"Somewhere in the galaxy a future Space Hague just spontaneously appeared and they don't know why... yet"
In Stellaris, there are all manner of horrific things you can do to other species in the galaxy. Subjecting them to slavery or genocide is just the tip of the iceberg, especially if you have the DLCs, which let you get very creative with that sort of thing. There's a reason why a popular fan nickname for the game is "Sci-Fi War Crimes Simulator", and why there exists an entire subreddit called r/shitstellarissays
devoted purely to Stellaris fans on Reddit describing in-game actions that, in any other context, would probably get them dragged before The Hague. The worst part? Some of these options are actually practical to use.
- If you choose to enslave your enemies, you have tons of options. Slavery actually has an in-game practical benefit of reducing the housing and amenity needs of the enslaved, and gets production bonuses if you build a Slave Processing Facility, implement the Share The Burden edict, and have the appropriate Governor, Civics, and repeatable techs, but it comes at the cost of a large hit to happiness (no Happiness in Slavery here, folks, unless you resort to Nerve Stapling and mind-control devices) and heavy restrictions on the jobs they can do.
- Chattel Slavery is the standard variety, and the only variety available unless you have the Utopia DLC. Here, enslaved pops are used to perform menial tasks like farming, mining, running generators, or doing clerical work. They produce more resources as Workers, but cannot work any Specialist jobs and take a happiness penalty even larger than that of other slavery types (barring Livestock and Grid Amalgamation).
- Battle Thralls mean your enslaved pops will be forced into combat. In addition to menial Worker jobs, they can become Enforcers, Soldiers, Duelists if your empire has the Warrior Culture civic, and Necromancers if it has the Reanimators civic, and armies raised from them deal more damage.
- Domestic Servitude is when slaves are forced to tend to the needs of free pops. In addition to Worker jobs, they can work as Entertainers, and any unemployed slaves are automatically given Servant jobs that produce amenities. Of note here is the Pleasure Seekers civic added in the Humanoids DLC, which, among other things, causes Entertainers to give a slight boost to population growth, the implication being that prostitution is legal and that it's increasing the birth rate. Pair that with slaves who work as Entertainers...
- Indentured Servitude is debt slavery, where pops work without pay in order to pay off a debt. Of course, their contracts are structured in such a way that they'll never be able to pay it off. Unlike normal slaves, indentured servants can work all Specialist jobs except for Enforcer, Entertainer, Duelist, and Necromancer. However, not only do they retain the same unhappiness penalty, they have more political power than other kinds of slaves (since they're not technically slaves and still have rights), meaning that, if they become unhappy, they can quickly become a thorn in your side.
- Livestock is where you send your enslaved pops to People Farms and eat them. These pops don't work, their only job is to reproduce before being slaughtered and processed into food. Naturally, these guys take the biggest happiness penalty of all, though the benefit comes in greatly reduced housing needs (since they're being shoved into factory farms).
- Grid Amalgamation, added in the Synthetic Dawn DLC and inspired by The Matrix, is perhaps the most cruel way to treat your slaves. If you're a Machine empire in need of energy, you can fuse your organic pops to the network and harvest electricity from their brains.
- Purging species also gives you plenty of options to work with.
- Displacement is probably the least cruel of all of these. Sure, your pops are kicked out of your empire and have to find somewhere else to live, but at least they'll be alive...
- Combined with Genetic Ascension however, and it becomes one of the most cruel. Combine the Fertile, Nerve Stapled, and Exotic Metabolism traits before displacing them. Empires that do not also have the Genetic Ascension perk will be forced to stop accepting refugees, genocide them themselves, or watch as the expensive, lobotomized pops become the dominant species. Needless to say, it's pretty much the ultimate method to troll xenophillic empires.
- Extermination. Good ol' systematic genocide.
- Neutering, added in the Utopia DLC. The species is allowed to live, but they will not be able to reproduce anymore, meaning they slowly die out.
- Forced Labor, added in Utopia, is like Chattel Slavery, except there's no requirement to keep your species alive. The pops will be producing resources for you until they're worked to death.
- Processing, added in Utopia. Like Livestock, except no need to keep up the population. Just throw them all in the meat grinder and enjoy your tasty xeno-burgers. Synthetic Dawn adds another version of this, Chemical Processing, for Machine Empires that serves as the extermination counterpart to Grid Amalgamation.
- Displacement is probably the least cruel of all of these. Sure, your pops are kicked out of your empire and have to find somewhere else to live, but at least they'll be alive...
- At the end of The Sentinels archeology dig, if you choose to fight the machine guardians of the Sentinels and defeat them, you discover the civilization that they were protecting, now living in a Lotus-Eater Machine on a massive computer drive. If you're Xenophobic or Militaristic, you have the option of turning their digital paradise into an eternal hell, repurposing it as a hunting ground for your own species (increasing that planet's happiness and reducing its consumer goods upkeep) or as a testing ground for sociological studies with the locals as "lab rats" (increasing research from jobs on that planet).
- There are so-called "genocidal" empires whose purpose is to kill everyone else in the galaxy. The Fanatic Purifiers civic makes an empire ragingly hostile to every one of its neighbors and committed to killing them all, to the point that they cannot carry out diplomacy other than declaring war, while also getting buffs to their fleets to make the job easier. The Determined Exterminator civic is the equivalent for machine empires. The Devouring Swarm civic for hive minds adds a Horde of Alien Locusts twist on it by having you eat the filthy xenos you conquer instead of simply slaughtering them. The Terravore civic for Lithoid Hive-minds allows you to go even further and eat planets. Naturally, any empire with one of these civics takes a massive hit to relations with everybody else, such that they're guaranteed to be constantly fighting wars.
- The Distant Stars DLC adds an anomaly that ends with you adopting and naming a juvenile space amoeba after it imprints on the science ship that discovered it, treating it like its mother. Once it grows up, it is placed under your control and treated as a powerful naval vessel, and the in-game lore says that it has become a mascot of sorts for your empire. The Overlord DLC, meanwhile, adds the Salvagers Enclave, where you can sell your obsolete ships to be scrapped. Not only is it possible to sell the space amoeba to the Salvagers, but the dev team realized that and created an achievement called "You Monster" for doing just that. What's more, there's a chance that the Salvagers, horrified by the idea, instead choose to adopt the space amoeba for themselves.
- Primitive aliens that haven't yet discovered Faster Than Light travel offer many ways to mess around with them.
- While the passive observation option is fairly benign, aggressive observation is represented with a picture of a bull getting abducted by aliens, letting you know that it's the option that has you behaving like The Greys of real-life UFO lore and engaging in assorted abductions, probings, and more. Aggressive observation also generates more Society research points, though there's also a chance that it could shift the aliens' ethics towards Spiritualist and Xenophobic.
- There is also, of course, the good old-fashioned Alien Invasion, where you deploy your Space Marines onto a planet whose armies are equipped with 20th century weapons at best (and likely something far more primitive). Planets that you invade and conquer, however, get the Stellar Culture Shock modifier, which grants a ten-year penalty to stability and resource output and means that the conquered pops can't be resettled, vassalized, or used to colonize other worlds. Then again, if you're a Fanatic Purifier, you're probably not worried about that.
- All this is before you get into the First Contact DLC, which is all about extending interactions with primitive civilizations. For instance, one event has your empire's tractor beams malfunctioning when kidnapping primitives for experimentation, causing them to fall to their deaths. You have the option of issuing a recall and fixing the tractor beams... or declaring that this is hilarious and distributing footage of the malfunctions as entertainment.
- The next level up from purging is the Colossus, a late-game superweapon that serves as the most powerful ship in the game. It only has one weapon (of which there are seven available), and that weapon isn't for fighting enemy ships; it is, in fact, defenseless against such and must be accompanied by a proper fleet when going through hostile territory. No, that weapon is for use against planets, and let's just say, there's a reason why the expansion that introduced it as a keystone feature was called Apocalypse, and why using it gives you a massive diplomatic penalty with its victim.
- The Colossus' default weapon, the World Cracker, does just that, complete with a nice shot of a World-Wrecking Wave. What's more, if you use it on an inhabitable world, the resulting wasteland leaves behind a mineral deposit for you to mine if you take over the system. Also, the first time that Fanatic Purifiers and Determined Exterminators use it or the below-mentioned Neutron Sweep, they get a ton of free Unity, as though the day they murdered an entire planet's worth of people in one fell swoop was an event they deemed worthy of a holiday. Some players, however, have argued that it's actually an aversion of this trope, as the quick death it presents is a far more painless option than some of the other things that can be accomplished by the kind of empire willing to use it.
- The Neutron Sweep is a slightly more humane option, in that it merely kills all pops on a planet while leaving the infrastructure on that planet behind, allowing you to resettle it with your own superior species without having to worry about them living next door to xeno filth.
- The Divine Enforcer, aka the God Ray, is available only to Spiritualist empires, and while it doesn't kill everything, what it does do may not be much better depending on your perspective. It instead brainwashes a planet's population into embracing Spiritualist ethics, while killing any machine or hive-minded pops. Great for imposing your authority on worlds you're about to conquer. You can also use it on your own planets, but at the cost of a happiness penalty.
- The Nanobot Diffuser, available only to Driven Assimilators, unleashes a swarm of nanobots on the planet that forcibly turn all pops into cyborgs that are part of your machine hive mind. Once it's done, you immediately claim ownership of the world. As with the Divine Enforcer, any pops that are already robots themselves or part of a Hive Mind are simply killed.
- The Global Pacifier, which traps a planet behind an impermeable force field, seems more humane than the other options at first glance, especially given that it's the only option available to Pacifist empires (unless they're also Spiritualists)... until you think about it for a second. While a world that was self-sufficient in resources can arguably survive on its own after it's cut off from the rest of the galaxy, a world that's not will likely collapse into poverty and anarchy as resources run out, civilization breaks down, and the remaining survivors kill each other for the remaining scraps of what's left.
- The Aquatics DLC introduces the Deluge Machine, available only to Aquatic species that have selected the Hydrocentric ascension perk. It floods the targeted planet, killing any pops that are not also Aquatic themselves and, like the Neutron Sweep, enabling easier colonization by the empire that used it.
- Since patch 3.7, the Ancient Relics DLC has added the Devolving Beam, an archaeotechnology that you can replicate if you collect enough minor artifacts. All organic pops except one are made pre-sapient, their intellect reduced to the level of apes who you are then free to exterminate, hunt, or shove into zoos as you see fit once you conquer the planet. An entire planet's collective intellect, culture, and accomplishments wiped away, with only a scant few survivors, and even if the original empire manages to uplift them again, they'll still have penalties to army damage, population growth speed, resource production, and leader experience thanks to your Stupidity-Inducing Attack. (Enemy armies and all machine pops, of course, are also killed instantly.)
- The Toxoids DLC introduces a unique Colossus called the Toxic God, available only to those species that complete the quest associated with the Knights of the Toxic God origin. It turns habitable planets into toxic worlds, bathing them in poisonous chemicals that kill all life on the surface and render it uninhabitable.
- The Doomsday origin from the "Federations" DLC. The player's home planet is set to explode in 35 to 45 years after the start of the game. No planets that match the environmental conditions of the species are guaranteed to be nearby. The player can try moving them to a world that is completely unsuited to their needs, or they can leave the majority of their species to die once the planet explodes.
- Stellaris has various forms of space fauna, such as Tiyanki, Space Amoeba, and Crystalline lifeforms. The Fruitful Partnership origin allows Plantoids and Fungoids to lure Tiyanki to their starbases and plant seeds on them to take advantage of Tiyanki migration, allowing them colonize distant worlds. The origin is generally considered to be one of the weaker ones when used as intended. But when combined with the Cordyceptic Drones civic, it becomes a Disk One Nuke. By using Fruitful Partnership to lure in Tiyanki, killing them, and then parasitically raising them as a Zombie Apocalypse, you can get a fleet equivalent to the early mid-game tier in the early game. By the time the strategy becomes obsolete, the Hive Mind will have conquered a good chunk of the galaxy already.
- Want to win the game in one fluid motion? The Nemesis DLC introduces the Existential Threat path in which you become the endgame crisis, the threat that the entire galaxy unites to stop. Step one: build a Star Killing machine. Step two: blow up star after star, wiping out entire (possibly-inhabited) solar systems, to acquire dark matter. Step three: use that dark matter to build the Aetherophasic Engine. Step four: activate the Aetherophasic Engine. When it goes off, your civilization ascends to godhood... and all it takes is every surviving star in the galaxy collapsing into a black hole, killing every living creature left in the galaxy. In terms of sheer body count, this may be the cruelest thing you can do in video gaming period.
- That's just the clear-cut options that the game explicitly presents to you. While the game offers plenty of obvious methods to be a colossal prick, the worst stuff can often be found between the lines, and some enterprising players have gotten creative in how they go about treating aliens. This thread on Reddit has players sharing their horrifying stories of what they did to the aliens they conquered.
- If you go down the organic ascension path, you unlock increasingly powerful tools for genetic modification. It is possible to paint smilies on their souls, lobotomize them so they can't rebel, or make them tastier so that they produce more food when you use them as livestock. In the above thread, one player turned conquered aliens into delicious livestock without lobotomizing them first, specifically to create an And I Must Scream scenario for them.
- One player, using a combination of conquest, livestock slavery, and trade deals, managed to find a way to sell conquered aliens back to the empire they were conquered from. As food.
- The relationship between large and small empires can veer into this as well. A small, remote empire under threat from a distant rival may be a good opportunity to give them research and resources so they can defend themselves and perhaps grow. On the other hand, making a small, nearby empire your protectorate may look tempting, as protectorates generate Influence (a resource which has very few ways to grow but many uses). This can lead to systematic cultural and technological oppression (refusing to provide aid in various forms while simultaneously defending them against outsiders) so that they remain in a weakened state long enough to accept your offer of protection in exchange for their independence.
- A very specific example would be a Machine Empire gaining the "Machine Worlds" Ascension Perk and then turning the Holy Guardians' special Gaia Worlds into Machine Worlds - proving them entirely right that machines are godless abominations. More generally, it's totally possible to turn an organics-inhabited world into a Machine World, which generally proves fatal to organics. On rare occasions they will actually survive it, but then die out anyway. Presumably while choking on polluted air and being in pain all the time.
- The Utopia DLC added the Syncretic Evolution origin, in which a planet's dominant species evolved alongside a second one that has "the intelligence of a particularly dim-witted child," and proceeded to enslave this second species (with the description implying that this was done through violent conquest) and breed them for physical strength and docility. Already, this isn't exactly the most benevolent origin, but where the real cruelty comes in is with later additions to the game. To start, Patch 3.2 made it possible to create a One-Gender Race. Patch 3.4, meanwhile, changed the default human portraits to reflect a hypothetical, racially blended human race a few centuries into the future. Finally, patch 3.4.3 re-added the original human portraits as an option, making it theoretically possible to have two human species. Taken together, it is now possible to create a human species built on total gender subjugation, either a No Woman's Land where the men enslaved the women or a Lady Land where the women enslaved the men.
- Similarly, playing any species as a One-Gender Race in general can raise some disturbing implications about how they came to have only one gender, but the implication becomes all but text if you're playing humanity as one, given that human biology is well-known rather than speculative as it would be for other species and something had to change such that all the men or women are gone.
- Meta-example: unless you have a very powerful computer, the game suffers from horrendous late-game lag due to the sheer amount of renders and calculations in the background. As a single in-game day can take a few seconds even at Fastest setting, the gameplay will slow down to an absolute crawl. Obviously, you can reduce the workload by reducing the number of renders, especially those of other Empires. There's a reason Fanatic Purifiers are quite popular.
