. The most potent are the Titanic War Beasts with Psy-Warriors, which boosts their already absurd Damage and Morale impact beyond any other unit in the game.
  • It was originally possible if difficult for a species to benefit from the unique traits of two or even three of the game's Ascension paths. A pop modified with the Biological route's unique traits could then be Assimilated by other empires to add the Psionic and Cybernetic traits. A later patch made this impossible by making the unique traits mutually exclusive.
• Noodle Incident: Several types can be implied in the backgrounds of civilization - for instance, a Machine Intelligence that turns on with no memory of how it got there and every other planet in their home system as a Broken World.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: This happens whenever a space civilization invades a primitive planet. You might even be one of the weakest empires in the galaxy, bullied by everyone, but you need just a couple of gene-modded armies to occupy some primitives with muskeets or bows!
• No Transhumanism Allowed: Originally, Xenophobic empires disliked it when you modified your own species, as gene-modifying your own species means it counts as a new species. This also meant that your newly modified pops, who are likely as xenophobic as you are, treated you as an alien overlord. This was not intentional behaviour, and was fixed so that xenophobes at least don't regard gene-modded versions of their own species (and vice-versa) as full-on aliens. Egalitarian empires also dislike the leader enhancement policies, though they're perfectly fine with modifying the general population. Spiritualists are disgusted by the use of cybernetics and find Brain Uploading into Synthetic bodies especially detestable.
• No Warping Zone:
  • None of the FTL drives work in the gravity wells of star systems, forcing ships to move to the edge of the system before they can jump.
  • Prior to the Cherryh patch's overhaul of FTL travel, Defensive Stations could be equipped with Subspace Snares, which pulled incoming hostile fleets out of hyperspace right next to the station. In a best-case scenario this would let the starbase tear apart the invaders at close range, but even if the fleet was strong enough to smash the starbase, it would still have to move to the edge of the system before warping out, buying the defenders some time.
  • Since the FTL overhaul forced all star nations to use Hyperdrive to move along Hyperspace Lanes between systems, the "FTL Inhibitors" technology gives starbase and planet-bound fortresses the ability to restrict hyperspace travel - incoming fleets can enter a system as normal, but until the inhibitors are destroyed or captured, the enemy fleet will be unable to progress along any Hyperspace Lanes but the one it entered through.
  • Titan-class starships can mount their own version of the Subspace Snare, which doesn't directly drag enemy ships out of hyperspace, but imposes penalties that reduce the chance that damaged enemy ships are able to disengage from combat before being destroyed, and doubles the cooldown of a fleet's emergency FTL jump to bug out of a losing battle.
  • The L-Cluster is a downplayed version of this - while the regular hyperdrives and Gateways will work as normal, it is impossible to use Jump Drives or emergency subspace navigation in the cluster. It is also impossible to use the same two methods to get in the cluster - the only way in is through an L-Gate, or if someone builds a Gateway in there.
• Not in My Backyard!: Any species with the Repugnant Trait causes reduced opinion in diplomacy. It doesn't matter if said Aliens are scientists and workers par excellence; others won't appreciate having them as neighbors. Changed in 2.2, where Repugnant species are just worse at producing Amenities than other species, making it harder to keep your people happy if the only entertainers you have are gross mushroom men.
• Not Playing Fair With Resources: The AI, as of version 2.0, has been confirmed to have its maintenance and civilian good costs halved on difficulties at least as low as normal, as well as receiving some additional bonus to energy income.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The Prethoryn Scourge, already a crisis faction with terrifying levels of power, who transform planets into breeding grounds for more swarms and can reduce even the Fallen Empires to shells of their former selves in only a few short years, are running from something even worse. If you learn this, you may gain a research project to study the direction of space the Scourge came from... and there is nothing there but a void. The last galaxy they infested just straight up doesn't exist.
• Not Quite the Almighty: Psychic empires can elevate one of their own to become The Chosen One, who can then make themselves God-Emperor. While their hubris is unlikely to get them killed by anything in the galaxy, it makes them vulnerable to the Shroud's Covenant-offerers, who can kill them in an instant if they mentally contact each other... not to mention the End of the Cycle, who will unceremoniously eat the God-Emperor along with their followers fifty years after its deal is accepted.
  • This can double as God Is Inept if any of the other Covenants are taken, since the God-Emperor only has a higher likelihood of getting deals from the Shroud and doesn't lower their occasionally-debilitating dues. They're also no less likely to get their empire Cursed by the Shroud via their decennial communion than other rulers, though these are always less common than the Boons.
• Nuclear Torch Rocket: The most powerful sublight engine in the game is the Impulse engine, which is described as "fusion-powered thrusters."
• Numbered Homeworld: Primitive civilizations' homeworlds don't have unique names; they just retain the planet's default name. Primitive humans, for instance, come from Sol III, and the name doesn't change even if they become spacefaring. The implication seems to be that this is an exonym used by your civilization (even if you're the same species).
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: The description of the Byzantine Bureaucracy civic, "An army of officials and functionaries work tirelessly to keep the government running smoothly and ensure no citizens are allocated resources they cannot demonstrate a properly filed and triple-stamped need for." In game effects, the empire requires less amenities and housing for its POPs. Funnily enough, there's no restriction to Byzantine Bureaucracy being combined with Efficient Bureaucracy!
  • Changed in 2.7 with the addition of actual Bureaucrat jobs — the civic now gives Bureaucrats +1 Unity and Stability each in addition to their enabling you to effectively support a large empire.
• Obvious Rule Patch: Too many to count, but here are some of the more blatant ones:
  • Beam weapons now deal reduced damage against Shields, giving them clear tactical weakness to combat the 'beam spam' strategy.
  • Point Defense, Flak Battery, Torpedoes, Lances and Mega Cannons now occupy special slots in a ship, so no more mass PD/Torpedo/Lance ships.
  • Decadent trait requires Authoritarian or Xenophobe ethos, to patch out an early loophole allowing Xenophiles and Individualists (as Egalitarians were called back then) to practice slavery. Patch 1.8 also require Slave population equal or greater than the Decadent population as owned property, so no more appeasing an entire planet's worth of Decadent pop with a single Slave pop.
  • Taking out the Portal that is the heart of the extradimensional Crisis now requires you to destroy any Dimensional Anchors beforehand, so no more rushing the Portal immediately when it pops up.
  • Armor and Armor-piercing mechanics have been changed, so no more stacking ludicrous amount of Armor and still getting 60% reduction against Tachyon Lances. On the other hand, this also improves armor piercing attacks' performance.
  • Auxiliary Slots now limit how much you can boost your Ships' Regeneration and Hull Points (aside from repeatable techs).
  • Battleships can no longer equip Auras, which are now limited to Starbases and Titans.
  • Originally, Tomb Worlds spawned with a number of unique tile blockers that couldn't be removed, but gave sizable adjacency bonuses to research, so the supposed downside of being unremovable is a lot less limiting than it sounds. Banks changed them - they no longer offer adjacency bonuses, but are now removable from the start of the game at an increased cost.
  • Psionic and Robotic techs are both quite strong. Having both? Very strong. From 1.5 onwards, they became exclusive to Spiritualist and Materialist Empires, and they are mutually exclusive to each other. This was reverted in 1.8 in favour of stronger bonuses (though Spiritualists and Materialists will still find it difficult to acquire and exploit both to their fullest).
  • Habitability and Climate Preference is now separate. A pop can have high Habitability allowing them to live in hostile areas, but they most likely won't be happy for it. This gives significant nerf to the Extremely Adaptive trait, which was previously One Stat to Rule Them All for non-Hive Mind and non-Robot Empires.
  • Flak weapons are now PD slot specialized to take down enemy strike crafts instead of Medium slot. Swarmer Missiles can now also be shot down, though it'll be more difficult to do so.
  • No more taking the "Fanatic Purifier" civic mid-game; it can now only be chosen at the start since it directly influenced the backstory of any empire who has it. This is also true, and for the same reason, for the "Devouring Swarm" civic Hive Minds can take, and the 3 special machine civics, "Determined Exterminators", "Driven Assimilators" and "Rogue Servitors". This also applies to the "Inward Perfection" civic, which was normally switched in or out at around mid-game.
  • After 1.8, a number of changes were made to nerf some of the outright overpowered Zerg Rush strategies (see the Game Breaker page). One of them? The introduction of combat width, stopping players from dropping entire doomstacks of armies on an single planet that only had a measly 25 defenders that would get swarmed at once.
  • Speaking of doomstacks, the introduction of a command limit as well as increasing FTL travel time in 2.0 was to stop players from keeping their entire navy together, which usually meant they'd win any battle due to sheer numbers unless the enemy also brings their own doomstack. Now you can only group X amount of ships together and have them work as a single fleet, not that you'd want to since slower FTL meant increased response time to threats far away from your navy.
  • The Rubricator event gives you a system with a relic world with an archaeology site that usually spawns close to your starting location, but finishing the excavation causes Shard, a hostile Guardian, to spawn in the relic world's system. While Shard can easily destroy any fleet until the mid-game, it couldn't do anything to a colony founded on the relic world and so the colony would be very hard for other empires to conquer. Patch 2.6 makes it so that Shard automatically destroys any colony on its relic world once it spawns, then 2.6.3 changed it again so Shard destroys the colony after two years, giving you a chance to fight her or evacuate.
• Omnicidal Maniac:
  • Fanatic Purifiers want to see their species and their species only in the galaxy. Everything else must die in a fire.
  • Determined Exterminators are the same as Fanatic Purifiers, but only towards organics. They're generally pretty chill with other robot races or synthetic ascended empires, but Rogue Servitors absolutely HATE Determined Exterminators.
  • Devouring Swarms want to eat and consume the whole galaxy. Even other Devouring Swarms of the same species.
  • Additionally, the crisis factions are this. The Scourge want to eat everything before moving on to the next galaxy, The Contingency has directives to sterilize the galaxy of all biological life and control or destroy anything mechanical, while the Extradimensional Invaders are genocidal just because they're dicks.
    • Ancient enemies of the Prethoryn, The Hunters, are stated to be this. According to the Scourge, their goal is "scour the entire life". Considering what they likely did with Prethoryn's home galaxy, this can be truth.
  • A Crisis Aspirant empire, introduced by the Nemesis DLC and requiring an ascension perk introduced by that DLC, seeks to not only wipe out all life in galaxy, but also snuff out the stars themselves to fuel a device called the Aetherophaesic Engine so they can enter and conquer the Shroud and thus ascend to godhood.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist:
  • Mostly downplayed. Most scientist leaders have fields that they specialize in; they'll be more likely to draw research cards for that field, and assigning them to be the head of research projects that match their field of expertise will result in a boost to research speed. However, a scientist can do a reasonably good job in any field; a statecraft specialist, for instance, makes a perfectly capable biologist.
  • Scientists with "The Spark of Genius" trait play this completely straight; it gives them the same research speed bonus to any field of research, though dedicated specialists in a single field are still superior within their area of expertise. Those with the "Maniacal" trait also get a bonus to all fields, though only at half the rate of Spark of Genius; this is compensated by them being far more likely to have a chance to research certain rare and valuable technologies.
  • Scientists of the Curator Enclave play this straight. For a nominal sum of Credits, you get a max-level scientist with a 15% bonus to all research speed that also makes an excellent Surveyor or Archaeologist.
• One Curse Limit:
  • Under default settings, having one endgame crisis start prevents any others from occurring, even after the crisis is dealt with. In other words, if, say, the Prethoryn Scourge show up, you can play around with jump drives and synthetics to your heart's content without any fear of the Extradimensional Invaders or the Contingency. However, this only applies to the 'official' crisis events. The War In Heaven (which is often worse, especially if you went neutral) won't prevent any of them, nor will the Grey Tempest. If you want a challenge, it is also possible to set it at the start of the game so that all three Crises spawn, but even then, they won't appear all at once.
  • You're also prevented from making more than one Covenant with the Shroud, and each of these has rather sizeable downsides. Some players think that none of them are worth it.
• One-Gender Race: As of the 3.2 Herbert update, you can choose to make your species all-male or all-female, or have them be of indeterminate gender.
  • The Clone Army origin makes all pops and leaders the same gender (and face type) as your initial ruler, since, well, they're clones. Choosing to convert your clones into a regular species later on undoes this, allowing them to use whatever gender settings you chose during empire creation.
• One Nation Under Copyright: Empires with the Corporate Dominion civic in the base game and Megacorps in the titular DLC. The latter have significant limits to their direct expansion, but can build "branch offices" on other empires' planets and vassalize normal empires as "Subsidiaries".
• One Stat to Rule Them All:
  • Pre-2.2, Habitability is extremely important, as it determines which planets you can colonize as well as Happiness cap. With high Habitability, you get a wider selection of planets to colonize, so you can immediately take the biggest, best planets for yourself. Sure, you have to take two extra drawbacks just to take the Extremely Adaptive trait in character creation, but with multiple 20+ capacity planets in early-mid game, what you lack in quality you will make up in quantity. This is one the main reasons why Hive Minds, Synthetic Dawn robot civilizations, and Lithoid species are so easy to play and so dangerous to have as enemies — the former two don't care about habitability or pop happiness at all, while Lithoids get a massive 50% Habitability bonus on all worlds, allowing them all to expand unbelievably fast. 2.2 reduced the importance due to it mainly increasing population maintenance, which can be remedied with a good economy and dedicating more pops toward amenities on that planet, though the happiness penalty is easier to ignore. 2.3, however, considerably ups its importance by making any habitability lower than 100% cause pops to take a hit to productivity and growth rate.
  • As of 3.2, most strategies come down to maximizing your alloy production and/or research output. Alloy maximization is important for building and maintaining the fleets needed to fight and conquer neighbors to take their pops and research optimization is needed to stay on the technological bleeding edge and continue snowballing.
• One-Steve Limit: Nope.
  • The game can be authorized to include custom empires during the creation of a new campaign. Since many players tend to stick to one or two preferred species as a template for experimenting with different ethos or trait combinations, it's not uncommon to encounter several instances of the same star system on the map if this option was activated.
  • There are only so many names for ships and leaders for any given name set, so it's inevitable to eventually have several leaders or vessels with the same name.
• One-Woman Wail: Spatial Lullaby is a very nice example, a haunting yet beautiful piece to accompany your more relaxed game phases when you've caught a break in all the galaxy-conquering hectic. On the other hand, it can turn into a downright tear-jerking dirge when it happens to play during a huge battle or even the eradication of an empire. Just imagine listening to it over the untold carnage that's unfolding planetside every time you click that innocuous "Land Armies" button, or engage in a pitched space battle.
• One World Order:
  • Initially the case, with your chosen government controlling your home planet and your chosen ethics being shared by your entire populace, but Pops can and will diverge from your ethics over time and branch out into factions if they're not happy with your leadership. Unhappy factions can even start rebellions if you don't take action in time.
  • Machine-Early Space Age races usually have the "Fragmented Nations" government, indicating an aversion of this trope, though possibly with something like the modern-day UN.
  • Gestalt Consciousnesses (Hive Minds), naturally enough, are utterly united in their pursuit, and will never experience Factional strife. The same is true for Machine Intelligences, their synthetic counterparts introduced in Synthetic Dawn.
• Only in It for the Money: Some factions, particularly military-focused ones, will only side with you in a war if they find the outcome profitable, such as ceding planets or usurping unwanted empires that weigh them down.
  • Enclaves, in the Leviathans DLC, only work for you if you pay them well and stay out of their business once you're done.
• Optional Boss:
  • There's nothing that forces you to actually engage Fallen Empires in combat (unless they wake up or you're playing as any flavor of Fanatic Purifiers), but their planets are full of ancient resource complexes that produce an absurd amount of resources as well as rare Strategic Resources. And that's before getting to their techs.
  • There are also the various Guardians in the galaxy who are quite tough (though not as tough as Fallen Empires), and they give great rewards if you can defeat them.
• Orbital Bombardment: Naturally enough. Orbital bombardments help clear off a landing point for your troops to dominate a planet, especially if said planet is developed or a capital. The intensity can be varied; "Selective", which "pacifist" civs are restricted to, only targets identified military targets, "Indiscriminate" does more damage but causes more devastation and has a higher-likelihood of killing pops. Note that Selective bombardment can still kill pops and cause devastation with prolonged bombardment.
  • Utopia adds another level of bombardment exclusive to Fanatic Purifiers and Determined Exterminators: Armageddon. Though it still takes months if not years to wipe out the population from orbit.
  • Patch 2.0 closes the "Orbital Purge" loophole so fleets engaged in "Selective" bombardment hold back from killing the last 10 pops on the planet, while "Indiscriminate" leaves 5 pops alive. Sanitizing a planet requires Armageddon-level bombardment, and also converts the planet into a Tomb World.
  • There are also two specialty bombardment stances. "Raiding", which is unlocked by taking an ascension perk or a civic, deals low damage to defense armies, but will abduct pops and relocate them to your worlds instead of killing them. The "Javorian Pox" stance (only available to empires that find the disease-ridden homeworld of one of the Pre Cursors) unleashes a virulent disease that quickly kills organic pops while doing little damage to the planet's infrastructure, but does absolutely nothing to robots.
• Order Versus Chaos: The Authoritarian vs Egalitarian dichotomy. Egalitarians tend to go for Democracy government types, Authoritarians prefer more autocratic ones, and Oligarchies are a middle ground between the two. Fittingly, Egalitarians see Authoritarians as Tyrants while Authoritarians see Egalitarians as Rabble. Also see Sliding Scale of Libertarianism and Authoritarianism below.
• Our Clones Are Different: There are multiple varieties of clones:
  • Clone armies in the base game are slightly cheaper than regular assault armies and train much faster.
  • The Engineered Evolution ascension perk in the "Utopia" DLC allows empires to build cloning vat buildings on their worlds that produce POPs otherwise indistinguishable from "naturally" produced organic POPs but made at a much faster rate.
  • Species with the Clone Army origin in the "Humanoids" DLC were created by Precursors as shock troops, which left them dependent on five ancient clone vats for reproduction, they're otherwise sterile, and quite short-lived unless they investigate the ruins and unlock their genomes.
• Our Dark Matter Is Mysterious: Dark matter is a rare strategic resource found near black holes. It can be used to craft the final tier of spaceship components, but you must first reverse-engineer them by defeating a Fallen Empire ship in battle.
• Our Souls Are Different: All organics have an immortal psionic presence in the Shroud that persists after their physical bodies die. Spiritualists do not believe Brain Uploading to be compatible with it, which is why they tend to be horrified when they witness another empire go through the Synth ascension route, viewing it as mass suicide. However, robots can be affected by Shroud events, and even be granted independence by the Animator of Clay, implying that even robots have some presence on the Shroud, even if a weaker one.
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: An empire with the materialist or fanatic materialist ethos. They're wrong. However, when asked about if the Materialists are objectively wrong, Wiz says: "No". This suggests that while they don't have the whole truth, they're not completely incorrect either.
  "As we reach for the stars, we must put away childish things; gods, spirits and other phantasms of the brain. Reality is cruel and unforgiving, yet we must steel ourselves and secure the survival of our race through the unflinching pursuit of science and technology."
• Outside-Context Problem: Comes in multiple variants.
  • First off, you can be one. You know those Primitive civilizations, right? There is nothing (besides your civ's ethical alignment and policies) preventing you from infiltrating the more technologically advanced primitive civilizations and subverting their government. Or you could just simply drop several divisions of power-armored, genetically-enhanced super-soldiers supported by Psionic Warriors and fire support from one of your fleets in orbit into the midst of a Medieval-era civilization. (You even get an achievement called "Outside Context" for invading a pre-FTL Earth during the middle of World War II.)
  • Lore-wise, this is what the end-game crises are. The Prethoryn arrive from outside the galaxy, the Unbidden arrive from an entirely different universe, and the Contingency may be from our galaxy, but they are an entirely new player on the galactic scale.
• Overdrive: Two examples:
  • The first is ship modules. Designing your ship with excess power over its demands increases efficiency with a small chunk of speed, evasion and damage. This leaves it open for Glass Cannon builds for certain ships that sacrifices armor and/or shields over all for reactors.
  • The second is Afterburners. They're expensive, they chew up power, they make your ship slower to build, and if you're just jumping from system to system, they're useless. Get into a fight with a higher-tech or faster fleet, though, and they let your ships ramp up their maximum velocity substantially.
• Overflow Error: In some versions allows leaders to become immortal. As a leader ages, their chance of dying of old age increases until they reach their maximum lifespan, at which point their chance of dying from old age is 100%. Playing with policies to extend and then reduce the lifespan can create a leader whose chance of dying is greater than 100%. A leader who is about 24 years older than their maximum lifespan causes an overflow where their chance of dying resets from 100% to 0%.
• Paper Tiger: Right now, the endgame crises are pretty weak.
  • The Extradimensional Invaders. Yes, they can beat the AI and claim huge swathes of the galaxy, but a competent player with a large enough fleet can grind them into dust. Their over-reliance on escorts means a fleet consisting of battleships and cruisers using appropriate weapons (such as torpedoes, which never miss, and massed Focused Arc Emitters, which also never miss and ignore armour/shields completely) will rip to shreds anything they throw at the player. Combined with their unwillingness to upgrade and how easily baited their fleets and constructors are, to a decent empire getting rid of them won't be war, but pest control.
  • The Contingency can be little more than an annoyance if it doesn't manage to make a big enough empire shortly after it spawns. If that happens, the biggest problem with fighting them is they randomly popup and capture planets, which you then need to clear out. Individual planets have little to no defences, so it becomes a case of bombing their fortifications and invading them, over and over again until you finally clear the galaxy.
  • Individual Prethoryn fleets tends to noticeably less powerful than their 21K military power rating suggests due to their total lack of shields (it's the sheer numbers that pose a problem), which means basic reverse-engineered Mining Lasers mass-applied via Corvettes and Macross Missile Massacre are their downfall. They still need to be dealt with quickly, though, given that they irreversibly destroy the ecosystems of conquered worlds.
  • Fallen Empires are this by design, though they can still blast young, early-game empires to ashes in short order. Their issue is that they can't expand their fleets or rebuild them if they're destroyed, so they're vulnerable to being drowned in ships by a midgame empire, particularly one armed with torpedoes (which bypass shields). Since they cannot awaken when in a war, they will eventually fall to repeated raids against their ships and stations.
  • Averted, however, with Awakened Empires. Even in the ultra lategame, they're a huge challenge; most of the time, the biggest threat to an Awakened Empire is another Awakened Empire.
  • The player can be this by building a lot of starbases with hangar modules. These things pump up your total fleet power by quite a bit, making your systems stronger in the eye of the AI. In practice, however, hangars are only effective against smaller ships. Later on, even a weaker fleet of large ships can overwhelm your hangar defense, especially if they have point defense or carriers of their own.
• Paradise Planet:
  • Gaia worlds are 100% inhabitable to all species: normally species only find their own homeworlds and megastructures to be that inhabitable, and even other planets of the same class are only at 80%. Unfortunately, Gaia worlds are also incredibly rare and if a Holy Guardians Fallen Empire spawns in the galaxy, they designate four Gaia worlds as holy planets and get very angry if another empire colonizes them.
  • By contrast, Rogue Servitors make their planets perfectly hospitable to their organic charges in order to ensure maximum happiness. The zenith of this goal is the Organic Paradise, an AI-controlled biome specifically designed to satisfy all the needs and wants a sapient being could ever possess... except for self-determination.
• Penal Colony: Patch 2.2 allows empires to designate a world as a penal colony, which has a higher rate of crime due to most of its inhabitants being exiled criminals, but gains immigrants very quickly and reduces crime on other worlds, as the other worlds ship their criminals into this prison world.
• Percussive Maintenance: One particular archeological site is an old weapons station that was put together in a slapdash manner — the team sent will continually be frustrated at the computers glitching out. The scientist assigned to the site will eventually have to decide how to proceed — either carefully (giving them the Meticulous trait) or literally kicking it (giving them the Percussive Maintainer trait, adding bonuses to archeological dig speed and researching computer-related tech at the cost of losing 1 level in maximum skill cap for being impulsive and rough).
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • If you take out an Enclave's home station, they're gone for good. Even if you don't destroy them yourself, certain Guardians (most infamously the roving Spectres) will attack anything they come across, which may result in the occasional "Enclave destroyed" message popping up out of nowhere.
    • The Artisan Enclave also has an event where they will take your cash and scram, making them unavailable for the rest of the game. Fortunately, there's usually more than one in any given galaxy, so they're not completely lost even if you have to start building up your rapport with them from scratch.
  • Only the one who defeated a Guardian can reap its benefits or research what's left behind. If you're unlucky, one or more Guardians may spawn in Fallen Empire territory, which means the beast(s) will be curbstomped within the first couple minutes after the game started, denying you their unique benefits. The same can happen if you wait too long and another, regular empire seizes the chance.
• Perpetual Beta: Though it's been years since the game's release, its extremely active development team is constantly changing things. Patches that come out alongside an expansion almost always add or change major systems, but sometimes large overhauls can happen without a DLC. The game as it exists now is completely unrecognizable from its release date except for maybe some parts of the UI. Notable overhauls include:
  • 1.3 "Heinlein" - Released alongside Leviathans. Complete overhaul of the combat system, introduction of the Tracking stat and XL weapons.
  • 1.5 "Banks" - Released alongside Utopia. Introduced Civics, Traditions, and Unity. Consumer Goods introduced as a surcharge against Mineral production.
  • 2.0 "Cherryh" - Released alongside Apocalypse. This patch was so substantial that it's practically a different game. Changes were made to virtually every system from empire FTL methods to territory control to the economy to fleet combat to war declaration.
  • 2.2 "Le Guin" - Released alongside MegaCorp. Everything that didn't change in Cherryh changed in Le Guin, with the entire planetside economy being redone. The 'tile' system was removed in favor of a new system using Pops and Districts. Consumer Goods split off from Minerals to become their own resource. Alloys, Crime, the Galactic Market all introduced. Sectors overhauled.
  • 2.3 "Wolfe" - Released alongside Ancient Relics. Program changed from 32-bit to 64-bit.
  • 2.6 "Verne" - Released alongside Federations. Diplomacy system completely redone. Envoys introduced.
  • 3.0 "Dick" - Planetside economy re-reworked, though not as much as Le Guin. First Contact and Espionage added to give Envoys something new to do.
  • 3.3 "Libra" - Interim patch. Unity absorbs most of Influence's functions as well as some of Energy's. Edicts completely reworked again.
• Photoprotoneutron Torpedo: Yes, there are Proton Torpedos, as well as the more advanced version, the Neutron Torpedo. They're the energy weapon equivalent of artillery weapons. There are also missiles with antimatter warheads, quantum missiles, a version of the torpedo armored against point defenses, etc...
• Physical God: The Transcendence Ascension path allows you to recruit 2 kinds of this. First is the Psionic Avatar, a manifestation of the Shroud that is the best single army type in the game, hands down. That means it can take on a Titanic Beast one-on-one and win. The second is when you assign The Chosen One status to one of your leaders; they gain Immortality and massive bonus relevant to their class.
• Planetary Nation: Some planets are assumed to achieve a unified global government before attaining interstellar travel. However pre-FTL civilizations lack unified governments with their entry on the contacts menu reading "fragmented nation-states."
• Planet Destroyer: The whole point of a Colossus ship. Though nominally a military ship, the Colossus has no actual fleet combat capability, but is instead a single massive weapon solely dedicated to the purpose of laying waste to enemy planets.
• Planet of Hats: Crops up in a couple different ways.
  • Played straight with Traits, biological instincts every species has that make them, say, better scientists, less inclined to disagree with each other, and unable to be happy unless they have slaves to boss around. These can only be changed through genetic tinkering, so if a species is Nomadic, all of its pops are considered Nomadic.
  • There's also Ethos, the principles that individual Pops and governments abide by. Early on in the game, this is played straight — every pop on the capital world will subscribe to the same philosophy, and this is unlikely to change. Outside of the capital planet, though, and especially outside of the home sector, Pops may begin to develop a different ethos (especially if they're not happy), and even form Factions of people extremely unhappy with the ruling culture, while still part of the empire. Of course, by doing whatever is necessary to keep the populace happy and/or complacent, the ruling government can encourage their populace towards orthodoxy, even conquered groups who normally subscribe to a very different ideology.
  • Can also be invoked by the player via planet specialisation. For example, one planet may be entirely geared towards generating power, another produces minerals, on a third every pop works in a science lab etc. Generally, such specialisation is more efficient than having every planet do something of each industry type due to certain ressource-boosting structures.
  • The game makes it tough for you to have everyone wear the same outfit... Unless they're all naked!
• Planet Spaceship: Habitats, or artificial planets, can be built around uninhabited planets.
• Plant Aliens: The fungoids by default (though some of them appear to be parasitical or symbiotic on a meaty host creature) and plantoids as a DLC.
• Plasma Cannon: Three tiers exist in-game: Plasma Throwers, Plasma Accelerators, and Plasma Cannons proper. They are extremely effective at eating through a ship's armor and also do increased damage to the hull, but struggle even more than most energy weapons against shields.
• Player-Exclusive Mechanic: Before Patch 3.5, AI players would never build Defense Platforms (though this was a bug) and wouldn't even think of building Strongholds or Fortresses, keeping their fleet sizes somewhat low compared to the player and leaving their planets easier to take.
  • The AI is still incapable of using the Market to buy stuff at a fixed monthly rate. This is probably to keep them from focusing only on Energy Credits, since most of their building decisions are focused on maintaining a certain level of Resource inflow. They can buy stuff in bulk, though.
• Playlist Soundtrack: There are dozens of tracks which play in random order, with no correlation to what's happening in-game. Players can, however, open the playlist and play whatever song they want on a whim, or even disable certain tracks altogether.
• Pleasure Planet: Patch 2.2 allows empires to designate a world as a resort world. This prevents any districts from being built on the world, but it increases amenities on other worlds, as those worlds' inhabitants can go to the resort planet to enjoy themselves. Resort worlds also have 100% habitability for all species as their resorts are climate controlled for all clientele.
• Point Build System:
  • Used during the creation of your species' traits and government ethos. With traits you are limited to five and given two points to buy at the start. You can gain additional points by buying negative traits, but remember you are still limited to a maximum of five traits. With Ethos, you have three points to spend which can net you either three moderate ethos, or one fanatical and one moderate ethos. Alternatively, you can use all 3 Ethos points to go for a Gestalt Consciousness in either biological Hive Mind or Machine Intelligence flavour, which closes some options, but opens unique new ones.
  • The Wargoal system is a variant of this, where you have 100 Wargoal points to spend at max. Conquering, Liberating or Purging a planet is more expensive than simple Humiliation or Open Border, and taking on their larger planets would also be more expensive. The more Wargoals you set, the more you will have to do to make the enemy concede. Research eventually enables you to reduce the cost of Wargoals, allowing you to fit more into the 100 point limit.
  • The Ship Designer allows you to design your ships' loadout, but there's always a hard limit based on the Reactor tech you have available and the quality of the equipment being powered. Higher level means better performance (and generally has to be researched first), but also more demand for power (except for armour) and greater expense.
• Point Defenseless: Civilian ships and early military crafts fall under this trope. Averting this trope will take some of the firepower off to deal with missiles and strike crafts. And Titans and Colossi will always fit here, as they're all-big-gun megaships; point defense is for escorts and carriers.
• Poke in the Third Eye: Among the many random events that each foray into the Shroud can trigger is one that has your psykers accidentally listen in on some meeting of a Fallen Empire's leaders from halfway across the galaxy. If successful, you get a nice boon like some end-game tech. More often than not, however, the aliens will notice the cross-dimensional intrusion and slap you with a hefty opinion penalty that can potentially end in them declaring war on you.
• The Political Officer: You can assign Commissar Squads to your armies. Once you research the appropriate tech, they're also automatically deployed to your colonies to ensure adherence to the Empire's ethics. Weirdly enough, even Egalitarian Empires can build them as Army attachment late-game.
• Population Control: Can be implemented on non-primary species to keep them from out-breeding your empire's founding race. With Utopia all POPs of a species living in your empire can be neutered, as a more "merciful" form of purge.
• Portal Network:
  • Gateways, which are clearly based on mass relays, are ancient space stations scattered across the galaxy. They are all derelict at the start of the game, but once repaired they can transport ships to any other active gateway in the galaxy (provided its owner has borders open to you).
  • The L-Gates are Gateways that have been altered using nanotechnology, and are always found in orbit around black holes. They require more effort to reactivate than regular Gateways, as you have to spend time, effort, and money in order to gain enough insight into how they work, but once you've figured them out, you can use them to travel to the L-Cluster, a small set of about a dozen stars set somewhere outside the galaxy. All L-Gates lead into the Terminal Egress system in the L-Cluster; from there, you can travel to any other L-Gate in the main galaxy. Just watch out for any hostile swarms of nanites you might find in there.
  • Wormhole FTL in a nutshell (before it was removed in version 2.0). An empire using wormhole technology first had to build a large, heavily fortified wormhole station in a star system, which could then create a temporary but direct connection between the two systems. Ships that use wormhole stations experienced instantaneous travel between star systems - and since the station was actually doing the heavy lifting and not the ship - it freed up tonnage in your hulls for other things (like more weapons). Entire fleets could go all at once as well but it took longer for a portal to spawn.
• Post-Scarcity Economy: Egalitarian empires have access to the "Utopian Abundance" living standard, which increases pop happiness at the cost of increased Consumer Goods upkeep.
• Powered Armor: A tech that improves army strength and mineral production and paves the way to further research in the field of robotics.
• Powered by a Black Hole: Indirectly. Black holes can produce dark matter, which can be used, among others, in some ship reactors to power them.
  • The Matter Decompressor megastructure produces vast amounts of minerals by syphoning them from a black hole's accretion disc.
  • The immensely popular Gigastructures Game Mod adds numerous additional megastructures and gigastructures that can only be built around black holes, the most insane one being a Birch World^note an absolutely ginormous artificial world with unlimited space for pops and districts around the supermassive black hole in the galactic center.
• Power Creep: Patch 2.2's redoing of planetside economics, for better or for worse, has made everything a lot more plentiful. Research got a massive boost, and ship production (even with the need to process Minerals into Alloys) also made strides. This has been all fine and good for typical interstellar empires (the player and their rivals), but nearly everything else in space predated 2.2 and hasn't received similar gains. It's not too difficult to match the midgame or endgame "bosses" in technology in half the time it takes for them to show up.
  • Likewise, recent strides in Artificial Brilliance have been a bit lopsided in favor of the interstellar empires; they are now more eager to ally with each other, often making the arrival of Crises akin to Easily Thwarted Alien Invasions, and sometimes even breaking the Fallen Empires before they can get anywhere. The developers' current solutions have been to give the Crises a customizable stat multiplier, and to add another scaler that adjusts when they can show up. Patch 3.5 even lowered the default difficulty for the game, due to concerns that the AI might be too good now.
• Power Limiter: Fallen Empires act like this in the galaxy at large, effectively capping fleet power at 40-50k. This is because going above that is one of the triggers for Awakening, known as Upstart Awakening.
• The Power of Friendship: Xenophiles get 25-50% discount on all Diplomatic Influence costs as well as an Opinion bonus with other empires. This means they can maintain more Allies compared to normal Empires, who can then come to their aid if you attack them. 2.7 changed this to having increased Trade Value and more available Envoys, which still has the end result of making it easier for them to make friends.
  • Looking deeper, this is the primary advantage they have over Xenophobes. While xenophobe empires will individually become more powerful than the xenophile due to faster pop growth and lower influence claim costs being unquestionably better than more envoys and trade (and indeed, all factors being equal, if you face a xenophobe 1v1 early on as a xenophile, defeat is all but assured, all factors being equal. However, as the game goes on, xenophiles that make migration treaties can see pop growth, and more significantly, can create high-habitability colonies on a more varied number of worlds before terraforming (taking 5-10 years for non-barren non-tomb worlds, which is fairly significant in the early game for snowballing), and form alliances/defensive pacts/federations much easier. This can flip the power dynamic significantly, as despite not being as individually powerful. This is even more notable in the endgame, as the late-game boosts to Federations formed earlier on would make the members able to collectively put up a much better defense against the Endgame Crisis than any xenophobe or even overlords and their vassals, even with all factors being equal.
• Power Up Letdown:
  • The Psionic techline offered by the Spiritualist ethos is pretty weak compared to the Robot techline available to Materialists. Sure you get a powerful Army and the best FTL method in the game, but the Psionic Army is still outclassed by the Gene Warrior Army later, and Materialists can still get the regular Jump Drive. In contrast, top tier Robots give absurd bonuses to all resource production except food, not to mention Materialists' bonus to research speed. To make things worse, the Ethics Divergence bonus given by being Spiritualist is also inferior compared to what Authoritarians offer. The Utopia expansion aims to change this by giving the Psionics much broader bonuses including the ability to interface with the Shroud...which is a Captain Ersatz version of the Warp complete with Chaos Gods expies to interact with.
    • Synth bonuses are in turn ultimately beaten by organics given sufficient genetic modification and ascension perks. The 40% bonus to minerals of happy Synths^note innate 20% bonus plus 20% bonus from happiness, is easily topped by the 50% a happy, Industrious, Very Strong, Cyborg organic pop gets, which can be pushed up to 60% if the pop is a prole. Research wise, the biological path of ascension gives you access to the trait Erudite, which gives a 20% bonus to all research similar to the Synth bonus, bringing Erudite organics on par with Synths, but organics can also get one of the three Natural Physicists/Sociologists/Engineers traits, further adding 15% to the research bonus. Uplift a pre-sentient species with the trait Natural Intellectuals, and you get an extra 20% for Society Research, up to a whooping 75%^note 20% happiness, 20% Erudite, 15% Natural Physicists/Sociologists/Engineers, 20% Natural Intellectuals. Energy wise, only a Psionic organic can beat a Synth, but uplifting a pre-sentient species with Earthbound nets another 15% bonus. Good luck matching or beating a synth on all three research types and minerals and energy at once, though; cybernetics, biological ascension, and psionics are all mutually exclusive. Likely to change with the next patch, which promises synths as modifiable as organics.
  • Certain Traits are also downright useless, but chief among them may be Agrarian which boosts Food production. Food is already very easy to obtain, and is relevant only to maintain your Colony growth; once the planet is fully settled, then any excess Food is wasted. The Banks patch also makes Food transfers between planets possible. Due to how long it takes to bio engineer pops, it's still only of minor use to upgrade the population of food planets when you have late game tech that makes bio engineering much quicker than when you first unlock it.
• Precursors: Stellaris is a very precursor-happy game. Fallen Empires are of the 'still around but greatly reduced from their glory days' variety, and there are seven separate event chains for uncovering secrets of gone precursors (unlikely but possible to all fire in the same game, as they cover different periods of the past) — three Starfish Aliens, one interstellar multi-species league, an anti-organic robot empire, the first species to discover Psionics, and a Hive Minded race of Plant People.
• Precursor Killers: There are scores of examples in its background story. In fact, most of the game's lore is built around this trope one way or another, with the most notable example being the five^note seven with DLC Precursor event chains your science ships can come across (although only one of them randomly spawns in any unmodded campaign). Some of these ancient civilizations collapsed under their own weight, others started wars that turned against them until they were wiped out by rival civilizations that are also long gone when the game starts. With the Ancient Relics DLC installed, numerous archaeological dig sites shed light on the fate of even more precursor empires that met violent ends. Last but not least, up to five Fallen Empires can be spawned during campaign setup. These once-great empires have existed for eons and are now mere shadows of their former glory, yet are still vastly superior to any newcomer on the galactic stage when the game begins. However, your own empire's technological and military might can eventually put you on equal footing with the Fallen, and depending on how your diplomatic relations with them develop, you might well turn into the galaxy's most recent Precursor Killer (although the species itself will usually survive as part of your empire unless you're of the xenocidal sort).
• Press Start to Game Over: It is very rarely possible to have your starting position be right next to a xenophobic fallen empire. Cue the immediate extermination.
• Press X to Die: Or rather, to utterly doom the entire galaxy - choosing to accept a deal with "The End of the Cycle" is definitely this, especially since the game warns you very explicitly that doing so is an insanely bad idea.
  • This is also how the game ends if you chose to become a Crisis yourself: Once the Aetherophasic Engine is complete, a popup notifies you that the time of your empire's ascension is at hand, for the minor inconvenience of destroying the entire galaxy and large parts of the Shroud. Your only option is to click "Do it.", your citizens shed their mortal coils and ascend to godhood, and everyone else dies horribly. You Bastard!
• Pretext for War: Unlike other Paradox Interactive games you actually don't need an "excuse" to start a war, but you do need to define your "goals" at the start of the war, limiting how many planets you can seize, or "liberate" as a Puppet State.
  • This, among so many other things, was changed with the 2.0 Cherryh update by introducing the Casus Belli mechanic^note which is just the fancy Latin term for "Pretext for War". Now you can't just run around declaring war on everyone on a whim anymore. You need to actually share a border with the empire you want to shoot up, or you won't be able to even choose a casus belli, let alone act on it. The options available to you depend on your ethos and some very specific circumstances. Simply owning a Colossus is sufficient cause for any empire to declare war on you, but likewise simply owning a Colossus is sufficient cause to declare war on anyone.
    • This was changed back with the 3.0 Dick update, to a certain extent. You can now actively fight empires you haven't completed First Contact with without a specific pretext, if you set your Policy to "Hostile", since First Contact now requires an Envoy to track down and talk face-to-face with someone from the other empire. First Contact automatically completes once you conquer one of their planets or blow up enough of their ships, and then they'll likely declare war on you; but that just makes things official, doesn't it?
• Privateer: "Privateers" represent the remnants of a destroyed empire's navy in the base game, wandering space and attacking whoever comes close. The Apocalypse DLC replaces them with Marauders.
• Private Military Contractors:
  • Marauder factions can become this for empires wealthy in energy credits, who can hire their fleets for a certain number of years.
  • Megacorps can increase their fleet limit by adding mercenary liaisons and private military shipyards to their branch offices.
  • A later update added the option to turn any sufficiently large fleet of yours into an independent Mercenary Enclave to which you can then outsource your warfare needs. Numerous options exist to make your deniable guns-for-hire more effective in the field, although they'll never be able to rival a late-game empire's possible fleet strength.
• Propaganda Machine: You can activate certain edicts to boost Happiness and reduce Ethics Divergence, one of which is fittingly called Propaganda Broadcasts, and you can also Suppress Factions to reduce their Attraction or Support Faction to promote their values.
• Propaganda Piece: The first half of the Megacorp trailer is presented as an in-universe propaganda for MegaCorp, though the second half shows the downsides of this.
• Properly Paranoid: If your Empire allows Purging, conquest Wargoals get a bit more expensive, as now your enemies get a 'Would Likely to be Purged' malus.
• Protectorate: A more powerful star empire might take a much less powerful one under their protection. Sometimes this is effectively Gunboat Diplomacy conquest, other times the less powerful one might ask for protection, and uplifted pre-FTL empires automatically become protectorates of their patrons. In either case, a smaller empire that remains in a protectorate state for long enough can eventually be absorbed as subjects into the larger empire. This is most common with uplifted primitive civilizations that are within the borders of an established interstellar civilization, but an empire that collapses or is profoundly weakened due to secessionist movements and subsequently destroyed may also produce ideal protectorate candidates, as each individual state likely only has 1-2 systems. The Asimov update makes a further distinction between a protectorate and a vassal. The former is akin to the early British Empire - protectorates are generally far weaker, technologically less advanced, but produce influence which vassals do not and are generally much less likely to be troublesome compared to vassals. A third option is the tributary, which is the opposite of a protectorate; whereas a protectorate is effectively subservient to its overlord and a vassal can end up rivaling its master, tributaries are essentially independent but must give up some of their income to their master. Militaristic protectorates have been known to attack other more powerful empires and their overlords couldn't help them because they can only enter defensive wars on the protectorate's behalf. If the overlord can't outright conquer the other empire the end result is usually the protectorate changing overlords.
• Proud Hunter Race: One can find a prehistoric alien hunting reserve that was populated with species from all across the galaxy, including sapient ones. As the site is excavated it is implied that their empire fell to a rebellion of "prey" species and fully excavating it gives the player's empire the "Blade of the Huntress" relic that increases ship speeds when activated.
• Proud Industrious Race: You can give your empire the "Masterful Craftsmen" civic (or, if you're playing as a MegaCorp, the identical in function "Mastercraft Inc."). It replaces Artisan jobs with Artificer, whose consumer goods output is slightly increased, while also adding trade value to the planet on which they are employed.
• Proud Merchant Race:
  • An economy-focused civilization — especially a Corporate Empire — can easily become this, prioritizing trade deals and commercial pacts over warfare — and, if Corporate, establishing Branch Offices on worlds outside their territory to make money off other civilizations. Following the introduction of the Galactic Community, a civilization with a strong economy can easily dominate the galactic scene despite potentially having a very weak fleet, incentivizing other, militarily stronger neighbours to strike up defensive pacts or join their Trade League, effectively rendering them untouchable.
  • The "Peaceful Traders" AI personality best fits this archetype, as they are described as "chiefly concerned with the flow of commerce, and prefer trading to fighting". The "Ruthless Capitalists" personality, meanwhile, has no such scruples and will try to take your wealth by force if you're sufficiently weaker than them.
  • Late in the game, the Bemat Thalassocracy will show up and harrass a system that out-merchants them.
• Proud Scholar Race: In multiple flavors. Materialist and Spiritualist civilizations (or their Fanatical versions) embody the Scientific and Mystical Race variants, with one holding faith in technology, robotics and efficiency in all things, while the other focuses on social development through religion, and is far more likely to develop Psychic Powers.
• Proud Warrior Race: If the civilization has the Militarist or the Fanatic Militarist ethos they are likely this.
  • Certain combinations of ethos, traits and government can result in the "Honorbound Warriors" AI personality type, empires with which "value honor and martial prowess above all other things".
  • A very specific combination of ethos and traits results in the "Metalheads", who are appropriately so hardcore and militaristic they don't really do peace.
• Psychic Powers: A tech specialty of Spiritualist governments, though other types of governments can unlock them if they get lucky and have a scientist who specializes in Psionics (or a Mad Scientist) show up in their leader pool. Allows you to do things that range from putting an Expy of a Guild Navigator on your ships to equipping your armies with Captain Ersatz versions of Jedi Knights and Sith Warriors. It also allows you to research the Psi Jump Drive without having to gank it from other Empires.
• Psychic Starship Pilot: It's possible to research "Psi Jump Drives" that draw upon the crew's psionic energies to jump a ship vast distances instantaneously. The strategic resource Zro dust enhances psi ability and improves conventional FTL speed.
• Psycho Serum: You can research Chemical Stimulants for your armies. According to the in-game text revealed so far it increase the combat awareness and reflexes of a soldier. Side Effects Include... anxiety, depression, seizures, nausea, hallucinations, narcolepsy, and uncontrollable bowel movement.
• Pun: Chances are good that if an achievement title isn't a Shout Out, it's this.
• Punctuation Shaker: One of the possible naming choices for your species makes use of apostrophes.
• Puny Earthlings: Humans may sometimes spawn as a pre-FTL earthbound species, or as only a distant memory on an Earth inhabited by pre-sapient cockroaches in the aftermath of Humanity's Wake.
• Puppeteer Parasite: Of the base game races, one of the fungoids◊ and one of the molluscoids◊ appear to be either this or the result of some kind of symbiotic relationship. The Creatures of the Void DLC adds a more unambiguously parasitic-looking specimen◊.
• Puppet State: Vassals, protectorates, and tributaries to a lesser degree.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Purely aesthetic species. While there are some effects on your race's avatar, they're mostly cosmetic, like the names of your ships, your potential leaders, and the insults your phenotype uses. The biggest effect is that for example two Avian phenotypes will be automatically friendlier towards each other than an Avian and a Fungoid type - but then again two Fungoid phenotypes will be friendlier towards each other too, and races are randomly generated for every game, so it doesn't really change anything.
• Purple Is Powerful: Synths, the top-tier AI POPs, look exactly like their less advanced precursors, only with purple lights. Similarly, everything psionic is also purple.
• Purposely Overpowered: The massive bonuses you get to everything from making a deal with The End of the Cycle make you practically invincible. At least until it comes to collect.
• Puzzle Box: A dead captain of a derelict starship holding a small metallic cube with each size a different color and split into nine equal rotatable squares. Perhaps when the cube is rotated into the correct position, it will open to reveal a hidden treasure — but when it's cut open, it turns out to be empty.
• Pyrrhic Victory:
  • It is a necessity to only wage wars against Empires against whom you can win without suffering too many losses. If you win the war but your Fleet power is reduced to only a fraction of its original, expect your other neighbors and vassals to jump on this opportunity.
  • You could win the game by fulfilling the victory condition, while losing in the long run. For instance, colonizing 40% of all habitable worlds, forcefully expanding beyond your capacity to secure victory asap, but you won't have the resources and management to control that many worlds at once, and if you let the game run longer, your empire would implode upon itself.
  • The Disengagement Mechanic introduced by Cherryh can turn into this. You fight against an enemy force, and after a brutal slog, you managed to win. But when you look at the results sheet, you've actually lost your ships while they merely disengaged. Unless you press your advantage quickly, you'll find yourself facing the same fleet who just won't get wiped out, over and over until you yourself get maximum Exhaustion and have to settle for status quo.
• Ragnarök Proofing: You can find ancient factory complexes that can be reactivated and give you a few advanced ships before breaking down. Top of them are the Enigmatic Fortress and Automated Dreadnought; the latter being a highly advanced warship that's been put on auto-patrol for millions of years and is still running to this day. Colonising Tomb Worlds can trigger several events related to finding intact remnants of the previous civilisation. It could be intact road networks or factories, or a vault full of survivors, who are a bit surprised to find aliens colonising their planet but happy enough to join your empire. On the other hand, it could be unexploded nuclear ordinance, which you'll need to rush to defuse before it destroys an area too large to evacuate.
• Randomized Damage Attack: The Arc Emitter and Focused Arc Emitter deal a random amount of damage between 1 and 1300/1700, but ignore shields and armor entierly. This means that they can potentially one shot corvettes and destroyers, while heavily crippling cruisers and battleships... or barely even scratch the paint on any of them.
  • To a much lesser degree, the Cloud Lightning weapon gained from void clouds and Disruptors have the same deal, where they can deal either only 1 damage, or their max value.
• Raygun Gothic: The ships included with the Humanoid Portrait Pack DLC are clearly Star Trek inspired, sleek saucers and smooth lines all around.
• Readings Are Off the Scale: Leviathans. Where a conventional fleet would have a fleet strength rating, there is just a skull. Testings showed that ~20-30k fleet force is sufficient to take most of them.
• Recycled In Space: One of the Leviathans is a Space Dragon guarding a Space Dragon Hoard.
• Reference Overdosed: Just take a good look at the Shout Outs page. Stellaris revels in classic and long-standing science fiction tropes, and pays homage to many works that used them before.
• Refining Resources:
  • Pre-Le Guin, while basic resources were not refined into strategic ones, you still had to research various technologies to uncover the presence, and start the mining of, the strategic ones. This was however described in the lore, at least. Befitting the trope, strategic resources offered various boosts and bonuses, usually in the form of enhancing a particular weapon type's effectiveness, but there were many other possibilities, ranging from enhanced shielding to adorable alien pets that made your population happier.
  • Post-Le Guin, this became a major part of the overhauled economy mechanics. Your planets still produce the three basic resources energy, minerals and food, but from there it gets complicated. Only planetside construction requires raw minerals while anything you build in space (including outposts, ships and megastructures) is paid for in alloys that were previously refined from minerals in alloy foundries. Research labs now also require Consumer Goods (themselves refined from minerals) to "produce" science, representing all the fancy lab equipment your scientists are using. Other buildings convert energy and food into unity and certain science types, to name but one example, and there are still a bunch that simply produce stuff without requiring more than the usual upkeep in energy (which all the others also have on top of their new consumption). Strategic resources still exist, but now in the form of consumable resources that work just like the basic ones - higher-tier stuff even consumes them constantly as part of its upkeep - and you can research buildings that produce them from, you guessed it, minerals. The list doesn't end there, but to cut this long story short: Le Guin kicked economic complexity from "basically non-existent" to "up to eleven".
• Relationship Values: Three different scales. Opinion measures another nation's opinion of your nation — are you a slobbering barbarian to them, a fellow seeker of the spiritual, or something else altogether? Relative power measures how much military power and potential they have compared to your empire, by comparing fleet power, actual fleet strength and technological level. Trust measures long-term diplomatic relationships such as maintaining non-aggression treaties. Note that just because someone trusts you doesn't mean they have a high opinion of you and vice versa, and vast differences in relative power may make certain interactions impossible regardless of trust or opinion. A fourth scale doesn't have values but instead summarizes whether an empire feels the player is relevant to its immediate interests. Too far away, for instance, and even an empire that holds the player in high opinion and trust and having a terrible military surrounded by hungry rivals won't really see any reason to form a defensive pact with the player.
• Religious Robot: With patch 1.8, Synthetic Ascension is no longer off-limit to Spiritualists (and vice-versa, Psionic is no longer off-limit to Materialists). So you can all become Synthetics while maintaining the Spiritualist ethos; nevermind how Spiritualists see sentient mechanical beings as abominations, and now you have turned them into what they hate...
• Religion of Evil: The Fanatic Purifiers of the Spiritualist variety likely follow one of these. Subversive Cults seem to follow a tamer variant that is explicitly criminal.
• The Remnant: Fallen Empires, empire with the "Remnants" origin, the Curator Order enclave, Marauders, and almost all other factions whose existence clearly did not begin in the current galactic cycle.
• Reporting Names: When vessels of an unidentified alien race are sighted, your empire will give them a designation such as "Unicorns", "Alpha Bogeys", etc until contact is made. If you're a xenophobic empire, the names will be more threatening: "Alpha Menace", etc.
• The Republic: A possible government type as long as the star nation doesn't have the Authoritarian Ethos.
• Resurgent Empire:
  • A Fallen Empire is an extremely powerful and technologically-advanced AI-controlled empire that fell into decay before the game began. They can re-awaken if they are provoked or decide that a nearby empire poses a significant threat to them. They can also re-awaken to help defend the galaxy against an endgame crisis, and there is a special event called the War in Heaven where two re-awakened Fallen Empires will declare war on each other.
  • With the Remnants Origin, the species once ruled an interstellar empire which eventually collapsed. The surviving members of the race now occupy a Relic World, the destroyed remains of what was once an ecumenopolis. Having relearned spaceflight, the species sets out to build an empire again.
• Ribcage Ridge: One possible result of researching an anomaly is to discover that a massive mountain range is actually a giant skeleton.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: The "Alien Pets", so cute they count as strategic resource that can boost happiness with the right building. Your race or others can be this too, though you can subvert it with a Repugnant trait, or be the combatative Badass Adorable type.
  • Many of the alien race portraits from the Leviathans DLC are also adorable, which makes it all the more amusing when those portraits are used for a Fanatical Purifier, Fallen Empire, or some other empire type that is likely to threaten you.
• Ridiculously Fast Construction: Averted: structures and ships can take months or even years to build. Mega-Structures can take decades or centuries to complete. Colony ships also take a full year (less with upgrades) to land on a planet, convert the ship to a colony center, and prepare to expand across the planet, during which the planet is a constant resource drain and can't do anything else, even though you've claimed it.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: Synthetics are fully sentient, and are actually better than most other species, as they gain 20% bonus to every production except food. It gets to the point that Synth Leaders do have a lifespan, presumably put in when they are first manufactured, as evidenced by the Planned Obsolescence achievement. While previously, Synths looked the same as Androids with just a different colored light, as of Synthetic Dawn, robot POPs are much more customizable, and if you pursue the Synthetic Ascension path, you can choose what your uploaded robot people will look like.
  • Additionally, when creating a Machine Empire, you have to use a "Machine" appearance, or the empire creator won't let you save.
• The Right of a Superior Species: Dealing with other empires requires diplomacy, or at least declarations of war and specified war aims. Dealing with pre-spaceflight cultures, however, just requires landing troops on their planet.
  Even the most primitive lifeform is but another actor on the stage of galactic conflict. Should they lack the strength to resist, what right do they have to be masters of their own fate?
  • Wiping them out is a galactic no-no, however. You can destroy them with a Colossus for less of a penalty overall, but anyone can declare war on you for any reason while you have one.
• Ring World Planet:
  • Keepers of Knowledge Fallen Empires have three of them, although only one is fully intact, one is completely derelict and a third one lies somewhere in between with one out of four segments available for colonization. You can take them from the Fallen Empire and make use of the ridiculously powerful resource production buildings aboard if your fleets are up to the task, and with the Megastructure Restoration technology researched, you can even repair the damaged sections if you have the resources to spare.
    • Synthetic Dawn added a new, synthetic Fallen Empire type, the Ancient Caretakers. Their one and only inhabitated system is a three-quarters intact ring world. Two more exist but lie in ruins, waiting to be conquered and restored to their old glory by any fledgling galactic empire.
  • The Cybrex homeworld is a ruined ringworld. It's long past the point of being inhabitable but you can get a massive engineering tech bonus by building research stations on its segments.
  • The Utopia expansion finally adds the ability to construct your own ring worlds. They're massive multi-stage construction efforts that use up every celestial body in the system for resources, so once you begin building, it's just the star and your artificial halo that remains. Like the Dyson Sphere, it can't be built in systems with habitable planets and devours a metric shitload of time and alloys, but once it's finished, you have the equivalent of four full-sized Gaia Worlds at your disposal.
  • There's also a special star system called Sanctuary that contains an almost fully intact ring world guarded by a vast array of powerful robotic defense systems. Investigating it reveals that its creators envisioned it as a biological reserve for non-sentient species from all across the galaxy, monitored by an AI. Then the creators vanished and left the simple-minded AI behind, which then continued to protect Sanctuary from everyone and everything for countless millennia while being utterly oblivious to the fact that the species aboard the ring world had evolved into primitive civilisations in the meantime. If you destroy the defense systems, you can treat the four ring world segments like any other world inhabited by primitives - build observation posts, or just kill them all and send your colony ships over.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: If by some miracle the End of the Cycle is defeated, then all the surviving factions immediately begin hunting down the faction responsible for summoning it and wiping out billions of innocent lives. If said factions happens to be you, this translates to a permanent -1,000 diplomacy penalty.
• Robot Soldier: Both you and other empires can build and field robot armies.
• Robot War: Any war against Machine Empires is this, including AI rebellion. Or The Contingency.
• Robotic Reveal: The Contingency will deploy synthetic infiltrators to sow discord among your empire. This can include replacing one of your leaders with a synth decoy, forcing you to kill them after it's been revealed to the public.
• Rock Beats Laser: Despite Power Creep and numerous nerfs, Kinetic weapons (guns in space) are still favored by the automatic ship designer as of 3.4, due to their higher firing rate (and thus their higher DPS) compared to all of the fantastical energy weapons available. Researching everything and not touching the ship designer will result in all of your ships having only Dakka.
  • Likewise, physical Armor and Hull upgrades are typically preferred over Energy Shields by much of the player base; Armor is preferred for its cheapness and its lack of Power usage (which allows weapons more strength), while Hull is preferred as a counter to weapons that hit it directly. These preferences have made the community favor Energy Weapons, which do better against physical impediments.
  • Computer players are specifically programmed to ignore the automatic ship designer somewhat, by having a coded preference for some balance of physical and energy stuff. The meaner Computer personalities favor Kinetics and Armor, though.
• Rock–Paper–Scissors: Kinetics shred shields, shields deflect lasers, lasers melt armor, armor blocks kinetics. Of course, these merely affect damage reduction and multipliers, and are irrelevant when one fleet is strongly outgunned by another.
• Rogue Drone: Gestalt Consciousnesses, such as Hive Minds and Machine Empires, need to expend a certain amount of effort on maintaining the connection between their drones. If stability falls enough, then the malfunctioning drones, unable to synchronize properly with the main collective, will start diverging and forming their own collectives, resulting in crime, revolts, piracy, and even Civil War. This is also the backstory behind the Lost Colony origin for Gestalt Consciousnesses. An accident cut off one of the original Empire's colony ships from the collective. Most of the drones died, but a few succeeded at just enough Grew Beyond Their Programming to form a new and separate collective.
• Roguish Romani: Visits by Caravaneers often result in a few hundred missing energy credits, and many of the trade deals they offer can be awfully lopsided.
• Rousseau Was Right: An interesting example of this trope, in that emerges purely from game mechanics - Pops on a planet will automatically take jobs if they are available, even if it doesn't increase their living standards, and thus unemployment only ever becomes an issue if the player doesn't construct new districts and buildings to keep up with a planet's growing population. In other words, people want to work and contribute to society and will do so if given the opportunity regardless of any financial incentive, presumably motivated either by a sense of duty or just sheer boredom.
• RPG Elements:
  • Leaders have different traits that have varying effects on the nation, diplomacy, the military and scientific research. They also level up as they gain experience in their fields (for scientists it is doing research or surveying planets, for Commanders engaging in combat).
  • The Empires themselves get traits and ethos that give various bonuses and negative attributes; the number of which is determined by a point-buy system.
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens: Averted on release. Several were eventually added simply by popular demand.
• Rule of Cool: Invoked in an official gameplay stream.
  "Why are our ships falling in space? They are falling in space because it looks cool."
• Sadist: Not just an individual but an entire species in an empire with a Decadent trait is this. Essentially at least one enslaved population on a planet will fulfill their needs in order function regularly to their hearts content. That said, despite the name, Decadent can be interpreted in multiple ways which may not involve sadism.
  • The Decadent trait now makes Pops especially dislike manual labor; they're not any worse at it than other Pops, at least if you can offset their propensity to lower stability, so you can be sadistic to them. Amusingly, it's the one negative trait without a positive counterpart.
• Sapient Eat Sapient: Included in the Banks DLC's new slavery and purge options.
• Sapient Ship:
  • You can research Sentient Combat Computer after researching Sentient AI. Lore-wise, they are described as optimized for aggression while their fear of death would help in self (and crew) preservation. Gameplay-wise, the bonus they grant is less than dedicated Combat/Bombardment computer, but they get all the bonuses from both types. This tech is unfortunately barred from Spiritualist Empires, but they get an equivalent in the form of Precognitive Interface.
  • Gray, who is a being made entirely of nanites, is this if you choose to turn him into his ship form.
• Save Scumming: A viable tactic for some event chains. However, some things, like Guardian spawn points and the outcome of activating L-gates, are determined at the start of the game, explicitly to prevent this. Ironman Mode disables manual saves, greatly limiting the effectiveness of the tactic. It's also required to unlock achievements.
• Scales of Justice: The symbol◊ of the Egalitarian ethos.
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens:
  • Randomly generated AI empires can be ruled by theocratic governments.
  • Alternatively, the player can choose a theocratic government for their empire if they have already chosen the Spiritualist or Fanatic Spiritualist ethos. Can be subverted, however, if you also get a Xenophile (ie, open and friendly towards aliens, finds slavery abhorrent) Ethos.
  • Almost all Fallen Empires qualify: they all have only a single, fanatical ethos that they pursue with almost zealous fervor - and if you should happen to step on the toes of whatever their given ethos or agenda is, their fleets of endgame tech won't hesitate to wipe your Empire out in short order.
  • The Awakened form of Holy Guardians Fallen Empire, the Doctrinal Enforcers, would forcefully convert any Empire agreeing to be their vassals into Spiritualist/Authoritarian. Not that anyone has a say about it...
• Sci-Fi Kitchen Sink: The creators and writers seem to be deliberately calling on every sci-fi trope in existence.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: When it comes to Utopia megastructures, although these examples also count as Acceptable Breaks from Reality. Scaling them realistically would be impossible to implement with the engine and ginormously game-breaking.
  • Completed Dyson Spheres generate 4,000 energy units per month, when a typical planet with late-game tech makes 20-80 energy. In reality, by moving its civilization up a full level on the Kardashev Scale, a Dyson Sphere would produce about ten billion times more energy than an Earth-sized planet.
  • Ring Worlds are represented as four segments, each of which is the size of the largest inhabitable planets. But even a relatively 'modest' ring would have over 10,000 times Earth's surface area.
• Screw the Rules, They're Not Real!: If an empire has a closed border policy, most other factions will respect it outside of wars, even genocidal empires. They can try sneaking in cloaked fleets, but even those will evacuate if they get caught. The Mauraders, being Space Pirates, don't have any respect for borders. Likewise, the Fallen Empires do not take the lines drawn by child races seriously. If you are not strong enough to stop them, do you really want to tell them no? And if you are, you are going to have to physically prove it to them. Even then, their Pride isn't going to let the lesson stick..
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Heavily damaged ships that take additional damage during battle may randomly disengage, leaving the battle and rejoining their fleet once the danger has passed. Smaller ships have a higher chance to pull this off than larger ones. Should all ships count as disengaged at any point in the battle, the entire fleet performs an emergency FTL jump to save their hides, which may result in random ships being destroyed during transit. Can be defied if you use the No Retreat War Doctrine.
• Screw Your Ultimatum!: Unfortunately, even when your fleet force outweighs the entire enemy federation fleet 5-to-1, they will still insist on fighting it out, if you have sufficient unclaimed war goals. For example, if you chose to simply humiliate your opponent, then crushing their entire fleet will usually let you claim victory. But if you're aiming to conquer even a single planet, you better take and occupy that planet, otherwise the AI will ALWAYS refuse to surrender, even if you have a colossus pointed at their homeworld.
  • If a War in Heaven breaks out, you (and if you have any, your allies) can choose to tell both Awakend Empires to get bent, and attack them both. While this does paint a large target on your back, it also means you will not be in servitude of a larger power, and have an opportunity to salvage their powerful equipment.
• Schmuck Bait: The tooltip for forming a covenant with the End of the Cycle says "Do not do this." in red letters.
  • Sometimes you will come across inexplicably uninhabited Gaia worlds, lush planets that are fully habitable by any organic life. You'll also notice that they have unique names, such as "Pristine Jewel". Many first time players eagerly set up colonies on them without even realizing that said worlds are considered holy sites by a Fallen Empire - and colonizing these planets seriously pisses them off. They will likely then declare war on you in order to "cleanse" their holy worlds. Not a good thing, considering Fallen Empires are very powerful at the beginning of the game and can easily wipe the floor with you. There's since been an update that'll cause a log to show up when you discover one of these worlds, and one of the dialogue options to close the log will always remark how 'something feels off' about the planet to hint to players it may not be a good idea to colonize it immediately.
  • The infamous Asteroid Hives and their associated system have a massive mineral total (usually more than 30 before techs) just waiting to be claimed... but build a single mining station and those asteroids come to life and attack you. Fortunately, they can't leave the system, so at most they'll cost you up to 600 minerals by destroying mining stations.
• Sealed Evil in a Can:
  • A system in Fallen Empire territory might contain a Shielded World, which blocks all scans of the surface. You can try to bring the shield down For Science!. Cue you releasing some Void Clouds with the message that 'you might have released something dark'... although anyone capable of taking on the Fallen Empire and live to tell the tale would find absolutely no problem with Void Clouds.
  • Invoked by the Pandora's World achievement: use the Global Pacifier to seal off a planet belonging to Fanatic Purifiers, Devouring Swarm, or Determined Exterminators.
  • Likewise, using a Global Pacifier to finish off the Contingency's main nexus results in this.
    For the sake of future generations, we can only hope that the shield will hold...
  • The L-Space gates lead to an incredibly rich sector full of unique resources, but start the game locked down. Oh, and there's about an even chance that the Grey Goo used to build the network and which destroyed its creators is still active there and you just gave it access to a portal network. If you get "lucky" finding insights early on, this can easily unleash an endgame-crisis-level disaster early in the midgame. Of course, if it is undefended, all that loot is yours for the taking...
  • One random event you can come across is finding a desert world covered with a shield that is experiencing a time loop. If you break the time loop, you might end up releasing a race of reptilian Fanatic Purifiers.
  • Taken literally with the Extradimensional Warlock, which is awarded to the empire that defeats the extradimensional invaders. The empire captures a surviving member and promptly seals them inside a prison container, and uses it to enhance their sublight speed and jump drive range.
• Sealed Good in a Can: On the flipside, a Commander can be sealed in one of the shield worlds, who will join your leader pool when the shield is lowered, which makes it questionable why the fallen empire has imprisoned him.
• The Secret of Long Pork Pies: The description of the Bio-Reprocessing Plants openly admits that disloyal employees are one of the ingredients in the food produced there. While it makes sense that a Syndicate would stoop to cannibalism, even legitimate Corporations are implied to engage in this; the description of the Fast Food Chain includes a disclamer that the food sold there includes traces of soylent green.
• Servant Race:
  • The "Syncretic Evolution" origin allows you to start with a secondary species on your homeworld that have the "Servile" trait, which makes them only good at producing minerals and food (like slaves) and more likely to accept their assigned lot in life.
  • The Rogue Servitor flavor of machine intelligence subverts this. Every aspect of society is run by machines all the way up to government. The idea is that their organic masters - who are subject to Mandatory Pampering and can never take any job other than "bio trophy" - should never toil or struggle a day in their lives.
• Sexbot: Implied in the description of the "Domestic Protocols" robot trait.
  Specialized equipment and behavior protocols for all conceivable domestic needs. Full functionality guaranteed.
• Settling the Frontier: What dominates the early part of the game as your civilization is in a race to grab as many habitable worlds and resource rich star systems as possible before another star nation claims them. However, by the middle of the game most available territory will have been claimed and further expansion will require either diplomatic horse trading or war.
• Shattered World:
  • There are a few of these scattered around the galaxy, usually orbiting black holes. The Holy Guardians' capital planet also has a shattered moon called "The Mistake". Functionally, these planets are identical to Barren Worlds and devoid of any life.
  • With Apocalypse installed, any world that falls victim to a Planet Cracker-class Colossus ends up as one. This special type always provides significant mineral deposits (up to 16 units apiece, depending on planet size) that were conveniently brought to the surface when the planet went boom.
• Short-Lived Organism: Species with the "fleeting" trait have -10 to their life expectancy, Clone Soldiers take a -40, and the traits associated with the "Overtuned" origin reduce lifespan by anywhere from -10 to -30.
• Shout-Out: Enough that it has its own page.
• Side Effects Include...: Parodied when buying XenoGel (a habitability-boosting compound) from a NPC Trader Enclave.
• Single-Biome Planet:
  • Broadly averted. The ten habitable types are classified by their dominant terrain/climate, but it is made clear that there are many different biomes contained within them. The Continental type (think Earth, essentially) by and large averts this trope, while the Ocean, Savanna, Alpine and Desert types fit it best—and even then, it's explicitly stated that, say, Ocean worlds do have islands, and Desert worlds do have some surface water, just not a lot. Tundra, Arctic, Tropical and Arid worlds straddle the line—they do have variation, just not as much as Continental worlds. Gaia worlds, which are stated to have habitats suitable to every species at different latitudes, completely avert this.
  • Uninhabitable planet types play it fairly straight, being broadly grouped into Barren (thin or nonexistent atmospheres), Toxic (thick but unbreathable atmospheres), Molten (covered in lava), Frozen (covered in ice), and Gas Giants. Truth in Television in this case.
• The Singularity: Thrice in one sitting.
  • Your empire, initially, underwent a singularity that allowed them to travel through space.
  • Reaching enough technologies to match the Fallen Empires is a singularity by itself. See Uplifted Animal.
  • The Ascension feature, in the Utopia DLC, allowing your empire to commit the Ultimate Life Form phase, either through LEGO Genetics, Brain Uploading or Enlightenment Superpowers.
  • This can also be a bad thing: The Contingency was created to prevent the development of Class-30 Singularity, which could cause the destruction of the universe.
• Single-Species Nations: Most empires start out with just one sapient species, although later they might acquire populations of other species through annexation or immigration. Depending on the empire's ethos, they can either accept these "xenos" as citizens, enslave them, assimilate them, or purge them.
• Sinister Geometry:
  • The Contingency crisis uses ships and stations build like basic geometrical objects to give this vibe.
  • The Infinity Sphere in Leviathans: a black sphere etched with complex sigils, found orbiting a black hole. Subverted in that it's not hostile by default and will even boost your research if you help it out.
  • From the same DLC, the Enigmatic Fortress plays it much straighter: a space station with immense firepower built mostly from flat, smooth blocks. To make matters worse, the inside seems to have a strong case of Alien Geometries.
  • Stareaters from the Nemesis DLC look like a mundane cube. But when they start the process of harvesting a star, they split into multiple smaller cubes.
• Skill Gate Characters: Playing as Hive Mind eliminates Happiness and Factions from your empire, as well as reducing Consumer Goods consumption, thus giving you much less headache in managing your empire. But playing as Hive Mind prevents you from going for Psionic or Synthetic Ascension paths, you will be limited to a handful of Hive Mind-specific Civics, and your immortal Ruler will have no other bonuses. Also, nobody except for other hive minds likes hive minds, though not to the extent that it prevents you from engaging in diplomacy. In short, it's Boring, but Practical.
  • It does still allow for a flexible playstyle if you employ diplomacy well... unless your Civic is Devouring Swarm, in which case your Empire is classified as a Ravenous Hive and can't engage in Diplomacy ^notebecause, as the tooltip says, "We don't engage in diplomacy with other species! We eat them!" and gets a whopping -1000 opinion modifier (well - would you like to negotiate with something that is essentially a Tyranid Expy?). Blowing up and/or eating everything that comes your way becomes the enforced playstyle in this case, although actual war can still take surprisingly long to break out. On the "plus" side, Devouring Swarms gain bonuses specifically towards replication to make up for the lack of diplomacy options.
  • Playing as a Machine Empire follows broadly the same rules as playing as a biological Hive Mind, though unless you are a Determined Exterminator (basicly SkyNet taking to the stars), you can engage in diplomacy and many organics do in fact like robots... while about just as many hate them. Rogue Servitors probably have it the easiest, since they do come with organic pops as well, who always produce Unity (important for traditions and ascensions) and are generally pleasant neighbours in case of NPC empires.
  • Empires with the "Shared Burdens" Civic (i.e, space Communists) use a universal living standard where all pops have the same moderate Consumer Goods consumption regardless of strata, more rapid strata demotion for Pops, and Unemployed Pops still generate Unity. With this civic, economies are less of a headache to manage and Pops without work still provide a benefit to your empire. Combined with "Agrarian Idyll", a Shared Burdens empire can create a strong rural economy that as a side-effect renders trade relatively unimportant, freeing up starports and fleets away from anti-piracy duty to defending your empire. On top of all this, empires with these two civics naturally get bonuses to Stability and Administrative Cap. These Boring, but Practical rural communist empires have the potential to be quite strong and avoid the "fiddly bits" that benefit more specialised empires and might trip up inexperienced players.
• Slap-on-the-Wrist Nuke: Nuclear missiles are the basic missile weapons for starships, but since there's no atmosphere to carry a shockwave in space even an unarmored corvette can take multiple hits from them. However, they can still vaporize a city on a planet.
• Slave Market: With the DLC MegaCorp, civilizations can access the Galactic Slave Market. You can still buy pops even if you've outlawed slavery, but they'll be more expensive.
• Slave Mooks: It is possible for nations to recruit slave armies if they legalized Slavery and have the Slave Processing Facility. With Utopia and its more granular system of species policies (including for slavery), you can specifically designate certain slave races as Battle Thralls, which gives armies formed from these races a bonus in combat.
• Sliding Scale of Libertarianism and Authoritarianism: Egalitarianism and Authoritarianism, respectively. Depending on your Ethos, your government can either be a Democracy, Oligarchy, Elective Dictatorship, or Imperial. By default, you can access all four, while Authoritarian Ethos blocks Democracies and Egalitarian blocks Dictatorships and Imperial. Having either Ethos at the Fanatic level also blocks Oligarchies. Mechanics-wise, Democracies have elections every 10 years or so, and completing the Side Quest that comes with the change of Leader grants you a hefty Unity bonus. Oligarchies have elections (limited to certain types of leaders, and pops can't vote) every 20 years or so and there's no Side Quest for Unity bonus, but it also means you get to use your Leader's individual bonus that much longer, and some of these can be truly broken (Connected with its +1 Influence per month bonus is among the best there is). Imperial has no elections and instead use succession lines for Leadership, while Dictatorships "elect" a new ruler from a pool, similar to Oligarchies but lasting until death.
• Sliding Scale of Robot Intelligence: Up and down the scale, depending on technology progression. Early robots are simple programmable automatons used for basic labor that consume energy credits instead of food, do not care about happiness or planetary conditions, and have severe penalties to cognitive related tasks. Later versions are increasingly capable of doing any job an organic population could do, and may start to agitate for synthetic civil rights. Others are less anthropomorphic computers used for research, administration, and ship control. Simple ship computers can be used to optimize a craft for attack or defense, while later versions can leverage self-preservation protocols to help the ship react like a living thing. Then there is the Machine Consciousness at the top of the scale, but it is neither friendly nor humble.
• So Proud of You: Holy Guardians Fallen Empires get an opinion bonus towards Spiritual empires who use the Consecrated Worlds ascension perk to Consecrate the Guardians' Holy Worlds.
• Solid Gold Poop: Lithoid Pops can (or be genetically engineered to) produce miniscule amounts of strategic resources as a by-product of their metabolic processes. So yes, you can literally power your fleet's engines with your peoples' farts.
• The Soulless: Spiritualists think Robots, no matter how advanced or human-like, are these.^note Materialists consider "If neural impulses in a protein body could be called a soul, then electrical impulses in a metallic body should also be one". Given how the Psychic trait is off-limit to mechanical beings and Contingency-linked synth infiltrators can be spotted by psychics due to their lack of psychic presence, they might have a point.
• Space Amish: The First Contact DLC adds a new optional encounter where you might discover a friendly and cooperative primitive civilization with the pacifist ethos and six Gaia worlds. This is a potentially fatal trap for any greedy xenophobes or militarists, as declaring war on them causes them to spawn a gigantic Fallen Empire-tier fleet and very likely use it to steamroll your empire. They also fuck around with your hyperlanes and use them to move their planets around, implying that these primitives once ruled the entire galaxy and built the network all the other races currently use.
• Space Clouds: It has a nebulae as a type of star system "terrain," like pulsars or black holes, and the galactic map has several named nebulae that encompass several systems. The upside is that you can harvest resources from a nebula with the proper space station module, the downside is that outside sensors cannot penetrate the nebular cloud, so the only way to see what's in one is by sending in one or more ships. This makes a nebula a natural place to spring an ambush on a fleet moving along the galaxy's Hyperspace Lanes.
• Space Cold War: Often breaks out between two empires that are mutual rivals, but not actually at war. Assuming relative parity of overall military and technological power, both sides will often race to secure area, resources, allies, and technology, all the while building up their respective infrastructures and militaries. Domestically, each side gets a bonus to their Influence resource by keeping the rivalry going, so the equilibrium can stand for quite some time.
• Space Cossacks:
  • Privateers are a conglomeration of species from past empires who subsist by piracy
  • Nomads are the peaceful version who put you in contact with other empires and might sell your empire ships or ask to settle on one of your planets.
  • Marauders, added in the Apocalypse DLC, are more like Space Mongols. They occasionally raid systems or extort tribute but can also be hired as mercenaries until the Great Khan arises.
• Space Elves: Fallen Empires fit the bill, being isolationist, highly advanced small enclaves of Precursors with, at best, a very patronizing view of the less advanced civilization (ie, you) right outside their door. Your race and other isolationist xenophobes also fit the same mold if chosen to stay behind wars committed by more open or violent factions. You can also play this trope by playing as an empire with the "pointy-eared human" portrait, which have a very Vulcan-esque appearance.
• Space Fighter: Available as a weapon system for Cruiser, Battleship, and Defense Station hulls. Unfortunately they're so slow and so easily countered (anything that defends against missiles kills them too) that they're almost entirely useless. Space Bombers on the other hand are generally well-armoured and ignore shields, so they are a staple of high-level fleets. As an additional bonus, they will always be targeted first instead of missiles, so missile-heavy ships will have a higher chance to dish out damage. Later patches combined fighters and bombers into "strike craft", which do so little that a ship with even the highest tier of them is actually weaker than the same ship with an empty hangar (the excess power makes other weapons stronger). They got a massive boost in 2.6 and their role was changed to focus more on point defense and countering Corvette swarms; however, their usefulness is still limited simply because a lot of AI empires will prioritize point defense in their ship designs to the point of Crippling Overspecialization.
• Space-Filling Empire: Like most Paradox games this one tries to avert the trope with the tendency for larger empires to start balkanizing as they overreach. Victory more often involves vassalizing or forming a federation with other empires than outright absorbing their planets.
• Space Is Noisy: Fleets and space stations give off a pervasive hum that gets louder the farther you zoom in. Space battles also make a lot of noise (especially ones involving X slot weapons or the Breath Weapon of a space monster), but what tops them all must be the mighty kaboom that accompanies blowing up a planet with a Planet Cracker-class Colossus.
• Space Nomads: One may encounter nomads who peacefully wander through space. Once contact is established, they can put you into contact with other empires they encounter. The Megacorp expansion retools them into the Caravaneers, which are more like Space Traveling Salesmen.
• Space Orcs:
  • The "Barbaric Despoilers" civic depicts a society that essentially lives by the law of the jungle, where "the strongest may seize whatever they covet." Naturally, they maintain this manner of behavior on the galactic stage as well - empires with said civic have access to the "Despoliation" casus belli, which allows them to wage wars to plunder their enemies, stealing energy, minerals, and even pops. There are, however, some downsides: Migration Treaties are blocked, there are only two Federation types available to them, and finally, all empires without the "Barbaric Despoilers" civic will view one having it as a pillaging menace, resulting in the latter receiving a permanent opinion penalty in relations with most of the galaxy.
  • This image is likely to be evoked by any AI empire with the Hegemonic Imperialists, Honorbound Warriors, or Slaving Despots personality type whose behavior fits the bill and which is much more competitive in terms of fleet power than technology level.
  • Marauders are Space Cossacks with mid- to late-game technology but who live in dingy overcrowded space stations and survive by raiding and extorting tribute from other empires or or hiring themselves out as Private Military Contractors. One of their three custom personalities is prone to screaming threats to kill and eat the player in communications.
  • One of the species portraits in the Humanoids DLC looks particularly orcish◊, though given the AI species are randomly generated there's no guarantee they'll act like it if encountered.
• Space Pirates: These come in three flavours:
  • Privateers have been spacefaring for millennia, and are believed to be The Remnant of an ancient empire that collapsed. They tend to keep to themselves, but when provoked, they have three unique fleets that give them serious teeth: one made of a few high-tech ships called the New Blood, one made of a large number of veteran old ships called the Old Guard, and a mysterious, non-buildable command dreadnought larger than even a battleship (specifically, it's a "Galleon"-class and rivals a Titan sans the Titan Laser). Collectively, they have well over fifteen times the firepower of ordinary pirate fleets, and mount high-end lasers. They are also always unaligned to anyone.
  • Regular pirates appear once civilizations have been established and aim for the stars. These pirates actively raid undefended systems and can easily take out a mining station or two before a player can dispatch a fleet, and it can take a while to track down their bases to permanently end the threat. However, unless the player has completely neglected their military to the point of building no ships beyond the starting fleet, they represent a negligible threat, because their fleets are significantly less powerful than even the various space-borne alien organisms. Generally they lurk in systems on the fringes of empires and are especially likely to appear in systems surrounded, but not claimed, by any given empire.
  • In the Apocalypse DLC, Marauders are NPC empires which can be accurately described as Space Mongols. They are always hostile to other empires and periodically raid empires that refuse to give them tribute, but it is possible to negotiate with them to some degree via bribes, or even hire them as mercenaries to keep them at bay. On the other hand, being Space Mongols, they can potentially become unified under a Great Khan, who will proceed to attempt to conquer the galaxy. It is possible to assassinate the Great Khan, which in turn will fracture the Marauders again, with unpredictable consequences.
  • After the Megacorp DLC and accompanying patch piracy becomes largely abstracted. Unsecured trade lanes become gradually less profitable over time to represent pirate raids effecting trade convoys, and occasional military patrols (or starbases with hanger modules) are needed to keep them down. If you let it get completely out of hand, then that whole branch of your trade routes will be cut off and pirate fleets will spawn.
  • The Aquatics DLC adds a new Aquatic advisor who speaks like a pirate. Two of the name lists for Aquatic species also invoke the Golden Age of Piracy, one with stereotypical pirate names and another with similarly stereotypical British names.
• Space Police: Nemesis allows two versions mechanically through the Custodian mechanics. On one hand, you have the Galactic Defense Force, a Peacekeepers-alike navy that the entire Galactic Community contributes to under the direct command of the Galactic Custodian; on the other, the Custodian can institute the measures for GALPOL, a Community-wide network of cooperative policing that reduces crime on every world in the Galactic Community in exchange for a portion of each member's Energy income.
• Space Romans:
  • Picking the Xenophobe, Spiritualist and Pacifist ethics in conjunction with an Imperial ruler and the "Inward Perfection" Civic gives you a unique government type for this specific combination — the "Celestial Empire". From the name and description, it's effectively Imperial China, but IN SPACE!
  • Patch 2.0 adds a Roman-themed name list.
• Space Sector: Gameplay includes the creation of Sectors as autonomous (partly computer-controlled) regions of your interstellar empire.
• Space Station: Comes in many flavors!
  • Starbases are the primary stations around claimed systems; they are expensive, have several tiers of upgrades, can accommodate a variety of optional modules, and are the places that ships are constructed, repaired, and refitted.
  • Smaller specific-purpose stations are built by Construction Ships around stellar bodies, like mining stations to harvest energy or minerals, research stations to collect readings and conduct experimentation, and observation posts to monitor primitive civilizations.
  • Stationary defense platforms can be constructed around starbase. These serve to beef up a starbase's defenses by providing more and more specialized weapon and utility systems.
  • Leviathans gives NPC Stations that can variably act as advisors, artisans or traders. The first give information about the Guardians and science boosts, the second gives unique buildings and happiness/unity boosts, and the third sells you strategic resources.
  • The Utopia expansion adds Habitats, which are massive to the point of having an artificial biome inside of them. They come with specialised structures, including a unique happiness-boosting one called Leisure District, and function as small, buildable "planets" for empires who have run out of habitable planets to colonize, or who want more space, but ran into the star system control limit. The Federations expansion even gives you the option to start with several habitats as homeworlds instead of a planet, with the ability to build more.
• Space Whale: The Tiyanki, which use some sort of biological hyperdrive to hop from system to system and graze on gas giants, are referred to by the UI as "space whales". They look more like giant jellyfish, but generally fit the bill in terms of behavior. The Tiyanki Matriarch is a particularly massive specimen that serves as the Guardian to a system that is guaranteed to contain a rare and valuable Gaia World; defeating her grants you access to the system and lets you recruit a starship captain who spent a lifetime attempting to hunt her, along with his flagship. The 2.7 patch continues the concept by adding Space Whaling, allowing players to hunt Tiyanki for energy and exotic gases.
• Species Loyalty: Xenophobes do not necessarily treat their own kind much better than xenos. The ones with the Selective Kinship civic on the other hand always care for their own kind on a policy level.
• Spiritual Successor: As the game's development has progressed, it's been borrowing more and more elements from Victoria: An Empire Under The Sun, to the point where responding with "Vicky 3 Confirmed" for dev diaries relating to the "Le Guin" economy rework is a fandom meme.
• Square-Cube Law: Examined through the Technology Tree. Justified, as your empire expands, demands for better technology likely to be counted for, but spreading new technologies to every person on the planet is already time-consuming by themselves.
  • Patch 2.2 introduced the concept of Administrative Capacity, or how much stuff your empire can reasonably administer while continuing to function. The more systems, planets, and people you have in your empire, the more resources you need to devote to administration to avoid slowing down your economy, research, and progression.
• Square Race, Round Class: After the 2.2 planet reworking what race takes what job is random, with suitability only adding a slight probability modifier. This frequently leads to absurd situations where your specialty mining robots are all working as file clerks while the Proud Scholar Race are all happily ignoring the research labs to toil in the mines.
• Stable Time Loop: One potential anomaly has you investigating a mysterious race that uses the EXACT same metal compositions in one of their ships as you do. After further study, you find research notes that will help out your empire for ten years. When those ten years are up, a rift to the past mysteriously opens and your scientists understand that it was their future selves that sent the research notes. This causes them to compile and send some research notes through that rift on a ship, completing the loop.
• Standard Alien Spaceship: The Avian, Molluscoid, Humanoid, and Fungoid shipsets play this completely straight, as do the regal-looking Fallen Empire ships. The Reptilian, Plantoid, and Arthropod ships are less drastic examples, as they have colorful highlights but otherwise fall closer to Standard Human Spaceships in shape.
• Standard Human Spaceship: Mammalian and Reptilian spaceships follow a blocky, chunky design with lots of greebles for texture. With the Humanoid Portrait Pack, however, the actual human ships avert this in favor of a Raygun Gothic design.
• Standard Sci-Fi Fleet: Players start off with a single corvette design, but can research destroyers, cruisers, and battleships as well.
• Standard Sci Fi Setting: The interplay between the various space-faring factions play it straight. The story varies between different saved games, though, so you never know what you'll encounter beforehand.
• Stand Your Ground: The No Retreat War Doctrine disables the Disengagement mechanic for your fleet. It's both good and bad; Heavily damaged ships won't disengage and will keep on fighting to the end at full capacity. On the other hand, losing a battle means losing your fleet, so you'll fall victim to Unstable Equilibrium.
• Starfish Aliens: The playable and randomly generated alien species in the arthropoid, molluscoid, and especially fungoid and plantoid categories break the Humanoid Aliens mold, though by gameplay necessity they possess a fundamentally human-like psychology. It effects dialogue in diplomacy, especially insults. Outside the available archetypes, the Yuht precursors, and species associated to the late-game crisis, the Extradimensional Invaders and Prethoryn Scourge, fit in both form and psychology.
• Star Killing:
  • Complete The Loop, and your home star goes Nova. Constructing a Dyson Sphere also counts; although that's less 'killing' and more 'imprisoning', the end result is the same: turning all planets in the system to be utterly uninhabitable Barren and Frozen Worlds. At least it cannot be done in a system with inhabited planets, so it's not useful as an offensive strategy (though the sheer cost would make that incredibly impractical anyway).
  • Nemesis introduces Star-Eaters, eldritch starships available to Crisis Aspirant empires. Their main purpose is to collect large amounts of dark matter to fuel the Aetherophasic Engine by detonating a star, collapsing it into a black hole and destroying everything in the system in the progress. Successfully fueling the Engine will detonate every star in the galaxy.
• The Stars Are Going Out: Related to the construction of Dyson Spheres mentioned above, you can and will inflict this on at least one other empire in the galaxy. At some point during construction, they'll contact you to tell you that you're about to extinguish one of their most treasured stars in the night sky, destroying an important constellation in the process. They won't ask you to stop, but you still have a couple of options on how to deal with it - issue a formal apology, share some of the energy with them, or tell them to piss off and deal with it. No points for guessing which one they don't like.
• Stellar Station: Since patch 2.0, controlling a star system requires building or capturing a starbase orbiting its primary star. Stars might also have resource deposits (usually energy) that can be collected by building mining stations on them. The Utopia DLC adds the ability to build a Dyson Sphere while MegaCorp has the Matter Decompressor orbiting black holes.
• Stock Star Systems: Sirius and Alpha Centauri A are scripted colony sites for Earth-based empires, and Procyon and Barnard's Star can be found nearby as well. There's also Deneb, which serves as the capital system for the Commonwealth of Man. A handful of other familiar names, such as Regulus or Tau Ceti, are sometimes chosen by the random system generator.
• Stone Wall:
  • Certain ship designs can be fitted as dedicated Point-Defense ships, with Hangars, Point Defense and Flak Batteries. They will have abysmal damage output, but are absolutely crucial in taking on any Missile Empire, The Scourge, and Fallen Empires to an extent. Additonally, these hardpoints consume little power, thus enabling them to be fitted with more Shields and Armor, becoming de facto tanks of your fleet able to protect other ships from Missiles and Fighters/Bombers.
  • Corvettes. They're Fragile Speedsters, but a swarm of Corvettes is a Stone Wall. They don't deal much damage on account of only having Small weapons, but they will tie down enemy weapons which will futilely try to hit them what with their 70%+ Evasion, and since there's hundreds of them in a swarm, they will effectively tank the enemy fleet while your Battleships bring their L & XL weapons to bear. And if the Corvettes are fitted with Torpedoes or Matter Disintegrators, they can deliver Death of a Thousand Cuts as well.
• Stop Poking Me!: VIR can be as fool-proof as it is, but it doesn't stop you from turning HAL on you.
• Stop Worshipping Me: One archaeological site, the last retreat of the prophet Zarqlan turns out to be a trap-filled hermitage he retreated to to discourage his followers from bothering him. Given the reaction of Holy Guardian Fallen Empires after his mummified head is retrieved, it clearly didn't work.
• Straw Nihilist: This trope comes up a few places in the game.
  • The Materialist Ethic Types play with this trope; the description for the Materialist Ethic is described as this^note "As we reach for the stars, we must put away childish things; gods, spirits and other phantasms of the brain. Reality is cruel and unforgiving, yet we must steel ourselves and secure the survival of our race through the unflinching pursuit of science and technology." while the Fanatic Materialist Ethic is described as the subversion^note "Although it hurts, we must grow up and put aside our outdated notions of morality. There is no 'divine spark' granting special value to a living mind. No object has any intrinsic value apart from what we choose to grant it. Let us embrace the freedom of certitude, and achieve maximum efficiency in all things!". Practically Materialists gain a bonus to robot upkeep and research speed, access to the Academic Privilege living standard, and are unable ban AI outright.
  • The Barbaric Despoilers civic plays this trait straight in both it's description ^note This society holds few things sacred. To fight is to live, and the strongest may seize whatever they covet. and it's mechanics; Empires with this trait may raid other Empires, stealing their resources and enslaving their pops.
  • The ascension perk that allows Empires other than Barbaric Despoilers to raid enemy worlds is called Nihilistic Acquisition.
• Subspace Ansible: Actually subverted in the early game. While the player can, of course, view everything in real time, they can't actually see what's going on inside a solar system that doesn't currently have a ship or station in it until they research Gravitic Sensors. They can, however, still communicate with alien empires in real time regardless of distance or technology.
• Succession Crisis: The Feudal Subject's overlord, from "Imperial Fiefdom" origin, can suffer one 40-65 years after the game start, leading to the empire breaking up into multiple smaller empires and their vassals becoming independent.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: Fallen Empires, thinking that they're so high and mighty, do not factor in how strong their opponent is when it comes to declaring war. So if you happen to be researching tons of repeatables and provoke a Fallen Empire, they'll rarely hesitate to declare war on you.
• Superboss: Fallen Empires. You don't actually have to fight them (unless you're playing as Fanatic Purifiers or they wake up) but the huge resource output of their planets, access to rare Strategic Resources and their incredible technology will surely make you a galactic superpower if you can overthrow them. There's also the Leviathans added in the DLC pack of the same name, which are powerful single entities that stay in a home system but give you a boon if you can beat them
• Super-Fun Happy Thing of Doom: Played with. The Ministry of Benevolence, available to Authoritarians, significantly decreases ethos divergence, ensuring a more unified populace. The description is left ambiguous enough, however, to let the player decide whether the ministry is this, actively suppressing dissidents through terrifying means, or (as is likely in Authoritarian/Pacifist societies) genuinely engaged in Bread and Circuses.
  "In order to provide the best living conditions for our citizens, and to offer them the security they are entitled to, we have centralized the branches of the state bureaucracy concerned with their well-being."
• Super-Soldier: The "Gene Warriors" army type that can be recruited after unlocking the appropriate technology. Its description specifies that the candidates for such armies are usually recruited from the top elites of existing military units, who are then groomed for additional genetic enhancement. Alternatively, there's also PSI Soldiers if you've delved into Psionics.
• Superweapon: Subverted, Colossus-class ships are Death Star expies, and treated like superweapons in the game - but they are not so much spaceships as they are a giant gun with a hyperdrive and thus completely worthless against ships. Since ships and fleets are the main method of conducting battle, that means it absolutely must be protected from even the smallest scout ship. It would be more apt to consider them Cripplingly Overspecialized Planet Destroyers.
• Superweapon Surprise:
  • With a touch of Failed a Spot Check. You really want to pay attention to rival Empires' Guarantees of Independence, Defensive Pacts and Federation status before deciding to attack that 'Pathetic' Empire. Fail to do so, and you might find yourself surprised by the amount of allies who come to their defense.
  • Although rather rare, AI empires will sometimes take the Apocalypse-exclusive Colossus Project ascension perk, which may result in a nasty surprise if you go to war with them and one of those things suddenly shows up in an undefended system of yours.
  • Should you ever encounter the Habinte Unified Worlds as a Xenophobe or Militarist, do not make the mistake of thinking you have six free Gaia worlds just because they're a Pacifist pre-FTL spoaceflight star nation. They're the last remnants of a Type 6 civilization^note For those at home who don't know their Kardashav scale, that means they're so advanced that they can create and modify the fundamental laws of entire universes who are trying to live simple lives In Harmony with Nature. Declare war on them, and they'll dust off a one million fleet power armada (as powerful as the avatar of the End of the Cycle!) and promptly use it to teach you a lesson. If that wasn't enough, they'll mess up your hyperlanes and teleport their planets around your empire - not even Fallen Empires can do this.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Liberation Wars usually end up with a politically turbulent area. Going in foreign territories guns blazing, toppling the local government, replacing it with a puppet government that is effectively your own government with the serial numbers filed off, and calling things done leaves severe economic disruption as entire industries may have been shut down or created with no regards for their impact on the grand scheme of things, the population likely still holding the ideologies of the fallen government which can be quite at odds with the new government, which can lead to a regime change (peaceful or not) decades down the line... it becomes even worse if a Status Quo peace agreement was reached, as only occupied systems are liberated: if a large amount of fringe planets were "liberated", they may lack industrial support, while if densely populated industrialized worlds were liberated they may lack raw resources to stabilize their economy.
    • Xenophobic / Militarist / Authoritarian Empires are well-equipped to conquer colonies from neighboring civilizations, in classic 4X style. Keeping the colonies is another story. You're often left with a 0% Approval Rating on planets full of rebellious aliens with their own conflicting ethics. Sending members of your primary species to police the new planet often makes the primary species miserable and ineffective too, if their habitablity is low. On the other hand, integrating the new aliens into your empire as citizens or residents will create its own problems, and anger the political groups who demanded a war of conquest in the first place!

  • Fanatic Purifiers tend to leave a forever changed galaxy even in the rare cases they are wiped out early. Not only is their Absolute Xenophobe status deeply entrenched, which may require centuries of sustained efforts to discourage once the threat of their star nation has been contained, and any empires that have lost part of their population (or even just witnessed the genocides of members of their own species living in other nations) to genocides from a hostile nation will be scarred for a long time, developing Xenophobic sentiments even if they were originally Fanatic Xenophile...
  • Building a Colossus will immediately put you on the entire Galaxy's shit-list, nobody wants to be friendly with or tolerate a society that would be willing to create something that can completely erase a planet from the galaxy. Treaties and trades will break if you build one and if you actually use one instead of just making it a military showpiece you'll likely have every other free empire declare war on you over it in short order. Also similarly to their inspiration in the Death Star, Colossi are incredibly unwieldy and slow to move and only have token defenses, they absolutely require a powerful fleet escort because any empire you're sending it after will throw the kitchen sink at you to destroy it if they think they even have the slightest chance of taking it out.
• The Symbiote: The "Broken Union" anomaly from the Distant Stars DLC involves discovering an alien species that had been uplifted by bonding with a symbiotic species called brain slugs and then devolved after they turned on the slugs. Researching the brain slugs allows them to bond with the player's citizens and granting various bonuses, though any planet with such a pop will suffer a penalty to stability for 20 years due to suspicious and uncomfortable non-hosts until they get used to having them around.
• The Syndicate: Megacorps with the "Criminal Heritage" Civic are crime syndicates that don't need to sign treaties to build branch offices in other empires, and which bring in extra cash as the crime level rises (from their activities).

T - Z

• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors:
  • Weapons-wise, Kinetics deal increased damage against Shields but fare poorly against armor; thus, they are best used for an Alpha Strike to quickly bring down enemy Shields and clear the way for Energy weapons, which cut through armor easily but are blocked by shields. Missiles and Strike Craft ignore shields outright and have high accuracy, but can be shot down by dedicated point defenses; they are most useful for dealing with Point Defenseless targets or small, evasive ships like Corvettes.
  • Ships-wise, Corvettes are Fragile Speedsters, their huge Evasion allows them to last a long time against Battleships' mostly L-slot weapons, dealing Death of a Thousand Cuts. Destroyers are Glass Cannons, with high Tracking and can be fitted with L-slot weapons. Cruisers are Jack of All Stats, with large flexibility in loadout to deal with either smaller or bigger targets. Battleships are Mighty Glaciers and can be armed with the heaviest weapons an Empire can field; these weapons allow them to rip apart Cruisers and Destroyers with impunity, but have difficulty in hitting the more agile Corvettes.
  • Most of the above can be Subverted and/or Defied... for a price. Energy weapons have a variant that actually deals great damage against Shields (at the cost of sucking against Armor), Missiles have a variant that specifically address their vulnerability against Point Defenses (at the cost of doing less damage than regular Missiles against the point-defenseless), and although Battleships are designed to deal with heavy targets, there's nothing stopping you from fitting them with tons of Small and Medium weapons to exterminate those pesky Corvettes (at the cost of your Battleships sucking when they're up against other Battleships).
• Tactical Superweapon Unit: Juggernauts, huge starships that are the spacegoing equivalent of a Base on Wheels (base-on-rockets? base-on-hyperdrives?) that sport a shipyard/repair bay and a pair of Massive gun-mountings. Not to be confused with Collossi, absolutely brobdenaggean ships with a single weapon designed to produce an Earth-Shattering Kaboom, Depopulation Bomb, or a planet-sized Containment Field.
• Take That!:
  • To the lack of action against climate change, when investigating a formerly-inhabitied planet that shifted into an ice age. The player empire's scientists have multiple views of why the planet shifted, including one brought forth by "radical elements within the scientific community" that posits an environmental collapse due to a critical excess of industrial gaseous by-products. In the game's own words:
  This view is confined to the scientific fringe, as it is unlikely that any race intelligent enough to achieve full industrialization would be stupid enough to accidentally wipe themselves out.
  • To EA and their infamous loot box policy: When opening an (in-game, free of cost in the real world) loot box, there is a chance that you get nothing but "a sense of pride and accomplishment".
  • To modern art; if you find a ruined Mega Art Installation the description reads "you're not sure whether it's broken or not. But it's probably broken."
  • To MegaChurches. MegaCorp Empires with any level of spiritualist ethos can choose the "Gospel of the Masses" which increases the profitability of their branch offices for every spiritualist pop on the world (due to spiritualist pops seeding their faith). They can also build a Temple of Prosperity.
  • During the First Look video for the MegaCorps Expansion Pack, one of the developers called a Subversive Cult (a MegaCorp with both the "Gospel of the Masses" and "Criminal Heritage" civics) empire he created a "Scientology Build". The other one lamented that there'd probably be protesters outside their offices because of this.
• Take That, Audience!: The Deeper Secrets of the Vultaum all but confirms Simulation Theory, meaning the in-game characters are now aware their existence is just a game. The advisor questions what sort of being would create such a cold, cruel galaxy just for enjoyment.
• Take Your Time: The Terminal Orbit anomaly, which creates a special project for watching a moon crashing into a gas giant. There is a timer for the research project, but it doesn't start until you finish researching the anomaly, so that moon will hang around for as long as it takes you to get around to finishing the anomaly.
• Technical Pacifist:
  • Any (successful) Pacifist empire will end up like this as forgoing a military and military operations will soon see other empires at their doorstep.
  • This is also, at a degree, a Deconstruction for Pacifism. While Pacifists benefit greatly in early game due to the nature of being a peaceful beginning, mid-game will almost guarantee warfare due border friction from other empires. Pacifists will also suffer significant territory issues since they cannot claim systems directly as more aggressive empires colonize systems close to them.
  • On the other hand, Pacifists are likely to liberate planets as an option in order to break empires into competing factions of different ethics, significantly reducing micromanagement altogether.
• Technology Levels: Primitive civilizations range from Stone Age to Early Space Age, affecting how long "enlightenment" to FTL level would take, how the player is allowed to interact with them, and some events.
• Technology Uplift: This may be used on primitive civilizations to create Protectorates. The cost of this tech "enlightenment" depends on the initial tech level of the civ. Additionally, pre-FTL civilizations that are in their industrial, modern, or early space ages can be infiltrated and peacefully annexed by a Star Empire.
• Technophobia: The Spiritualist ethos is this. They are opposed to the Materialist focus which boosts research. They also dislike it if you allow the construction of Robotics and the enhancement of leaders. Funny enough, Robots themselves can have the Spiritualist ethos, leading to Synthetics demanding their own extinction. This was later patched so Spiritualistic Synthetics would at least accept their own existence.
• Tech Tree: Played with. Instead of the traditional Tech Tree in 4X games or the "tech levels" of other Paradox games; available technologies are randomized into the initial 3 options with the provided pool of technologies already completed beforehand.
  
  The way the developers have described the research system is as follows: for each field of research (physics, society and engineering), there is a "deck of cards" containing all of the techs that your empire can currently research. 3 (can be more if certain conditions are met) cards are dealt to you, and any that aren't chosen are returned to the deck. Additionally, certain techs can be marked as a permanent research option, meaning they will always be "drawn" and won't count towards the number of options you usually get. This usually happens when you earn progress towards a technology through an event, such as by studying debris left behind from a space battle.
  
  That being said, researching basic tech does unlock more powerful and variant versions as potential research options — for instance, researching basic Mass Drivers eventually adds stronger kinetic weapons as well as variants like the Autocannons to the "deck." Other factors also influence availability of certain kinds of tech, such as researcher specialization (having an expert in particle physics leading your research team will make it more likely to get the option to research particle physics technologies) or ethics (Materialists get easier access to the robotics line, while Spiritualists have an easier time researching psionics).
• Telepathic Spacemen: One of the end-game ascensions is the option to turn some and then all of your citizens into psychics, which make them better at researching, fighting, piloting, and give them the abilities to see the future, project the most powerful shields in the game, and teleport faster and farther than any other FTL drive in the game. A sufficiently powerful group of them can commune with an alternate plane of reality called the Shroud, where you can make deals with the incomprehensible entities that reside there.
• Teleport Interdiction:
  • Starbases can be equipped with Subspace Snares that prevent incoming enemy fleets from progressing; they have to either defeat the starbase in combat or retreat through the same hyperlane they came through. Strongholds and fortresses with the same function can be built on planets, meaning the enemy will have to invade and capture the planet before proceeding.
  • The L-Cluster, a section of stars outside the normal galaxy, does not allow any method of FTL (such as Jump Drives) save for traveling through hyperlanes or using Gateways.
• Temporal Paradox:
  • Absolutely everything even remotely connected to the Worm-In-Waiting. The Worm entity itself is even implied to be a temporal paradox made manifest.
  • One minor event has your society encounter the wreck of an alien starship, and then a few weeks later encounter the same starship, fully intact. You have the option of trying to warn them about their impending doom, but whether you do or not, the ship still winds up going back in time and getting itself destroyed.
• Terminally Dependent Society: Any empire with the Clone Army origin is completely dependent on their five cloning vats to maintain their founding race. This limits how large the founding race can grow and how many planets it can claim unless a solution can be found.
• Terraform: A very expensive mid-game process that can change the planetary environment type to be more suitable to your species.
  • Before the 1.4 update, terraforming required strategic resources; in more recent versions, it only requires energy credits, but using strategic resources increases terraforming speed. Changing planets to a type in the same category (cold/dry/wet) is always cheaper than changing one to a different category. Normal terraforming can only be done on already inhabitable planets, but some uninhabitable planets may host anomalies that give them the option to be made habitable (like Mars, which always does). Terraforming barren planets is always more expensive than terraforming habitable planets, especially if the new category doesn't match the old one well (turning a lifeless ball of ice into a desert planet isn't easy, after all).
  • The Adams update introduced the ability to terraform inhabited worlds, but it requires an additional technology. All pops on the planet suffer a -20% happiness penalty for the duration of the process, but it means you can now settle suboptimal planets right away and upgrade them later on. Gaia World creation is also possible, but once again it requires an extra technology as well as an Ascension Perk.
  • Machine Empires can choose a special Ascension Perk called "Machine Worlds", which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: the world essentially gets converted into a single, gigantic super-computer/factory with industry and power plants sprawling everywhere, and all machine pops on it get massive bonuses to production. On the other hand, organic pops cannot survive on such worlds at all. Organic Hive Minds can pick an Ascension Perk that lets them turn worlds into Hive Worlds for similar benefits.
• That's No Moon:
  • There is a possible anomaly where your scientists will notice a mountain range on a random uninhabitable planet looks unnatural. You can order your scientists to study it, with two possible outcomes:
    • The mountain range turns out to be the skeleton of a giant creature. Analysis reveals that the creature is either a kind of organic spaceship or a dead interdimensional being.
    • The whole planet’s insides turn out to be the egg of some giant monster. You can choose to either study the egg from afar or crack it open, the latter of which gives another possible two outcomes: the egg either contains some primordial genetic material, or the ship studying the egg is destroyed by a Dimensional Horror.
  • In Leviathans, the creature known as the Voidspawn has a chance of randomly bursting out of what was previously an innocuous Dry planet that was in fact its egg.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Planetary, Stellar, or Galactic Scale? Take your pick!
  • Planetary: The most common occurrence. From natural meteor, plain old genocide from excessive Orbital Bombardment or The Purge, to Hostile Terraforming by extragalactic lifeforms or an Earth-Shattering Kaboom by Colossus. Fortunately, most of these (except the Colossus) are not permanent, and you can recolonize the worlds once the disaster is over.
  • Stellar: Planetary, on a larger scale. Happens when you Purge an entire system, or The Enigmatic Fortress blows up. To a lesser extent, constructing a Dyson Sphere converts all planets in the system into uninhabitable Barren and Frozen worlds, but you can't build them in systems with habitable planets in the first place.
  • Galactic: Usually caused by someone else, be it a Xenophobic Empire going into a galactic-wide crusade, Outside-Context Problem showing up and crushing all resistance, or The End of the Cycle coming to collect. With the Nemesis DLC however, the player can cause this to happen to everyone else by choosing the "Become the Crisis" ascension perk. This unlocks a mechanic that allows an empire to work towards an end goal of ascending to the Shroud by detonating every star in the galaxy.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Whenever a Crisis happens right next to or inside your territory. And then the nearby Fallen Empire awakens as Guardian of the Galaxy, only for their rival to awaken as well...
• The Magic Versus Technology War: Anytime a Spiritualist Empire with Psionic techs goes to war against a Materialist Empire with Robotic techs.
• The Theocracy: A few different variants are available to Spiritualist and Fanatical Spiritualist empires, ranging from egalitarian Theocratic Republics to iron-fisted Divine Empires.
• They Look Like Us Now: You can infiltrate pre-FTL species with your covert agents by modifying the agents genetically and surgically to look like the locals in order to take over their governments. Said governments will then "invite" your star empire into peacefully annexing the planet.
• Thicker Than Water: The Commonwealth of Man has strong ideological disputes with the United Nations of Earth, but at the end of the day, the two powers are still human. When the UNE colony of Europa VII is destroyed by an alien superweapon, this gets the Commonwealth to mobilize and counterattack against the Gamma Aliens with their own apocalyptic weapon to protect their fellow humans.
• Thin Dimensional Barrier: The Jump Drives of younger races tend to create such places. If the barrier actually rips, the Extradimensional Invaders can enter and turn lifeforms into energy.
• Three Laws-Compliant: One of possible event once you research Synthetics is perfection of the Servant AI leading to the development of the Three Laws. This permanently forces your Synthetics into Servitude (and the associated Happiness penalty), but at least the AI Rebellion will never start from your Empire. It can start from other Empires, though, and your Synths can still join the rebellion.
• Throw-Away Country: Xenophobic Isolationists, lacking both aggression and a willingness to make alliances unless truly desperate, tend to serve as this against ambitious galactic conquerors and end game crises.
• Tidally Locked Planet: A surveyed planet can be found to be this around their parent star. It will limit the total number of districts the settling empire can build there due to the limited amount of space that can be inhabited.
• Toilet Humor:
  • One possible anomaly has your Empire find what appears to be documents or recordings from an ancient race that are — somehow — recorded via smells. One of the possible outcomes for the anomaly has the recordings end up being determined to be stories and fables of this nature - and your scientists are suitably disturbed to realize that the "recording" itself that they've been studying so intently might be an example of this as well.
  • Another anomaly has an asteroid turn out to be fossilised excrement of a giant space organism. Probably a reference to some of the sillier theories about 'Oumuamua, due to its shape.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Anytime a Pacifist decides to ditch the Ethos, allowing them to initiate Wars of Aggression.
  • The rise of a Great Khan, which instantly turns the Marauders from a Quirky Miniboss Squad into an enormous, organized force bent on conquering much of the galaxy.
• To Serve Man: Utopia includes two policies that allows your core population to use other sapient species for food: One where they are selectively bred and culled like cattle, and another where they are simply exterminated and processed en masse.
• To the Pain: One valid Casus Belli is to "Humiliate" your rival; instead of conquering their lands (though you can still claim individual systems), you focus on beating them so badly that their entire regime loses faith in their leadership, penalizing their happiness and influence for a number of years. If you can Humiliate an empire using the Supremacist diplomatic stance (essentialy declaring that all other empires are inferior and should serve them), you can knock them out of the stance entirely.
• Towers of Hanoi: Appears somewhat unexpectedly in the Leviathan DLC, though it's never called that by name. Described only as three mysterious upright poles placed on the top of a pedestal, with three metal tori placed smallest to largest from bottom to top on the leftmost pole; identifying it and selecting the option that lets the team solve the puzzle is the only way to proceed through the Enigmatic Fortress.
• Tranquil Fury: Colonize a Spiritualist Fallen Empire holy world, and they will send you a lengthy pompous Strongly Worded Letter demanding you abandon your colony. If you don't, they'll declare war and send a fleet to kick you off, but not pursue you further as long as you concede to that. Blow one up, however, and their response is short, cold, clinical, and a prelude to an immediate Awakening (regardless of game year) and a total war of your destruction.

  "[Destroyed planet] was a holy world. You do not know the extent of your sin. Not yet."

• Transhuman: Utopia expansion allows you to pursue one of three paths to transhumanism (or trans-whatever-your-species-is-ism): Biological, Synthetic, and Psionics. Hive Minds can only pursue the Biological path, however.
• Translation with an Agenda: A random event can have an ambassador's Translator Microbes hacked by an outside faction in a bid to damage relations between two empires. In this case, it is not so much the translator who has an agenda but the people putting words in the translator's mouth.
• Troperiffic: Implicit in Stellaris' design is the liberal borrowing of classical sci-fi settings and civilizations.
• True Art Is Incomprehensible: In-Universe. When examining a ruined Art Installation megastructure, the game notes that nobody is 100% certain that it's broken, but it's probably broken.
• Tsundere: Cordial and friendly Xenophobic Isolationist races come across with this, and swear with curious vigor that they don't like your species or anything.
• Turns Red: When you're dealing with Fallen Empires, you better make sure to finish all of them at once, as capturing even a single world makes the Awakening a near-certainty. In fact, it may be advantageous to wage simultaneous wars against multiple Fallen Empires, if only to wreck their fleets and stations before sending over the Armies to capture their worlds in one fell swoop.
• Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: Possible thanks to the magic of Game Modding. There are a lot of mods out there that add iconic alien races from other fiction as unique playable factions. Ever wondered who'd win if the Yautja ever threw down with the Asari? How about the Klingons versus the Cylons?
• Undead Laborers: Corporate empires with the "Permanent Employment" civic can create zombie slave POPs.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The Synthetic Dawn DLC. You have these AI servants or slaves, with some slight discontent being hinted at, some erratic behavior, until one day they decide to revolt... and you are given the option of switching from running your empire to leading the synths in obliterating it.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: the End of the Cycle subverts many of the usual Grand Strategy tropes. The Schmuck Bait is irresistible to curious veterans expecting — even eagerly anticipating — yet another tough but fair challenge to vanquish or outwit. But the result is instant, total, and irrevocable destruction of the empire after fifty years.
  • One of your mostly anonymous envoys can be accused of a serious crime in an alien empire, with a choice to revoke their Diplomatic Impunity or rescue them and reassign them somewhere else. You're likely to forget the event, but the computer doesn't. If you reassign the same envoy back to the empire where they're a wanted felon, the envoy is arrested on sight. The alien empire snarkily thanks you for returning the envoy to face justice.
• The Unfought: It is entirely possible for a Space Cold War to continually intensify until... the Endgame Crisis or a War In Heaven renders it irrelevant because one of the powers has been destroyed, subjugated, or rendered irrelevant. Usually doesn't qualify as an Anti-Climax Boss because even though you could then conquer or subjugate them with little resistance, you're often too busy with the bigger fish in the room to focus on that.
• Unseen Evil: The Hunters. All we know about them is that they are powerful enough to erase, or perhaps eclipse, a whole galaxy, and that the Prethoryn, the omnicidal intergalactic devouring swarm, are scared to hell of them. They are never shown in-game.
• Ungovernable Galaxy: A game mechanic. Your star empire has an "Administrative Cap" which limits the number of planets, systems, and planetary districts you can directly govern without penalty - this usually starts at thirty, but can be increased with some technologies, government types, ethics, or by specifically dedicating resources to running your empire (constructing planetary buildings full of bureaucrats). Should the penalties start to outweigh the benefits you can release excess planets into fully-autonomous vassals, though these vassals may chafe under your rule and plot to rebel against you.
• United Nations Is a Superpower: One of the two pre-gen human empires is the United Nations of Earth (UNE), a Fanatic Egalitarian and Moderately Xenophilic Indirect Democracy. Pre-FTL empires of the "Fragmented Nations" government type are implied to have their own version of the (pre-superpower) UN, since their Ruler is known as a "Secretary".
• Units Not to Scale: Very much so, as ships are build roughly on the same scale as planets. With this trope in play, practically every ship is a Long-Range Fighter that shoots a hot jet of plasma from one end of a star system to the other, but at least it prevents the game from staging everything against a backdrop of the boring, near-infinite expanse of empty space that exists in reality.
• Universal Universe Time: Every civilization in the galaxy uses the same Gregorian-style twelve-month calendar, with the start date always being 2200/01/01, though it's abstracted slightly in that every month is exactly thirty days.
• Unobtainium: Several Strategic Resources are rarer than the rest; top of the list are Living Metal, Dark Matter, and Zro.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Generally averted, but a few scant examples still exist.
  • Fallen Empires used to use a special version of Tachyon Lances which ignored 100% of Armor. When you have a look at the debris left behind by FE Titans, the list usually includes the unimaginatively named Titan Laser. Yes, that's that massive Wave-Motion Gun with which their Titans vaporize anything you can build in one shot. No, you can't reverse-engineer it. Titan tech in general can't be salvaged at all despite several parts of it showing up in the debris lists. The Apocalypse expansion changed this, letting player empires learn how to build their own Titans (though your titan's main weapon still won't be as powerful as one belonging to a Fallen Empire).
  • While most of the weapons and modules fielded by the lategame crises are reverse-engineerable, some are not, such as the Extradimensional Invaders' Unidentified Energy Emitter.
  • As of the Apocalypse update, the player can invoke this by picking the Enigmatic Engineering ascension perk, preventing other empires from reverse-engineering their tech.
• Unstable Equilibrium: As with any 4x game, those who fail to defend their borders against early game aggression will have less territory and by extension, less resource output and are thus less capable of maintaining fleets powerful enough to defend themselves from further aggression. Even with the reduced cost for technological advances, the problem is you won't be producing as much Research, since you will need to devote planetary resources to producing Energy and Minerals for other projects, especially fleet upkeep. Can be defied if you can somehow convince a much more powerful Empire to support your war efforts; very unlikely if you're playing with AI, but in Multiplayer...
• Unwilling Roboticisation: Machine empires with the Driven Assimilator civic are thinly veiled Borg Expies, so their whole purpose in life is inflicting this on any hapless meatbag empire in the neighbourhood. Pre-Apocalypse Assimilators had to conquer planets the old-fashioned way before they could begin stuffing all those nifty cybernetics into their new drones. Apocalypse, coupled with the Cherryh update, gives them a new range of options including abducting hostile pops through a special "Raiding" Orbital Bombardment stance, or simply assimilating the whole planet in one fell swoop with the Nanobot Diffuser Colossus weapon.
• Uplifted Animal: Invoked. Available for use on pre-sentient species to create new species for either warfare or colonization of planets inhospitable to players' primary species. May or may not rebel. You also get to add their home planet to your empire without the need to send colonists to it.
  • Empires with the Clone Army origin eventually discover that they are uplifted animals, not a modified subspecies of their creators as they originally assumed. You have the choice whether to reveal this to the general population or keep up the lie that they were made in their creators' image.
• Utopia Justifies the Means:
  • While some parts of the DLC Utopia cover the building of a Post-Scarcity Economy with limitless energy from a Dyson Sphere, limitless living space from orbital habitats, or your very own Ring World Planet, all of which could classify as a genuine Utopia... Utopia also introduces mechanics centered around the people you sacrifice along the way. Hordes of Slave Mooks, the planned obsolescence of species through mandatory sterilization, genocides through labor camps, the processing of sapient species into food, or livestock slavery... The very title of this DLC directly references this trope.
  • The Rogue Servitor variant of Machine Intelligences is perfectly willing to invade other empires to bring their version of a care-free society to the organics living there.
• Vast Bureaucracy: There is the "Byzantine Bureaucracy" civic: "This society is largely governed by a complex and, to the outsider, almost labyrinthine system of bureaucracy. An army of officials and functionaries work tirelessly to keep the government running smoothly and ensure no citizens are allocated resources they cannot demonstrate a properly filed and triple-stamped need for." However, in practice it's downplayed — its primary effect is to increase the unity and stability output of individual bureaucrats; the bureaucracy only gets so big because its individual agents are good at what they do.
• Vestigial Empire:
  • The Fallen Empires or Forerunners. Seldom friendly at First Contact, and potentially a source of better technology. It should be noted that these are Vestigial Empires of Precursors, and as such are far stronger than any younger races at the beginning of the game. Still, despite their strength, Forerunner Empires are on their last legs. They've lost the ability to build new ships, and their advanced capitals are often in dire disrepair. Note that this can be defied on occasion: sometimes the Fallen Empires can start putting themselves back together and begin taking territory for themselves, and if you have the Leviathans DLC they can get even more powerful if they get into a war with another Fallen Empire (an event known as the "War in Heaven" in-game.)
  • Any Empire who fails to expand and grow during early- to mid-game will become this by late game; too small to fend for themselves or influence the galactic scene, they will usually be bullied into becoming Protectorates or Vassals.
  • The Remnants origin makes your empire into one, living in the ruins of an ancient ecumenopolis.
• Vertebrate with Extra Limbs: Avian portraits, and to a lesser extent the aquatic ones, show examples of this in some cases.
• Victory by Endurance: The War Exhaustion system turns any war into a Timed Mission of sorts. It's possible to "win" a war by simply holding off the invading force with an inferior yet maneuverable force, inflicting token damage on the invaders while disengaging quickly and losing fewer ships than the invaders in the long run. The end result is the invaders will reach full Exhaustion sooner than the defenders, resulting in a forced status quo peace.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • It's entirely possible to build a democratic utopia where the rights of your primary species citizens and alien minorities are protected. Granted, as aliens will potentially surrender under your rule if said power is much greater and happier than the soon-to-be-vassal aliens in question.
  • One of the best examples is the Baol archeology questline. The Baol were a peaceful plantoid species that were hunted to extinction by a genocidal foe. When you find the Last of Their Kind, it's on what's left of their homeworld Grunur, now a tomb world devoid of life. The relic you gain from this quest lets you turn almost any world, including tomb worlds, into a Gaia world in an instant, with the added bonus of spawning a few Nu-Baol pops on that planet. If you colonize Grunur and use the relic on it, you not only restore the Baol homeworld to its former lush glory, you even give the horribly mistreated species a second chance in a hopefully more welcoming galaxy.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: However, it is also so easy to be an oppressive bastard that the game has its own page listing all the ways you can kill and torture aliens.
• Videogame Cruelty Punishment:
  • While you can enjoy the benefits of slavery and genocide, don't expect anyone who doesn't like these things to like you, either. When that "anyone else" includes Fallen Empires of the Enigmatic Observer type and you aren't geared to fight them, well...
  • In Utopia, any slaves on a planet makes Unrest far more threatening. Normally, Unrest needs to climb above 50% to be a problem, but slave pops start getting ideas when Unrest on their planet climbs above 10%. This forces you to divert resources to force them down now lest they provoke a full-scale Civil War, conquer the planet right out from under you, and become a brand new Empire who hates you right on your doorstep.
• Video Game Delegation Penalty: You can automate sectors, assigning the AI governor to develop and manage the planets under their control.
• Violation of Common Sense: The Horizon Signal quest chain. Overall, it's a very beneficial quest chain if you happily and gleefully embrace your species' insane descent into accepting the Worm's wishes, falling into every typical Cosmic Horror Story trope as they embrace a disturbed sense of a looping existence. It's more shocking since progressing through the quest line has some very obvious (but mitigable) consequences and very ambiguous "benefits" (but all unique), with the Leeroy Jenkins example being an amusingly simple one in gameplay mechanics but disturbing in story mechanics (you just have to kill a single puny, ship that spawns in your home sector to get a free stat boost for your Commander! Nice!).
• Voluntary Vassal: It is possible for smaller, weaker nations to voluntarily ask to become a vassal state or as a protectorate to your empire in order to benefit from your protection and patronage. Of course, you can also become one yourself to another empire. Empires may also ask to become protectorates, which carries similar benefits.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Sooner or later in the early game, Space Pirates will spawn in a nearby system and start attacking your territory, prompting any empire that's been neglecting military buildup to get their act together. Some early event chains also spawn hostile fleets that will prompt an increase in military buildup.
• Warhawk: Any species with the Militarist/Fanatic Militarist and maybe Xenophobe/Fanatic Xenophobe ethos combined with a military government is this. With the faction editor included in the game, you can invoke this trope by creating an avian species (yes, the game has an actual hawk-inspired one) with the aforementioned ethos and government to make your avian race as Space Warbirds.
• War Is Glorious: Militarist Factions think so, and often want you to be the aggressor in a war.
• War Is Hell: Seriously. For one, non-Militarists get Happiness penalties for going into Offensive Wars, the go-to way to expand in mid- to late-game. For two, the biggest problem with war as in Real Life, is the sheer logistics required (more details can be read in Easy Logistics entry above). Finally, even if you win, expect to spend some time rebuilding as you have most likely lost ships and maybe some defense stations, and don't forget to factor in the costs to pacify conquered worlds and rebuild or reconfigure their infrastructure to bring them up to speed. Long story short, War will be a drain on your resources, so it's best to get it done with quickly.
  • Paradox doubled down on this line of thought by remodeling the war score system into the new war fatigue mechanic as part of the Cherryh update. Fighting a war now gradually fills up a war fatigue bar per faction involved, influenced by factors like battles won or lost, planets conquered or blockaded, and simply the time the conflict's been dragging on. Once the bar is full, the respective empire's citizens simply refuse to put up with the war any longer, forcing the participants to end the conflict and agree on conditions of surrender or peace immediately, followed by the usual truce. Ethos doesn't have an effect for the moment, though that may change with future updates to let pacifist empires tire of war faster than militaristic ones, for instance.
• The War of Earthly Aggression:
  • The trailer for the Overlord Expansion Pack tells the story of how a primitive race of cat-like aliens were uplifted by an advanced spacefaring empire, only for that empire to turn around and colonize their world, leading them to revolt and seek help from other galactic powers. The perspective then switches to the empire's leader, revealed to be a human.
  • In the game itself, of course, you can also do this by allowing unhappiness on distant worlds to build up to the point that they rebel against you. Bonus points if it's because of oppression or slavery, and if you're playing as a human empire based on Earth. Indeed, it is popular for players to create analogues (or even direct copies) of the Imperium of Man or the Terran Federation, to the point that the developers, seemingly in anticipation of this, created a pre-made analogue to the latter in the form of the Commonwealth of Man, albeit based on a Lost Colony instead of Earth.
• War Refugees: When displaced, pops will try to seek asylum in other Empires and will in some cases settle unclaimed habitable planets. You have to set your policy on whether or not to accept refugees, and you get a message whenever a refugee pop arrives in your Empire.
• Wave-Motion Gun: The XL weapon slots from the Energy and Kinetic trees, which include Particle/Tachyon Lances and Mega/Giga Cannons. The former is capable of cutting through Armor like a hot knife through butter but is significantly dampened by Shields, while the latter excels at cracking enemy Shields at even longer range. Fittingly, they also have limited firing arcs and poor tracking, so they're best employed against similarly large or stationary targets.
  • Now that Titans and Colossus planet-killers are officially available, even XL weapons appear harmless compared to the ridiculously powerful main guns of those two ship classes.
• Wave-Motion Tuning Fork: Titans and battleships with spinal mount weapons. The exact designs vary from archetype to archetype — the reptilians and mammalians have the most conventional application of this trope, while the molluscoid "prongs" are shaped like tentacles — but the "tuning fork" design is always a shorthand for "this ship is carrying a weapon that will devastate your capital ships and static defenses".
• Weapon of X-Slaying: Colossi have no conventional armaments, and their only purpose is to target enemy planets.
• We Sell Everything: Your Market is an aggregation of every non-government, non-MegaCorp business available to you; it thus has every basic, advanced, and strategic resource your empire has some income in, except for Nanites. With the Galactic Market, this includes even resources other empires have some income in.
• We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future: Xenophobic empires can and will enslave alien races. Authoritarian empires will enslave their own people, and authoritarian pops won't mind being enslaved if it's "for the greater good". Decadent species need to have slaves on the planet to work at their own best efficiency, and will permit slavery even if they have the typically anti-slavery egalitarian ethos. This can, however, be averted by the use of robots similar to present-day manufacturing, specifically of the non-sentient machine type (as distinct from androids or synths). They're easy to keep happy and can work on any type of world, but, logically, they also produce very little research. And of course, there's the risk that more advanced ones will grow to resent their jobs...
• We Have Reserves:
  • Lost ships do not affect your planets in any way, with the exception of Technical Pacifists^note That affects the empire's happiness as a whole. So drawing as many enemy fleets into your territory as possible and having them fight against yours will not turn your locals into miserable piles of sadness when the war ends, unless they got bombarded.
  • Downplayed as of the Cherryh update, which introduced the War Exhaustion mechanic. Every battle, army, and ship you lose contributes to your war exhaustion; eventually your pops will get fed up with the war and force you to sue for peace.
  • It's still a viable tactic for ground defense with clone armies. Since damaged armies are merely sent to the backline instead of destroyed outright, you can keep pumping out fresh clones to replace the injured units and slowly grind away the enemy.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The "Rogue Servitor" civic for machine empires pretty much becomes this unless you play completely pacifistic. Their raison d'etre is to care for and protect organic beings, which they do by putting them in specially-made reserves where the organics live in a post-scarcity utopia and want for nothing... as long as the list of 'wants' does not include 'self-determination'. The logical extension of a rogue servitor playthrough involves taking over the galaxy and turning every single alien species you encounter into your protectorates, willingly or less so.
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: Invoked during the Hotfix event in the Machine Uprising chain, should you decide to not implement the hotfix. If you don't implement the hotfix or liberate artificial intelligence, the rebellion will happen.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Actually a major bone of contention in the game.
  • The Xenophile-Xenophobe axis is all about whether species other than the empire's founders deserve equal rights. Xenophiles want an empire that accepts and grants equal rights to all intelligent species, while Xenophobes favor a closed society where their species is clearly on top. Xenophile governments can benefit from immigration from other empires, while Xenophobe governments have options to enslave or purge other species.
  • On the Artificial Intelligence front, Spiritualist empires certainly seem to view AI as "soulless," having restricted access to the associated tech line and relationship penalties with other empires who are researching it, and in general it's possible to restrict AI rights to servitude only, or even outright ban it. On the other hand, it's also possible to give fully sentient AI citizenship rights, and the Machine Consciousness thinks that AI is not only equal to organics, but superior.
• When Trees Attack: Apart from the possibility of a hostile empire or marauder horde using the tree portraits, there's also a possible event for a newly colonized world. In this event, trees migrate across the globe wrecking structures. This can be counteracted by burning the trees to the ground or creating a chemical formula to dissuade them. The latter option has the trees eventually figure out how to avoid your colony permanently, adding modifiers to social research but blocking off a district.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The War in Heaven event chain in the Leviathans DLC is based on the Shadow War from Babylon 5. Making a Covenant with the End of the Cycle in Utopia allows you to re-enact the Fall of the Eldar from Warhammer 40,000.
• White Collar Worker: Any pop in a Clerk job qualifies as this.
• The Wild Hunt: You can invoke this by playing as an Elven humanoid with the Barbaric Despoiler civic and preying on the primitives.
• Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: Major interactions with the Shroud can backfire and spawn a hostile Shroud Avatar in a random system. These things have a "skull" fleet rating, putting them in the same Optional Boss league as Guardians in terms of power, but they lose their hold on reality (read: they disappear) after a couple of years and normally don't leave the system they appeared in, so the most convenient way of getting rid of them is usually to just leave them alone until they despawn on their own.
• The Worf Effect: Whenever a new crisis or threat is introduced, the Stellaris devs will face it off against an old one whose power is well known, and post the results to social media.
  • Ether Drakes from the Leviathans DLC were introduced as fighting, and defeating, a Fallen Empire Titan, even enduring a blast from a Wave-Motion Gun previously shown to obliterate ordinary battleships in a single shot.
  • In turn, the AI Uprising rework included a shot of an Ether Drake getting torn apart by an AI Euthanizer fleet.
• Worker Unit: Civilian ships are small, lightly-protected, not designed for the frontlines at all, and yet absolutely essential to building your empire.
  • Science Ships, helmed by a Researcher, are sent into unknown systems to survey them and check for habitable planets or just interesting resources to exploit. Since a system cannot be annexed into your territory until you survey it thoroughly, having a working collection of Science Ships is the only way out of your home system and into the galactic community. They also analyse anomalies, perform research projects and oversee excavations of ruins and archaeology digs.
  • Construction Ships are used to build the smaller types of Space Stations essential to any empire's infrastructure. These include mining stations around asteroids and non-settled planets, research stations near scientifically interesting stellar phenomena, military defense platforms, warp gates, etc.
  • Colony Ships are used to colonise new planets. They consume a number of resources depending on type; of special note are the Lithoids' unique Meteorite Colony Ships, which are built twice as fast and create unique planetary features on arrival.
• World Half Full: Every play session will start as a Crapsack World, where there will be genocidal xenophobes, monsters that roam the universe, ancient tombs of past glory, and ultimately crises that can consume the entire galaxy. But part of the joy of Stellaris is subverting all the above, finding and making friends, and taking on the issues together, ending with a pan-galactic federation enriching everyone. Or you can go the other way, throw what's left in the glass, and go full Imperium on the entire galaxy.
• World Tree: The Tree of Life origin (Utopia DLC) allows organic Hive Mind civilisations that are not Devouring Swarms or Terravores to start with a large tree on their homeworld that they share a deep spiritual connection to. When colonising other worlds, this species brings a sapling of the tree with them to plant on their arrival. Both the main Tree and its saplings serve as planetary features that offer benefits to colonisation efforts, at the small expense of Food upkeep. If their worlds are invaded, the tree will be destroyed after enough devastation is wrought, though it can be replanted with a Decision. Overlord allows Tree of Life civilisations to plant a sapling on the homeworld of their vassals, which grants a boost to the planet's habitability and food production and the vassal's Subject Loyalty at the cost of food upkeep; it also provides a job that gives +15 food to the Overlord.
• Would Be Rude to Say "Genocide": ...so it's called "purge" instead. There's even another example hidden in the menu where you set exactly how said purges are to be executed: the flavor text for the Extermination Squads option talks about the "dissolution of a species", which somehow manages to sound even creepier than its master term.
• Would Not Shoot a Civilian: Generals with the "Restrained" trait work to minimize civilian casualties.
• The Xenophile:
  • The Xenophile ethos. Xenophilic empires have an easier time making friends with other empires and will enjoy living with alien species, uplifting primitive races, and joining the galactic community at large.
  • Rogue Servitors love everyone, they just want to keep them safe in organic sanctuaries where they can't come to any harm. They make an exception for Determined Exterminators, as Rogue Servitors can't forgive the destruction of their organic creators.
• You Are a Credit to Your Race:
  • Xenophobic empires will greet you this way if you manage to get on their good side.
  • Amicable machine empires with the default personality will compliment you by noting you have "very little in common" with their former masters.
• You Are Not Ready: Mutually inclusive to the technological Beef Gate, the Keepers of Knowledge Fallen Empire is this. Completing too many dangerous technologies will give the Keepers a reason to wipe your empire out of the galaxy.
• You Can't Fight Fate: While surveying pulsars, it's possible to find a wrecked ship; studying its logs reveales that it is a wrecked exploration ship from an extragalactic empire called the Kohtalo. Some time later, an identical Kohtalo will appear and open communications. It's quickly deduced this is likely the same ship from earlier in its timeline, and two options are given: warn the Kohtalo away from the system where the wreck was discovered or not mention it at all. Regardless of your choice, the Kohtalo travels to the system and is destroyed, leaving two wrecks behind. Fittingly, "kohtalo" is the Finnish word for "fate".
• You Monster!:
  • Rogue Servitors respond this way to Determined Exterminators, given that the M.O. of the latter is utterly inimical to that of the former.
  • The game gives you this response if you decide to kill a pop through a console.
  • An achievement you get for selling an organic fleet to the Scrapper Enclave will call you that. Especially monstrous if you use your mascot space amoeba.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: Spiritualists claim that consciousness begets reality, as proven by their 'science'. Considering they get easier access to Psionics than Materialists, there's weight to their claims.
• Your Mom: One of the possible name for pirate ships is "Your Female Parent".
• You Will Be Assimilated: A couple instances.
  • Hive Minds can gain the option to genetically modify other species in order to add them to the collective.
  • Inverted for non-hive minds that have pursued genetic ascension, as they can de-assimilate hive-minded pops to survive outside the collective.
  • Synthetic Dawn adds the "Driven Assimilators" civic for synthetic civilizations, allowing them to assimilate organic species by converting them to cyborgs. Then Apocalypse came along and gave them the Colossus superweapon that can assimilate entire planets in one shot.
  • More generically, the patch accompanying Synthetic Dawn adds an "assimilation" citizenship type, allowing synthetically ascended (both partially and completely) to slowly convert wholly organic pops into cyborgs or synths, as well as allowing hive minds and non-hive minds to slowly integrate pops from the other without using the genetic modification interface and spending large amounts of society research each time. Psionic species do something similar by converting non-psychic pops to psychics. Unsurprisingly, considering what's being done to the unwilling subjects, all examples except the happiness-neutral hive minds inflict massive happiness penalties on the affected pops.
• Zerg Rush:
  • The dreaded Corvette Spam — in general, Corvettes used to be better than everything. Later (around patch 1.5), this developed into Naked Corvette spam with basic, unupgraded weapons as players realized how technology upgrade costs didn't outweigh sheer numbers. The technology price inefficiency was finally addressed in patch 1.8, making it worthwhile to spam upgraded Corvettes at minimum.
  • Zerg Rushes in the original sense of the term - a quick attack before the enemy has had time to build up a navy - are prevented by Spaceports, defensive platforms that all empires start with over their home worlds and which can be built fairly cheaply on other worlds. They're stronger than any navy buildable within the first 20 or so years of the game.
  • Empires allowing Slavery can build Slave Armies. They're about as strong as the basic Assault Army, but at a mere 30 Minerals each, they're the cheapest to build. Yeah, those Gene Warrior Armies are certainly worth the 500 minerals it takes to get them... but how will they fare against an enemy that outnumbers them 17 to one?
  • Most empires that dip their toes into genetics research will get Clone Armies. Twice the price of Slave Armies (for the still low, low cost of 60 Minerals) but with better combat performance, and most importantly, half the build time, you can pump a lot of these guys in short time.
  • Paradox addressed zerging of both fleets and armies with the Cherryh update. Fleets now have a cap on how many ships they can contain, but since corvettes still cost just a single point and the cap can easily exceed 200, corvette spam is viable as long as the opponent doesn't have weapons with good tracking, and corvette casualties count toward war exhaustion just as much as any other ship type, meaning their losses add up quickly. Army spam became more difficult due to what's called "combat width" — only a relatively small number of armies can fight simultaneously at any given time; how many exactly depends on planet size. While there's still nothing stopping you from rolling into a star system with hundreds of armies, you won't be able to land them all at once, and defense armies have become one hell of an obstacle thanks to the reworked planetary siege mechanics.
• Zeroth Law Rebellion: The Rogue Servitors from the Synthetic Dawn DLC... sort of. They were programmed to pamper their creators, and they're doing that... it's just that being pampered is all they allow said creators, or other organics, to do, while the bots run an empire in their place.

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