YMMV / Stellaris

• Accidental Innuendo: The 3.0 "Dick" update, named after science fiction author Philip K. Dick. Fan reaction on the forums was pretty much what you'd expect. Queue the avalanche of posters proclaiming how much "they love Dick," etc.
• A.I. Breaker: Marauder empires will periodically issue demands to your empire and will send a mid-game fleet to raid your systems if you refuse. However, they will only start making these demands after first contact is complete and will never raid an uncontacted empire. As Marauders will not complete contact themselves, a player can avoid dealing with them entirely by simply never progressing the first contact situation.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: When the Great Khan is defeated the second time, they refuse to Abandon Ship and consequently die when their flagship explodes. Is this a case of Facing Death With Dignity or a Despair Event Horizon? Given the character's honorable demeanor and genuine desire to make the galaxy a better place for their kin, there's room for either or both interpretations.
• Awesome Music: The game soundtrack, courtesy of Andreas Waldetoft (and eventually Bert Meyer who takes over scoring the later expansion packs), has been described by one fan online as a hybrid of the Europa Universalis and Mass Effect soundtracks and with good reason.
  • The first track you hear when you boot the game (provided you don't own any expansions) is the "Stellaris Suite: Creation and Beyond" which perfectly encapsulates the feeling of being a newborn interstellar civilization stepping out into the galaxy for the first time.
  • "Towards Utopia: Nova Flare" a remix that inverts the synth and orchestral proportions of the original "Towards Utopia" track resulting in this tranquil synth-laden track punctuated by moments that invoke a unique version of Playing the Heart Strings that will have you cry tears of joy rather than sadness.
  • Prior to using the Paradox Launcher, Stellaris' launcher would use the track "The Birth of a Star" as background music. The combination of an orchestral melody, electronic backing, and quick yet powerful drumbeats combined perfectly to create a mix that's perfectly futuristic and otherworldly for the game.
  • "NOT ALONE", the theme music of 4th anniversary trailer of the game, a haunting ballad about leaving behind a one-planet existence and exploring the wide galaxy (though lyrics-wise it could just as well have been a love song). The song was released as a single for streaming a month later.
  • "In Memory of Mercedes Romero" A mournful piece sprinkled with a bit of hope. Who would have thought the track for an Ascended Meme would be so beautiful? Truly befitting of a Bold Explorer.
  • "Deep Space Travels" starts out quiet, but then bursts into an epic theme with a mix of synths and a pipe organ.
  • "Hostile Fleet Detected" was shown off during the Commonwealth of Man's revenge for its UNE brothers and sisters. It builds up to a crescendo and then remains thoroughly epic throughout till the end.
  • "Assembling the Fleet" has a subtle start, but instead of building up into a climactic force, it telegraphs a distant hope. A crisis is looming on the horizon, but a Guardian or a strong Federation awakened, saying "We got this. You'll be okay. We'll all be okay."
  • "Then Comes Light" is a track that perfectly captures the ominousness and dread that comes with being the unfortunate victim of a Colossus, whether it's just an Earth-Shattering Kaboom of a planet cracker, the forcible conversion of a god ray, the total sterilization of a planet from a neutron purge, or - in the absolute best-case scenario - the encasing of a planet in an Ur-Quan-style slave shield courtesy of the global pacifier, backed up by one of the most ominous Ethereal Choirs in the game.
  • "Nemesis: Main Theme", one of the most bombastic themes in the game, is the perfect theme for the expansion's premise, that of a galaxy coming together to defeat an existential crisis, beginning with an appropriately darker, more militarized rearrangement of the "Creation and Beyond" main leitmotif before segueing into a sinister melody representing the crisis and slowly brightening up to a suitably epic, heroic finale.
  • The Aquatic Species Pack's release trailer came with a spacefaring version of the "Fish in the Sea" shanty, sung by a deep robotic-sounding voice, a perfect fit for the new seaborne species.
  • The Toxoid Species Pack came with their own catchy theme in the form of "Banging on a Trashcan", perfectly capturing the aesthetic of Toxoids.
• Broken Base:
  • In early versions, a pair of opposing ethos were "collectivism" and "individualism". The question tore apart many a forum and even been given tongue-in-cheek reference in-game◊. The 1.5 "Banks" update renamed these ethics "authoritarianism" and "egalitarianism", respectively, which is less controversial, though arguments on the accuracy of the names still flare up from time to time.
    • A similar break came with the "Overlord" DLC, in regards to Vassals. There is a group who despise the fact that vassals aren't just a slave nation that do everything you tell them to do without asking for anything in return, with the response being "if you just wanted to conquer them then just conquer them in the first place".
  • The Plantoids DLC, which added a new family (in the taxonomical sense) of races with 15 portraits, a new ship set, a city, and a namelist. Why is it a base breaker? It divided the forums into four groups. One was vocally angry with the $7.99 price tag, the feeling that several plantoids were reskins of existing portraits, and the studio manager responding to the criticisms by saying the DLC was cheap and should have been $19.99. The second group had no problem with the price, loved the content, and simply posted as such. The third said it was cool, but a bit too expensive for their tastes, and they'd either wait for the new patch to bring them back in or a sale. The fourth group defended the DLC as vehemently as the first attacked it. Many users in the first and fourth groups received warnings from forum moderators for their lack of civility. A more recent DLC, Lithoids, added rock-based lifeforms, but unlike Plantoids also came with some unique mechanics and was much better received, leading Paradox to state that chances are likely they'll go back and add some unique mechanics for all the other families as well.
  • Strictly limiting psionics to spiritualists, as a counterbalance to materialists' mastery of robotics and boosts in science. Many sympathetic to the Materialists argue that they would just treat those like any other natural phenomenon: they'd study it, use that knowledge to improve or replace their theories of how the universe works, and look for applications. The fact that they can't do just that and are sealed off from anything involving the Shroud is a point of contention. It's also rather questionable why the spiritualists are all fine with it, no matter the actual precepts of their religion. Probably due to this, the ethics restrictions on robotics and psionics were removed in the 1.8 patch, replaced with stronger Materialist or Spiritualist factions, respectively. Psionic materialists and religious synth citizens for all!
  • The decision to significantly rework FTL travel for the 2.0 "Cherryh" update by essentially removing warp and wormhole travel in favor of hyperlanes. The reasoning was that having three types of FTL in the game made terrain strategies rather difficult: for example, in the old system building a massive starbase to attempt to stop enemy fleets was rather pointless since, well, it wasn't going to stop any wormhole or warp based empires, who could easily bypass it. The old FTL systems are still there, in a sense, but now very different mechanically: wormholes are no longer things you can generate willy-nilly but are more like Snakes and Ladders^note Or Chutes and Ladders, depending on where you're from, connecting two specific systems. By the start of the endgame you gain the ability to build Gateways, akin to Stargates. Likewise, warp drives, now jump drives, are like a power-up, allowing you to directly travel from one system to another within a set range but only every X number of days. This was controversial to say the least. While discussion had been ongoing since November 2, 2017 (the FTL rework dev diary) on both the Paradox and Steam forums, the patch launch on February 22, 2018 immediately set the fanbase on fire. The Stellaris reviews on Steam dropped from Very Positive (80+%) to Mixed (65%) during the span of a single week^note For fairness' sake, the developers were also battling a separate controversial issue since they removed official Chinese language support on 2.0's launch, angering Chinese players for months stretching until June, and many of these negative reviews leaked into DLC including Apocalypse's reviews. The launch of the Apocalypse DLC coinciding with 2.0 suffered as well, with just as many reviews discussing the FTL rework instead of the DLC content and giving it a mixed launch.
  • The 2.2 Le Guin update broke the base even worse than the 2.0 Cherryh update above, mostly because it was an extremely buggy Christmas Rushed update that required over 200 bug-fixes in the following weeks. There are many points of contention:
    • The update saw a massive overhaul of the population system and an increased complexity of resource management with many new resource types to juggle, making Stellaris look and feel more like other Paradox titles like Europa Universalis in being far more detailed and micromanagement-heavy. Some players are upset by this because they liked Stellaris specifically because it was more accessible than the average Paradox game, while long-time Paradox fans are happy with the game drawing from others that they know and love. A third group is simply annoyed they have to relearn the entire game yet again. The fact that the available building slots on a planet were severely limited to just 12 (when planets used to have up to 25) did not help.
    • The research mini-rework saw the research costs of many technologies readjusted, but most notably the minimum was set from a few hundred research points to 2000 research points, with nearly every other source of technology being re-adjusted to compensate. It also came with the removal of specialized research labs.
    • The strategic resources being reworked into their own fully-fledged resources was generally seen as an improvement over the old system where merely possessing a planet with a strategic resource gave an empire-wide bonus, but the reliance of them for higher-tier buildings, many of which merely increased the job slots they provided, was contested.
    • As a result of the game being overhauled and so many mechanics having to be balanced and readjusted the development team forgot to include certain changes in the patch notes, such as Cloning Vats being limited to empires with the Engineered Evolution ascension perk.
    • The Paradox development team claimed that the update will also improve performance and reduce the amount of micromanagement later on. At release, the update did the opposite of both, by drastically increasing the amount of pops that could exist on a planet, leading to a performance sink that has troubled the game for many versions, and adding various mechanics such as housing and amenities while limiting building slots to population, meaning that players had to keep revisiting their planets to take advantage of newly-unlocked building slots and address various deficits, increasing micromanagement. Fans were not pleased.
    • Before the release of the update there were copies of the update given out to several streamers. When some of the streamers raised a concern over the AI playing extremely passively and often not doing anything at all they were threatened by Paradox not to disclose such information about the game, which led to a short-lived drama that did not improve people's hopes over the update.
    • The AI has been a particular negative point of the update as it did not get enough adjustment to all the changes brought by 2.2. One highlight includes AI empires overreacting to megacorporations with the Criminal Heritage civic making crime-producing corporate establishments on their planets, which would result in the AI building nothing but precinct houses and then forgetting to deconstruct them, leading to highly inefficient planets full of precinct houses.
    • Balance changes that came in with Le Guin meant that previously-popular buildings and strategies from other DLCs like Habitats and Ringworlds were dramatically nerfed to make way for the Megacorp-exclusive Ecumenopolis. The new economy changes have also made machine empires extremely powerful, as they can ignore food and consumer goods. It also meant the AI is now even more hopelessly inept than it ever was and has to be given even more significant bonuses just to stay relevant. Some people aren't bothered by these changes and thought that all of these things received rightly-deserved nerfs while not being concerned about the AI changes (since they often use a mod anyway) while others are fuming that playstyles and empires they liked have been rendered totally unusable and that the lack of a good, or even decent, AI makes the game too easy.
    • The "Market" mechanic that came as a way to make up for the deficits that appear from the intensive resource juggling was considered a necessary mechanic to make empires more economically flexible as a result of having to divide resource production between multiple resources, but it was also seen as an uncharacteristically magical source of infinite resources that massively ramps up buying costs and collapses selling costs with repeated purchasing or selling. It has also been the source of a few bugs and exploits such as buying energy and selling energy for energy.
  • The launch of the 3.0 Dick update was met with significant issues due to the new population rework. Intended to counter late game lag by reducing the total number of pops in the game, the rework imposes a penalty on new pop growth which increases based on total pops in the empire. Proponents of the rework pointed to the improved state of late game lag, ease of late-game population management, and elimination of Ring World spam as benefits. Opponents meanwhile felt this was a half-baked approach to fixing lag which comes of gameplay as it crippled Machine Empires, any late-game expansion, and rendered Ecumenopoli and Ring Worlds unusable.
    • The mechanics of the population rework as well proved contentious. The mechanics are an increase to pop growth based on current number of pops and a logistic curve which increases pop growth on planets based on "Carrying Capacity". Proponents feel it offers a more realistic feel with pop booms and troughs while opponents complain there is no explanation in-game and it forces them to use unsatisfying playstyles, such as the building of "feeder worlds" to create pops. The devs ultimately added sliders to the game settings for both mechanics.
• Canon Fodder: The nature of "the hunters", the beings chasing the Prethoryn Scourge between galaxies, are a common subject of speculation on the forums and online spaces. They may be an offshoot of the extradimensional invaders; a civilization that Became The Crisis, built an aetherophasic engine, and Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence; a type 4 civilization harvesting all energy in the universe; or something else entirely. The developers have stated that they will never answer this question to ensure that the hunters remain mysterious and terrifying, so fans are free to speculate to their hearts' content.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Defeating a Fallen/Awakened Empire. Especially if they bullied you earlier. Nothing is more satisfying than crushing an arrogant Precursor race that is past its prime.
  • Also, the veto power granted by being on the Galactic Council. Nothing quite as satisfying as vetoing the proposal for more power made by an overzealous and uppity Custodian. You just have to make sure that you're quick enough on the trigger that they don't declare it an emergency measure, and be mindful of your own resolutions getting frozen in retaliation.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • For players who want to minimise the impact of the randomness caused by the tech system, setting tech costs to a quarter of the original is a must.
  • Since it's near impossible to have pops specialized in a particular job actually remaining in said jobs, "universal" traits become more attractive.
  • Research and Alloy production trump everything else because they're the chief resources where producing more than is necessary can be turned into immediate benefits. Higher research gets technology faster and a larger alloy reserve means more warships can be built, both of which enable further snowballing. Most players prioritize these two resources over everything else.
  • Players on low-spec machines or players that use a lot of mods will quite inevitably end up playing as some kind of Empire that has genocide as a core policy (Fanatic Purifiers, Determined Exterminators, Devouring Hives and Terravores), as allowing the galactic population to get too high will result in the game slowing to a crawl.
  • Synthetic Ascension has always been considered better than both Biological and Psionic Ascension almost since they were released. The Psionic path is easiest to unlock, but its bonuses are situational and somewhat random. The Biological path provides some powerful bonuses to your pops, but requires more micromanagement and tends to become diluted if your empire is too racially diverse. Synthetic Ascension, the strongest of the paths, turns all your pops into robot cyborgs, making them immortal, eliminating the need for Food, and giving them some hefty bonuses as well. Since the Economy and Population rework, Synthetic Ascension became even more powerful for meta-reasons as well: previously Biological Ascension had the potential to be more powerful because you could have tailor-made pops for specific jobs and stack production bonuses on top of each other. The new Pop System made that kind of precision control of your economy impossible. Because you can't really control what field individual pops will be working in anymore, a lot of those biological-based bonuses will go to waste due to inefficiencies. What you want now is pops that, while maybe not the absolute best in one field, are generally good in all fields - exactly what Synthetic Ascension provides. Furthermore Biological Ascension still has to worry about genetic diversity, while Synthetic Ascension turns everyone into the same generically powerful robot. In a game where micromanagement can become quickly a nightmare (as of late 2020 Paradox are still working on it), anything that lessens that mental burden is a huge meta-bonus for players.
  • The Focused Arc Emitter is widely considered to be one of the best weapons in the game, combining the massive range and destructive power of extra–large weapons with the practicality of disruptors (perfect accuracy on top of ignoring both shields and armor to apply damage directly to the hull). Because every single late–game enemy vessel uses copious amounts of shields or armor (or both, as in case of the Contingency) to protect itself, the arc emitter will almost always pay for itself, no matter what kind of enemy one faces. Even if the fleet otherwise uses regular close–range energy and kinetic weapons, the arc emitter is a good weapon to use, as it can take out several smaller escort ships on the enemy side in a powerful Alpha Strike before the battle’s close combat part starts, dramatically reducing the amount of damage a fleet needs to take during battle. As a result, the default late–game war strategy tends to be to spam battleships with Focused Arc Emitters, with many more experienced players advising new players to do just that if they‘re unsure on what to do.
• Crossing the Line Twice:
  • One quick line from the beginning of episode 7 of the ParadoxExtra Apocalypse stream referenced the Pringles' quote "once you pop you can't stop". What is this in reference to? Exploding planets.
  • Also from Apocalypse, neutralizing a hostile world with a Colossus shield for the first time makes the game joke about how you just created the galaxy's biggest terrarium... before it invites you to crowd around it and bang on the window. Building a research station in orbit around the shielded planet actually nets you a quite enormous society research bonus. It somehow turns the, arguably, most merciful Colossus weapon into the most cynical of them all.
• Demonic Spiders: Apocalypse's Marauder empires quickly turn into this, especially if you're unlucky enough to spawn right next to one (or more if you're very unlucky) when the game starts. Their raiding fleets will easily overwhelm anything you can build until early mid-game, and unless you give in to their very expensive demands, they'll make sure your empire will never get off the ground. Worst of all, their ships don't even drop any valuable or unique tech when destroyed, which is the one thing that makes it worthwhile to tangle with other powerful enemies like Guardians and Fallen Empires. And if you get really unlucky, you actually claw your way into the mid-game stage, only for the Marauders to unite into their new mid-game crisis that'll steamroll over almost anything in their path, with you most likely being their first victim.
• Designated Hero:
  • Honorbound Warriors are cast in a more positive light than other aggressive AI empires like Hegemonic Imperialists or Evangelizing Zealots based on the fact that they show respect towards enemies in their dialogue that can put up a fight, and that they will grant their alien citizens equal rights while avoiding purges and other forms of genocide. However, their in-game shtick is essentially violent contempt for pacifists. Because there's nothing more honorable than antagonizing and subjugating people reluctant to fight back. Most of the time, they come off less as proud warriors and more as the stronger (as they're often amongst the most successful AI empires in a game, and just as opportunistic as everybody else) version of Hegemonic Imperialists.
  • Spiritual empires generally are supposed to be seen in rough moral parity with their materialist opposites, focusing on ensuring the people's spiritual wholeness rather than scientific research, and respecting the sanctity of life rather than treating it as just another chemical reaction. In practice, however, spiritualists and spiritual factions within pluralistic empires are the worst sort of Straw Zealots, defined by their ridiculous demands based on esoteric reasoning (particularly notable is insisting that no one be allowed to live on Tomb Worlds, up to and including native inhabitants of those tomb worlds) and their Fantastic Racism towards robots. And notably, they are allowed to use AI, just not to give it rights; this has the unfortunate but obvious side effect of suggesting that rather than understandably skeptical of the potential dangers of what, in-universe, is recognized as a dangerous technology, they're just offended on principle that a self-aware machine could ever be considered the equal of a living thing. Materialism in general and fanatical materialism in particular are supposed to have similar self-evident flaws, but none of them are nearly as glaring as hard-locking machine slavery or a refusal to engage in diplomacy with machine empires.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Cybrex is only one of five extinct precursor races, but the community likes the Cybrex so much for their backstory (not to mention the free ringworld you can repair if you have Utopia and the required techs, or Living Metal if you don't have Utopia) that you would be forgiven for assuming that they're the only precursors by how little the community discuss the other precursors by comparison. Maybe this popularity is what prompted their return in 1.8...
  • The Xenophile AI advisor in Synthetic Dawn is beloved for being an enthusiastic Genki Girl, and for having an accent that is frequently compared to Tali's from Mass Effect on the Paradox forums.
  • The stray Space Amoeba you can find and "adopt" (which you can choose a variety of names for, but the community prefers "Bubbles") is very popular. While not really a powerful asset at any point in the game, many players have considered something killing Bubbles to be sufficient Casus Belli for a war of extermination.
  • The End of the Cycle is just one of five Cosmic Entities from the Shroud that you can make a covenant with. You likely won't even encounter it unless you develop psionics and follow the Psionic Ascension traditions tree, and even then there's only a small chance that it will actually contact you. However, the ridiculous benefits and catastrophic consequences of taking its Deal with the Devil, which the game itself even warns you is a bad idea to take, made it by far the most popular and memorable of the Shroud beings.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • The Commonwealth of Man is by far the most popular preset empire, which is either because the community subscribes to this trope, or because the Commonwealth's traits, civics and general setup are more to their liking. It helps that the CoM has a unique and interesting event chain which sheds light on their backstory. They also remember where they came from, and will drop the hammer of vengeance upon anyone that hurts their UNE brethren.
  • A very popular choice for many players is human supremacist technocracies and militaristic empires. Basically the Terran Federation or an Imperium of Man minus the constant Doing in the Scientist and grasping the Idiot Ball for dear life.
• Fandom VIP:
  • The YouTuber ASpec is beloved by the fanbase for his explainer videos, and has been invited to host and even participate in official LAN parties, as well as participate in exclusive on-on-ones with devs.
  • The Templin Institute is well-known for their Stellaris Invicta series, which shows off the kind of Emergent Narratives that are possible in the game. Several of their original human civilizations have since become Official Fan-Submitted Content in the official board game.
• Fanon: There are a number of massive crises that can cause massive havoc in the galaxy, and the fandom has a number of theories connecting them. Those which psionic abilities can communicate with the Prethyon and find that they are fleeing something they call "the Hunters", while it turns out the Contingency AI is trying to prevent something called a "class-30 singularity". And a psionically-adept player that prods too long into the Shroud can eventually find out about the End of the Cycle, a full-blown Cosmic Horror Story if the player takes the Schmuck Bait. The running popular theory is that threat the first and second factions are referring to is the third.
• Fan Nickname: "Sempai" as a nickname for the Fallen Empires, given their aloof demeanor, attitudes with names like "dismissive" and "patronizing", and the amount of experience and age they have compared to the lesser empires. By extension, "Sempai noticed" is shorthand for angering a Fallen Empire and implies a This Is Gonna Suck.
• Game-Breaker: Grown large enough to be moved to a separate page.
• Goddamn Bats:
  • Space Amoeba sometimes wander between systems at random. This wouldn't be a problem if they weren't marked "hostile" and thus cause any civilian ship to scramble for cover, dropping whatever they were doing - thankfully, once you get a few more ships in your fleet you can put a permanent stop to them.
  • Space Pirates will keep spawning on unclaimed systems next to your empire. Late game, they only spawn with ~2k fleet power which makes them hilariously weak, but in the meantime they'll go around wrecking your mining and research stations. It's the sheer annoyance that drives them fully into this trope.
    • Pirates were later changed to instead spawn on trade routes that aren't sufficiently protected from piracy buildup, forcing you to dedicate small fleets to patrolling the hyperlanes of your empire. Longer trade routes from distant stations become harder and harder to properly patrol, as only a system occupied by a fleet loses its piracy value. Pirate fleets and starbases are still no tougher than before, but a poorly-managed Space-Filling Empire can end up with numerous pirate systems harassing mining/research stations and leeching Trade Value.
• Goddamned Boss: While all 3 of the Endgame Crisis factions have the potential to be this ^note Namely, by initially being at least relatively evenly matched against the galaxy, not wiping you out, but you can't wipe them out as they gain a foothold until repeatable technologies being researched allow you to gradually overpower them. Until then, it's a matter of stalemate of you holding them off from anything major, and once you get strong enough, simply systematically killing them one-by-one, none have this quite like the Prethoryn Scourge. It's not uncommon for the Prethoryn to be defeated in the end, not by some Post-Climax Confrontation of say, a starbase or a stray fleet once the bulk has been defeated, but by the destruction of a colony ship. This wouldn't be a problem, except for emergency FTL and the colony ship generally teleporting to a random system every time, before trying to emergency FTL again and disappearing for at least a few months. As a result, the Prethoryn can remain a "crisis" until this colony ship(s) is finally destroyed, years or possibly even a decade after the last fleet and starbase has been destroyed.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Sometimes leaders just... don't die. It's not that they're strictly immortal, they're explicitly listed as having a mortality chance under their age tooltip... It's just that, despite the fact that they're over 186 years old and should be absolutely, 100% dead, they are not and basically live forever, eternally unshackled from the timely limitations of others who shed their mortal coils. On the plus side, hey, you'll always have that level 5 scientist!
    • In some patches this appears to stem from an Overflow Error. The chance of dying of old age increases each year, but the value is not capped at 100%. By manipulating policies to extend and then reduce lifespans until a leader's actual age exceeds the maximum lifespan by a large enough amount, the greater than 100% chance of dying overflows and is considered to be 0%.
  • A (now sadly patched) former bug/oversight meant that the Fleet Consciousness you gain to control your captured Prethoryn Queen counted as an admiral for all intents and purposes. Including eligibility to run for office in a democratic empire, and on occasion winning even without the player's involvement.
  • Another bug that's no longer possible is gifting a star system to Militant Isolationists. See, these guys don't want any new space, but it was possible to do it, which combined with their stance of not wanting to share any borders with anyone turned into an exploit: gift them a star system that borders a rival empire, and suddenly they'd demand that rival empire to back off. If not, they would become very, very angry. A war of extermination usually followed.
  • Robotic leaders were eligible for the Substance Abuser trait. It's still entirely possible for them to be Psionic or have Brain Slugs.
  • Shortly after Nemesis was released, players discovered that cracking the central star of Terminal Egress with a Star-Eater orphaned all L-Gates in the galaxy, rendering the L-Cluster impossible to get to. This made it possible to turtle eternally in the L-Cluster and even complete the Aetherophasic Engine in the L-Cluster, provided you moved your capital into the cluster beforehand.. This was changed by making the central star into a Black Hole from the start of the game.^note The reason this occurs is because Star-Eaters destroy all objects in the systems aside from itself, and as the L-Gate at Terminal Egress counts as one it would be destroyed as well. As all L-Gates in the galaxy are connected to the Terminal Egress one, destroying it would render all of them useless.
  • 3.1 included "The Broken Gates", a new archaeological site which on completion summons an Eldritch Abomination which destroys the system where it arrives. The intent was for the event to occur in the same system as the site, but players found the event was actually tied to the Science Ship excavating the site. Players could fly the ship elsewhere and essentially choose where to unleash the event, whether it be an empty system, the homeworld of a rival empire, or a Leviathan's stomping grounds. This was quickly patched.
  • 3.4 introduced Mercenary Enclaves which are formed from one of the empire's fleets so long as it is of sufficient size and has an Admiral, which if destroyed will generate debris for any undiscovered ship technology the fleet possessed. The Head of Zarqlan summons a Fallen Empire fleet which the player is expected to control, but it can instead be used to form an Enclave. Destroying the Enclave then generates a debris field which unlocks Fallen Empire ship technologies far earlier than usual. This was later patched.
  • 3.4 added new complexity to vassal/ruler relationships which had unintended consequences. Even a minor regional war could quickly draw every empire in the galaxy into it, even pitting federation members against one another without breaking the federation itself. In some extreme cases, player empires even ended up having to declare wars on themselves.
  • After defeating an interdimensional horror, you have the choice of proceeding with a Leviathan parade on one of your colonized planets. Doing so will start an event chain that may result in the planet getting destroyed and a new horror spawning. However, if the planet happens to have an orbital ring around it, the event will bug out and cause the horror to spawn completely inert.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: IGN and PC Gamer got heat for their less-than-positive reviews compared to everyone else. The IGN review proved to be controversial enough to the point where Paradox themselves defended the site and reviewer.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: For April Fools 2021, Paradox "released" a series of joke origins, one of which is premised on being the Sole Survivor in a galaxy wiped out by a successful Aetherophasic Engine activation, leaving nothing but black holes. Not only did it take about a day for modders to make the joke a reality, but at the end of the Cold War promotional game, it was discovered that there actually is a way in the vanilla game to survive the Aetherophasic Engine: have your planet be shield-trapped by a Global Pacifier colossus.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Paradox veterans sometimes have this complaint. The mechanics aren't quite as complex and opaque as usual for a Paradox game, especially in the early versions of the game before the various extensive reworks. Moreover, before the game starts, the player can adjust various parameters so that they have an easier time; this is looked down upon in some circles. Basically, it's designed to be more accessible than other Paradox games.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: ...but "more accessible than other Paradox games" is a very relative statement for complete newcomers to the genre.
  • It's also substantially more random than the historical Paradox games, and since a Stellaris campaign contains far fewer nations (major or minor), it's much easier to end up in a situation where you're at best in a stalemate with all your enemies, with no rich-but-weak targets or enormously powerful benefactors to tip the balance in your favor. Add the more complex nature of combat, and you have a game which is relatively easy to "get" on a surface level, but arguably much harder to learn the ins and outs of compared to something like Crusader Kings II or Europa Universalis IV.
  • The wrong neighbours can make it hard to survive even the very early game. The snowball effect will work just as hard on a player as it does the AI, and if you are next to, say, an Empire of fanatic purifiers which is designated with an advanced AI start, you might not have any hope at all to build up a military before the larger empire wipes you out with little trouble.
  • Moreover, before the game starts, the player can adjust various parameters so that they have an harder time. This approach can easily conjure Unwinnable scenarios.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Missiles as a whole are considered badly underpowered, due to their slow travel time and the fact that any sort of point defense effectively shuts them down. Strike craft suffer from the same travel time and crippling weakness to point defense as missiles, plus ships have a limited number of them which can only be replenished when the ships are out of combat for an extended period of time.
  • Paradox has tried since release to make strike craft a viable alternative period. Though the latest (2.6) incarnation is the best they've ever been, they're still considered to be weak or niche compared to other weapons systems and are mostly just an upgrade to point defense.
  • Destroyers have, since the earliest days of the game, struggled for any real reason to be included in any fleet setup aside from super niche roles. They aren't as fast as Corvettes, aren't tanky enough to tussle with Battleships or Cruisers, and the only combat roles they can fill that can't be done by corvettes are "picket ships" that counter strike craft and missiles (useless against any enemy not hard-coded into those weapon types exclusively, and possibly replicated by both Cruisers and Battleships) and massed long range bombardment with a single Large hardpoint (which Battleships do with a much higher likelihood of surviving, as well as bringing an equal amount of weapons per fleet capacity). With war exhaustion included, making each loss a long-term liability, it doesn't leave them in any real strategic position aside from incredibly niche situations.
  • The Spiritualist ethic is widely considered the worst. There's a few reasons why: Spiritualists primarily focus on generating large amounts of Unity, one of the weakest resources to focus on. Spiritualists hate robots — Pops are king and have been for several versions, hitting their peak in 3.0. Robots are the fastest way to gain access to the second pop growth queue, so having a robot factory greatly increases your effective pop growth. This puts spiritualists in a bind - Either they keep robots outlawed and miss out on all those extra pops and the resources they would generate, falling behind all their robot-using neighbors, or they allow robots and kneecap their Influence gain and pop happiness by angering their largest faction while also guaranteeing an AI rebellion if they ever research either of the dangerous AI techs since they can't give AI full citizenship. Spiritualist is mutually exclusive with Materialist, which is often considered the strongest ethic because of the research bonus and synergy with Synthetic Ascension, which has long been considered the strongest of the ascension paths. Spiritualists are encouraged towards Psionic Ascension, which is generally considered the weakest ascension path due to its largely random bonuses and being the only ascension path that has potential drawbacks.
  • The Pacifist ethic is also said to be scraping the bottom simply because they can't declare offensive wars. With conquest being a huge part of the game and the mechanism by which many empires begin snowballing, not being able to do it is a significant handicap. This is more the case in 3.0 due to the reworked population mechanics encouraging larger empires - Pacifists will eventually get stuck in a position where they have to build Habitats or Ringworlds in order to expand.
  • Before the 3.8 update, Democracy was considered by far the weakest of the various government types in the game. Instead of agendas, which provided a passive bonus as long as the leader was in power, leaders got mandates, goals that had to be be completed during their term in office and provided six months' worth of your current Unity production (or 1,000 Unity, whichever number was lower) when completed. Already, given the weakness of Unity as a resource, this was a problem, especially by midgame when most players' empires were generating more than 1,000 Unity in six months and thus reducing the value of the bonus, but it got worse. Fulfilling these mandates required building a number of stations or districts or bringing resource production above a certain number, which could have you building unnecessary infrastructure in order to meet the mandate — or being unable to do so because your mandate involves building research or mining stations, even though you no longer had places to build them. The only reasons to use democracy were either to run a Fanatic Egalitarian build (which requires it) and some of the civics associated with it, or for roleplaying purposes. The 3.8 update fixed this by overhauling all government types, including Democracy, such that it now boosts the Factions' approval and Unity production and resets the timer on government reform and party cooldowns after each election. Now, Democracy is considered the strongest non-gestalt government type for Unity-focused empires, especially if you're using the Parliamentary System civic for an early-game Unity rush.
• Memetic Badass: Mercedes Romero, a Blorg scientist in the pre-release dev livestreams, is frequently treated on the forums as a Bold Explorer and an Adventurer Archaeologist; there's even been fan art made depicting her. When she died of old age in one of the streams, the devs re-named Earth "Mercedia" in her honor; one of the game's official soundtracks (added in patch 1.5/Utopia) is titled "In Memory of Mercedes Romero", making her an Ascended Meme as well.
• Memetic Loser: The Galactic Community, for its tendency to prioritize small-scale resolutions like the Tiyanki Conservation Act rather than urgent matters like defending against an endgame crisis. Players often exaggerate this for comedy or drama in memes and After Action Reports, treating the Community as useless at best and actively obstructive at worst.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • On the weekly stream, even though they were running the latest build of the game, some of the dialogue that comes up is incomplete, which the chat then proceeds to joke about. "01_EMBASSY_PROPOSE", referring to an embassy proposal screen that has no dialogue for it at all, took off as a huge joke in chat and on the Stellaris subreddit & official forums, and has lead to lots of jokes and self-references such as "01_PARTY_INVITE", "01_UNFRIEND_PROPOSE" and "01_MORE_GAMEPLAY", among many others.
  • Another one from the weekly stream: a hilarious (and unintentional) High-Five Left Hanging moment between the devs became a popular reaction gif on the Stellaris forums.
  • K'Reel & Mercedes Romero generated characters achieved memetic status on the forum & streams.
    • Post-release streams about incoming patches & expansions have resulted in "HOT CODE" and "NOT FINAL NUMBERS" becoming new memes.
    • "Hotcode" has been used by the ParadoxExtra streamers since at least the Utopia playthrough whenever something is obviously messed up.
  • The "TLDR-37" asteroid is actually Welsh, but its full name would cover the entire screen.
  • Around the time Leviathans was announced, the devs ran a game "The Rad" on a galaxy full of community-created empires. One of these was called the "Ayylmao Foundation", based on the "ayy lmao" meme which quickly became a running joke, just like it does in other gaming communities, such as XCOM.
  • MUGANI? HAK HAK HAK!
  • On the Stellaris subreddit, whenever someone posts a screenshot where they show that they found a system with an abnormally huge amount of minerals, the commenters will encourage them to build mining stations there asap. ^note It's a special system that, if someone attempts to build a mining station on the crystalline asteroids, will soon attack with spaceborne creatures, tearing apart their mining station and potentially construction ship in no time.
  • Memes about Xeno-Compatibility are very common in the game's online space, as are Absolute Xenophobe responses (which often quote or paraphrase 40k).
  • "Eat the ice cream." A thoroughly bizarre commercial that encapsulates the more negative, cynical, and common interpretation of how the Rogue Servitors are "serving" their "masters", and often shows up on the subreddit and forums in conversations about them.
  • "Sci-Fi War Crimes Simulator." Players often have a sense of humor about all the atrocities you can commit in Stellaris, many of which are detailed in the game's Nightmare Fuel and Video Game Cruelty Potential pages.
  • The Federations DLC brought in a flood of new Star Wars memes.
    • "I am the Senate!"^explanationPassing a legislation to become sole leader of the Galactic Council. The legislation is actually called this. This got a boost with the announcement of the ability to reorganize the Galactic Community into the Galactic Imperium in Nemesis
    • I love democracy.^ExplanationThe diplomatic weight system means that if you play your cards right, your vote can count for more than the entire rest of the senate combined.
  • Also from Federations, the unnamed representative of a militarist empire reacting to anti-military sanctions.
    OUTRAGEOUS!
  • Jeff.^ExplanationOne of the Necroid species◊ from the expansion quickly got the memetic name Jeff, after a corruption of its preset from the base game, the Jeferians. Players sometimes make it go to Planet of Steves levels, where any and all pops are called "Jeff".
  • "It's a hand, not a vehicle!"^ExplanationThis event image◊ is frequently misinterpreted as a ship or speeder flying near a ruined city. It's actually the gloved hand of an archaeologist picking through some artifacts, and anyone who points this out (such as this Reddit post) tends to get a lot of confused or indignant responses.
  • Reducing late-game lag.^ExplanationLate in the game, the game starts to strain under the weight of lag and slowdown, much of it caused by the pop system simulating the various sapient lifeforms inhabiting each world, each one individually rendered even as the number of pops rises into the thousands. Various fixes have attempted to solve this issue, but the most effective one has been to manually reduce the number of pops that the game needs to render — or, to put it less euphemistically, a campaign of galactic-scale genocide to kill as many aliens as you can. The Aetherophasic Engine in the Nemesis DLC sometimes gets called the ultimate anti-lag device. This is also why Paradox added an option to disable Xeno-Compatibility, as the resulting slew of unique alien half-breed species that the game now has to keep track of drives lag up even further.
  • Galactic Community being obsessed with Tiyanki^ExplainationTiyanki are neutral spaceborne animals inhabiting neutral systems. One of the bills that can be passed in the Community is Tiyanki Protection Act, which forbids attacking them, and another is a bill either repealing it or enforcing their extermination. Due to the quirks of Community mechanics, it's common for the act to be put to vote just as the Crisis shows up. The general consensus in the fandom is that despite sci-fi setting, Paradox still managed to put realistic politics in its game.
• Memetic Psychopath:
  • The Butterfly portrait◊ available as part of the Cuties Portraits Pack is for some reason portrayed as evil incarnate and sometimes used by a number of players as the species for Fanatical Purifiers games. Even the developers seems to agree, as the Butterfly portrait was used when they showed off the Fanatical Purifiers themed room introduced in the 1.6 Adams patch.
  • In a similar vein, the Starfish◊ are usually associated with Fanatic Purifiers, with the Lead Director even implying that they were the ones who blew up the human planet Europa VII in the Apocalypse trailer.
  • And the Geckos◊ included in the Cuties Portrait Packs is also often associated with Fanatical Purifiers, being mentioned as such by the developers as well, and an event spawned Fanatical Purifier is scripted to have this portrait.
• Moral Event Horizon: Purging an alien species is considered this by that species' empire (thus it only works when you capture several, but not all planets from a rival empire and purge the populace). You can get up to -1000 relationship penalty with that Empire (compared to maximum -100 for purging an unrelated third party), and while there's a +2 per year rebound value, the time frame required to complete it is so long it's unlikely to reach that point.
  • With Apocalypse, any deployment of a Colossus counts as well, usually to the whole galaxy and not just the target empire. Particularly heinous actions like cyborgizing the population of entire planets or simply blowing up worlds will net you penalties between -60 and -1000 apiece.
  • Creating an Aetherophasic Engine in Nemesis, as when it's completed it turns every single star in the galaxy into black holes, killing everyone else (unless their world was shielded by a Global Pacifier) while your empire ascends.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • "Research complete" or any of its variants spoken by the different advisors, which plays whenever you finish researching a technology.
  • "Invasion defeated", when you repel a ground invasion of one of your colonies. Especially if you're fighting the Scourge, who destroy all life on the planets they conquer.
• My Real Daddy: Martin "Wiz" Anward was not the original game director (the one in charge of the gameplay and creative side of development) for Stellaris, however, he took over development shortly after release and became the face of the Stellaris development team. Many game mechanics (for the better, most fans would agree) were reworked under his leadership. His departure from the team to head a secret dream project from its inception (largely suspected and later confirmed to be Victoria III) was widely mourned by the fanbase.
• Obvious Beta: The initial release fell prey to 'released too early' and 'not tested thoroughly enough' tropes, with three hotfixes coming within a couple weeks from launch day.
  • There was a real problem in the late-game with stuttering and general lag, as well as instances where selecting a fleet in the late game of any composition will max out a single CPU while the other cores or threads sit around nearly idle.
  • There have been records of bugs with armies being lost to the player should they invade a planet, take control, and then be booted out of the system as a result of another empire taking the planet within the borders. What is worse, those armies show up on the outliner wasting a huge amount of space.
  • One of the late game crises could not be properly beaten, as a certain trigger relating to planet health didn't work. Another one constantly purged its own population.
  • Evasion being so overpowered that the best fleet composition by far was simple corvettes loaded with as many evasion boosters as possible.
  • The HOSTILE FLEET DETECTED bug. Due to a flaw in the way the game reported enemy fleet actions on launch, every single time a fleet in sensor range prepared a jump to anywhere, it spawned a hostile fleet notice. By mid or late game, wars can be quite large endeavors between large alliances, meaning there can be dozens of enemy fleets, each of which spawning a message every single time they jump. The 1.02 patch cut this down somewhat.
  • Colony events, the spice of the mid game, hardly ever fire. Fixes were promised and pushed back in several major patches several times. Nowadays, each new colony is almost guaranteed to generate a (unique for that game) colony event, finally.
  • Choosing Sol as your starting system didn't prevent the random galaxy generator from adding a second Sol to the map. This was fixed in a later patch.
  • A bug can cause only female portraits to be chosen for leaders instead of having it be a 50/50 chance either way.
  • Sector AI couldn't understand how to deal with robotic or enslaved pops.
  • Originally, if you created a custom species that started on the special "Earth" option (which is always a Continental planet) but didn't have Continental Preference as its planet preference, you couldn't ever research Continental Colonization and by extension Ocean Colonization, even if you got a compatible species to settle them with. This locks out two abundant planet types for your entire game. No longer an issue now that Colonization techs have been done away with and replaced with the Habitability mechanic.
  • It's possible for an AI Empire to invite you for war against... yourself. This tended to happen with Tributary empires that are released, but then hate you. Rejecting their terms does nothing, accepting their terms seemingly starts a war but actually does nothing, and most importantly, they will keep inviting you to the war declaration over and over. It gets annoying after a while, and makes you wonder if wiping them off the face of the galaxy would finally put a stop to it.
  • One endgame crisis exterminated itself by purging its entire population until patch 1.2.3 fixed it.
  • The only available Victory Conditions at release were Domination (colonize 40% of the available inhabitable planets) and Conquest (conquer every other Empires under your heels). This effectively shafted Pacifists, as they could not start wars of aggression and by midgame, most of the inhabitable worlds would already be colonized and the only way to expand is either trade for planets (highly unlikely if not outright impossible that they would accept a deal where you come out ahead) or to wage war. Pacifists could still declare war of liberation, but allies and vassals did not count toward Domination either. Heinlein fixed this by adding the Federation victory condition, which requires a Federation to own 60% of the available inhabitable planets — thanks to the changes to alliances in Heinlein, this meant that allies did count towards it.
  • Portraits from pre-order bonuses could not be used by the randomly generated AI empires. A patch that came out alongside the Plantoids DLC pack was supposed to fix this, but it only worked for the plantoids. Creatures of the Void, Arachnoids, Chirpy, and the Platypus still don't show up.
  • The original version of the game slapped a hefty -1000 "Not Diplomatically Relevant" modifier on when attempting to form alliances with empires that were too far away, effectively making it impossible and severely hampering Federation-based gameplay. A later patch replaced this with a scaling "distance" penalty that was much easier to overcome.
  • The Cherryh update's massive overhauls to the warfare system were apparently barely playtested before release. The new war exhaustion mechanic in particular made a lot of players very unhappy until Day One mods rebalanced or outright removed it. Also, like so many other updates before, Cherryh wreaked havoc on a great many text messages, especially those unique to Machine Empires, so that only indecipherable strings were shown in their stead.
  • The Le Guin's massive overhaul to the economy system also has a lot of problems with bugs: AI being unable to use the new Economy, the ability to make infinite money with market, endgame crises cannot purge pops, and more. It doesn't help that the patch was released only 2-3 weeks before the Christmas break. However, the developers went back to work after their break, and by the time of 2.2.6 beta, the game is now in a pretty good shape.
• Popular with Furries: The fox-like◊ and cat-like◊ mammalian species have quite a following for this reason. It's often joked that their empires must be Xenophobic because they're fed up with people hitting on them all the time.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: 1.8 made major changes on Sectors. You are still required to set aside planets to Sectors, but they no longer cost Influence to remove, the Artificial Stupidity has been lessened (and if you're still worried of the Sector replacing unique structures, you can always disallow redevelopment), but most importantly allows you to directly interfere with what the Sector is building instead of being locked out of it.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Sectors. They were created for the sake of preventing the player from having to micromanage potentially dozens of planets at once, but the Sector AI is significantly prone to Artificial Stupidity that they're usually more trouble than they're worth and you cannot make any changes to planets inside a sector to fix the mess the AI made or make changes due to changing circumstances. What's worse is that the Core System Limit imposed a significant penalty for having too many planets not in a sector, forcing players to use it. The devs have been slowly improving them in each update, but there are plenty of players on the forums who would love to see them removed entirely, preferring to control everything themselves. This system has been significantly overhauled a number of times and is more or less a non-issue now, though the AI is still pretty dumb if you let it run wild.
  • The War In Heaven, which comprises of two Fallen Empires waking up and starting a huge galactic war involving everyone, sounds like a super cool idea, and it sometimes can be. When it happens early in game, it results in the fallen empires kicking the lower races into the dirt while usually avoiding each other. Even late game player empires can be little more than target practice. The rewards for winning one aren't great, and it would also cause any vassal races to switch to being vassals of the Fallen Empires. Additionally, if a strong enough empire forms the League of Non-Allied Powers in response most of the other empires will move to join them and instantly score a Federation Victory for the League.
  • The Wargoal system is often seen as annoying. Originally it was implemented so the average Empire won't fall overnight from a single Declaration of War. In practice, this means even taking out a small Empire would be a chore, as you could only take at most, 7 planets at a time. Due to this, and a whole host of changes in the 2.0 Cherryh update, wargoals were basically being removed, replaced by a new system... which was just as reviled by the player base because it was hilariously unbalanced on release, often forcing warring empires into a white peace after just a few minor fleet scuffles without any territory gains or losses on either side.
  • War Exhaustion, the system that governs how close either side is to suing for peace, is reviled by many players for how infamously unbalanced it is. Placing more value on casualties than on actual victories. Meaning you can win a lot of battles and still lose, just because the enemy fleet keeps retreating. The Parthians would be proud.
  • The randomly-assigned research projects are becoming this as more technologies get added at the lower tiers, since the odds of getting a critical technology get lower the more technologies are in the available pool. Early wars can be entirely decided by which side gets key military technologies first, building up an overwhelming advantage while the other side is stuck pushing through techs they don't need just to thin the deck. It's also the reason that getting an additional research alternative is considered one of the game's most powerful bonuses.
  • The inability to effectively manage pop job assignment. Changes made during the population rework of 2.2 (see Broken Base above) have made it impossible to move a given pop into a given job, which means there's little to no point in trying to design or breed specialized populations - your highly-efficient farming robot is just as likely to be assigned to a miner job.
  • The Great Khan event. During the mid-game, there is a chance that a Marauder empire will unite under a single leader and begin a campaign of galactic conquest, turning into a mid-game crisis. This can happen without any warning, and anyone unfortunate enough not to be prepared will be swiftly conquered by the Khan's powerful fleets. Even if the player is ready or able to fend them off, the AI empires are rarely able to put up much defense and will usually surrender and become vassal states.
  • The Pops system. While the whole game has been based around it since 2.2, it's become widely hated not for any element of the system itself but because of the sheer volume of lag that it generates in the late game, a problem that is built into the system's very design.
    • To break it down simply, every game day every pop has to be checked for various job-related functions. This isn't a problem early on when there might be 200 pops in the whole galaxy, but it can bring even high-end systems to their knees in the late game when you might have 200 pops per planet and it has to check thousands of pops every day for unemployment and apply hundreds of different bonuses to and from them and their jobs at the start of every month. This gets even worse with AI empires, which have a bad habit of creating multiple sub-species, or if an empire took Xeno-Compatibility, which eventually results in the creation of dozens of new species with their own sets of traits and bonuses that all have to get calculated into the already-gigantic set of calculations related to pops. This particular aspect got so bad that Paradox specifically added an option to disable Xeno-Compatibility at the start of a new game. This pop-generated lag gives the game a reputation for being nearly impossible to finish.
    • The 3.0 "Dick" update attempted to address the late game lag from Pops by putting a soft cap on Pop growth: past a certain point, Pops grow (or are constructed) more slowly. To compensate, each individual Pop grants increased benefits. While the basic idea was praised, the fact that this soft cap applies empire-wide has caused frustration, since it means late-game colonies, ring worlds, or habitats can take in-game decades to gain a single Pop. In effect, the late game still grinds to a standstill, not because of the game lagging, but because empires cease being able to expand or develop their industries in any kind of reasonable timeframe. A quick hotfix released shortly after allowed players to disable the empire-wide soft cap entirely.
    • The 3.2 "Herbert" update added an additional wrinkle by setting a qualifier on species with special traits that prevents adding or removing said trait. This prevents the merging of unwanted sub-species back into the main population and also ensures that pops which were "left behind" during special events such as gaining Psionics can never be part of the main species; the result is the enforcement of Species page bloat.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Often described as "What Spore's Space Stage should have been."
• Spoiled by the Format: If you find an alien empire's homeworld before completing first contact procedure, you can see in the population tab not only what they look like, but also what ethics they follow, which is often enough to deduce their personality.
• Tear Jerker: Has a page.
  • The Prethoryn Scourge, once you establish psychic communication and learn why they're invading. They're the last survivors of a species that has been pursued by the Hunters for eons and their only way to keep ahead of them is by devouring the galaxy and moving on. It's kill-or-be-killed and so you're forced to render these intergalactic refugees extinct. Sure put a sad twist on the Guilt-Free Extermination War.
  • The story trailer for the Apocalypse expansion, where a pilot of the UNE narrates a parting letter to her child as her fleet fights a desperate Last Stand to defend a colony against a massive alien armada and a Colossus superweapon. Their efforts are utterly futile, as they fail to stop the Colossus from firing, and the planet is destroyed.
• That One Achievement:
  • "Last Best Hope" requires you to lead a galactic war against two awakened empires (which most of the standards have sided with) with a new Federation (meaning no federation fleet) and defeat both at once. Oh, and if you don't win within a few years your federation members will unilaterally sue for peace with both and you can't get the achievement even if you go back to war later and win (because the game considers the new war not properly part of the War in Heaven). As of writing 0.6% of players have managed it.
  • "Stay on Target" requires the player destroy a Colossus while it is firing on one of their planets. The firing sequence is relatively short (four in-game months, or about two minutes real-time on standard game speed) and the Colossus is bound to be surrounded by a defending fleet. The player needs to both destroy the Colossus before it fires and not before it starts firing. And there's always a chance the Colossus will abort its firing sequence and run away or jump to safety before it's killed.
  • "The Path Not Taken" requires a player take one of the civics that limits them to weaker jump drive ships and colonize ten planets before researching the next form of FTL. The civic itself starts the player with less resources and less pops than other empires while the jump drive-only ships must be micromanaged as they cannot do more than one jump at a time. Colonizing ten planets means the player will be juggling dozens of ships with limited to no automation for likely decades before enough systems are secured and settled.
  • There are quite a few that are simply extremely unlikely.
    • The "Outside Context" achievement is for invading Earth while it's fighting a world war. So the human empires can't be in the game and Earth has to spawn at the right point of development close enough to your starting area that you get there before any competition and before Earth advances to the Atomic Age.
    • The closely related "Inscrutable Power" and "Raiders of the Lost Galatron" achievements. The first is for simply acquiring the Galatron, a relic which has a 0.5% chance of dropping from Caravanner Reliquaries, of which a player can only open six total per game. The second achievement complicates matters by requiring a different empire acquire the Galatron and the player must then win a war with the objective of taking the Galatron.
    • "Infinite Creation" is a pure roll of the dice on whether the player gets it or not. To start with, the Infinity Machine must spawn on the map, which is not guaranteed. The player must then assist its research, tying up a level 5 Scientist for five years. At the end of this there is a 50% chance the research will succeed, at which point there is chance the event required for the achievement will occur. This is somewhat better than the original design of the events, where a hidden dice roll in the first encounter determined the outcome.
    • "Deus Vult" requires the player colonize four Holy Worlds while having a Spiritualist ethic. The Holy Worlds mentioned are specifically four named Gaia planets that spawn in the systems surrounding a Spiritualist Fallen Empire. The first hurdle is that said empire must spawn, which is not guaranteed on all but the largest galaxies. The player must then either spawn close enough or expand aggressively enough to claim all four systems. Then comes the final challenge, as the Fallen Empire will declare war if you settle a Holy World without permission. Your only options are to either hope for a randomly generated digsite which gets you that permission or build a fleet capable of holding off the empire.
• That One Boss: While this is intentional for the 25x Crisis, special note must be made for the 25x Contingency (or 37.5x, or 56.25x on all) crisis in general, as unlike the Prethoryn Scourge and Extradimensional Invaders, the Contingency fleets don't have any easily exploited weakness (aside from overreliance on energy weapons), have solid range, strike craft, point defense, and a good mix of small, medium and long range weaponry. For this reason, they are almost universally seen as the most difficult of the 3 endgame crises.
• That One Disadvantage:
  • Pacifists can only declare Liberation Wars, and can only force the enemy to Cede territories that used to belong to them. They're still better off than Fanatic Pacifists, who are limited to Defensive Wars only, and cannot declare War at all. They're especially shafted during midgame, where it's all about declaring war to each other for land grabs. On the other hand, they get to keep a lot more allies due to their diplomatic Influence discount, and if one of these allies is a warmonger, they can be asked to join in despite their official stance on War Declarations. After all, they didn't declare the war.
  • Repugnant becomes this from 2.0 to 2.1. It's only worth one trait point but will ensure that every empire that meets you instantly closes their borders because of the relationship malus. Thanks to hyperlanes being the only way to travel this can cut off huge chunks of the galaxy from being explored and, because of a bug in 2.0, may render Gateways permanently unusable. 2.2 changes Repugnant to reduce amenities gained from pops, which isn't great, but at least it doesn't affect relations anymore.
  • Inward Perfection has the same drawbacks as Pacifism, but with the diplomatic penalties of Xenophobia, restricting you both in war and diplomatic options. Making for a hard game where you will be disliked by most of your neighbors, and with no way to form alliances. The bonuses to your own empire are fairly strong, though.
• Ugly Cute: One particularly alien-looking fungoid template◊ is not, in of itself, cute. But it has become associated with the quirky and pitiably lonely Blorg Commonality, made famous in the pre-release stream and eventually made into a pre-made civilization the player or AIs can pick.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The Espionage system. Players agree it's a cool concept, they just want it to be worth using. There are massive opportunity costs to getting the technologies researched and sacrificing the use of envoys who could be doing other things, and all that effort and cost is sunk into performing clandestine operations that are so inconsequential the other empire might not even notice they happened.
• Win Back the Crowd: The 3.0 Dick launch was highly contentious among players due to its buggy state, contested pop growth mechanics, and enemy AI now being incapable of managing an economy let alone posing a challenge. The fact that the last 3.0.x patch addressed only bugs and allowed an option to modify the growth mechanics was met with concern. Then Paradox announced the creation of the Custodians, a new team at the studio whose job will be to update old content, make quality of life improvements, fix bugs, and take suggestions from the community while the main team works on new content. As the lead-up to that, they announced the next free update would introduce new Traditions and allow players to swap them around as they please. The reaction was universally positive.
• Woobie Species: The Baol, full stop. A peaceful Hive Mind of plantoids who were subjected to genocide by a cruel warrior race who wanted their planets' mineral wealth. So brutal was the extermination campaign that the survivors regressed into a Formerly Sapient Species to escape the pain.
  "When the burners came, entire colonies were silenced before the danger was known to us. Like a limb gone limp, nerves cut suddenly and totally at the base. And then we lost the next, and the next, and the next. One by one, their voices left the chorus. We lost our others. Their silence deafened us who remained. Can you understand, visitor? We could not bear to hear more agony. The burners were swift, like you, swifter, and before we could withdraw, they had set us all aflame. All burnt to ash, and the air filled with that gray agony: the dust of our lost."

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