Stellaris is a 4X grand strategy video game developed by Paradox Development Studio and published by Paradox Interactive. In Stellaris, players take control of an interstellar civilization on the galactic stage and are tasked with exploring, colonizing, and managing their region of the galaxy, encountering other civilizations that they can then engage in diplomacy, trade, or warfare with. A large part of the game involves dealing with both scripted and emergent events, through which new empires alter the balance of power, powerful crises threaten the galaxy, or event chains tell the story of forgotten empires. It was released worldwide for Windows, macOS, and Linux on May 9, 2016, and for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One as Stellaris: Console Edition on February 26, 2019.
Stellaris is a real-time strategy with 4X and grand strategy elements, taking place on a map of a procedurally generated galaxy with individual star systems acting as two-dimensional tiles similar to previous Paradox releases. Players take the role of a single FTL-capable civilization, referred to as an empire, with the goal of exploring and claiming systems, colonizing habitable planets, and expanding their economy to outcompete rival civilizations progressively encountered through first contact events. The relative power of empires is evaluated on three factors – military strength, technological progress, or economic power – allowing players to either specialize in a single area or maintain a balanced approach. The ultimate goal is to either ally with or defeat every other empire in the game while surviving a number of external “crises” threatening the entire galaxy. Star systems can only be traversed via a web of faster-than-light routes called hyperlanes, while habitable planets hold populations of an empire’s citizens – represented by “pops” and pop groups – and can be built up with buildings and districts that produce resources or other passive effects as long as there are enough pops to fill the available jobs.
A large part of Stellaris’s main gameplay is determined by the design of the player’s empire, with templates dictating both visual and mechanical effects and the player being free to either select from developer-made pre-set empires or create their own. Players can customize the unique “traits” of their starting species, an “origin” representing the pre-FTL history of their civilization, the starting head of state, a selection of two to three “ethics” representing the core philosophy of their empire, and an “authority” and two “civics” representing the internal structure of their government and society. Ethics are chosen from a total of eight options along four mutually exclusive axes, allowing the player to either select moderate versions of three ethics or a fanatical version of one and a moderate version of another, while authorities in the base game consist of democratic, oligarchic, dictatorial, or imperial options representing the system of election for new rulers. The Utopia expansion would add a Gestalt Consciousness ethic, overriding other ethic choices and granting access to new authorities representing either a biological Hive Mind or an artificial intelligence network, as well as a large number of new civics and a megacorporation authority.
The game begins on January 1, 2200 AD, upon the player empire’s discovery of the hyperlane network. The default campaign length is 300 in-game years, divided into 100-year earlygame, midgame, and endgame segments dictating certain events and modifiers. The economy of a player’s empire throughout the game is primarily based on five main resources: energy credits, minerals, food, consumer goods, and alloys, each having a primary purpose to contribute to the player’s economy. There are also Strategic resources that are used to make advanced buildings, weapons, defenses, and can also be used to endorse edicts. Edicts also can cost Unity which can be obtained by supporting factions within your empire or by constructing buildings that create Unity producing jobs. Advancement in Stellaris is achieved through technologies and traditions which progressively scale in cost for the player to achieve, but provide better features for the player as the game continues. Edicts are used to boost and passively upgrade empires, which can cost Strategic resources, energy, or Unity to maintain. There are also mid-game crises which can occur, such as a crusade by a marauder empire or an invasion by nanomachines from an extragalactic cluster. Later in the game, larger crisis events occur that have galaxy-wide implications—for example, an awakening of dormant sentient AI, another version of this which works more diplomatically, or an invasion by extra-dimensional or extra-galactic forces, these being either randomly chosen or selected by the player at the start of the game. Paradox hoped that this feature would address a common late-game problem in 4X style games; whereby one faction is so powerful that their eventual victory is inevitable, resulting in frustrating gameplay. In the Nemesis DLC, the player can choose to become a psionics-oriented crisis with the goal of destroying the galaxy, while in the Machine Age DLC, players can become a tech-oriented crisis, widely considered the most powerful path to use. To beat the technological crisis, players must join forces and declare them the crisis in the galactic community.
Another thing found within the game (although only accessible via the Utopia or Machine Age DLCs) are ascension paths, which radically alter the player’s empire. These include biological, cybernetic, psionic or synthetic. However, if the player has the Machine Age DLC, machine empires are capable of going on three separate paths (4 if they have the Driven Assimilator civic) that are inaccessible to biological empires. These are the virtual, modular, nanotech, and if the empire has the Driven Assimilator civic, cybernetic.
Some civics within the game radically change how to play the game. For example, “genocidal” civics may not initiate diplomacy and sometimes act like early-game crises. Or the feudal civic which makes vassalization a priority.
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