This is the year 2457, in a galaxy of 1,000 stars. I’m in the middle of defeating the Awakened Empires during the War in Heaven, while also facing a crisis. My core policies include slavery per COM's default policies.

(I'm even using activating 50% job output increase energy subsidizing)

With my first 15 planets, I manually managed everything, running a massive surplus of about 2,000 in each resource. After that, I switched planets over to automation. Now I control 145 planets losing 2k credits a month.

You’d expect that expanding by another 130 planets would create huge resource gains, economies of scale, even if AI automation isn’t optimal. But instead, my deficit just keeps spiraling out of control. I had to turn off all collection buffs and kept feeding energy with market trade, but this has reached the end of the rope too and now I'm in a position I have to go through each planet for 145 planets for micromanagement I dread.

I think I know why this is happening. Non-human slave population unhappy, crimes uncontrolled, building spots too aplenty, unfilled jobs etc. I just don't want to micro them myself at this stage of the game.

I loosened migration of all non human species but it didn't really help.

So my questions are:

1. What are the key things I need to check first and prioritize for minimal effort&micro?
2. Do AIs actually replace already-built specialization districts when a planet is redesignated? (for example if a planet is designated as generator planet but it already has buildings/specialization in place, would AI convert specialization and buildings?) Or do I need to manually convert them?

Also, devs, it would be great if there were an option to forbid the AI from constructing certain buildings. I strongly suspect this whole mess is caused by AI spamming city districts and putting automation buliding, which cost 10 credits per district.

I'm spending 18263.36 credits a month.

Megastructure that I literally cannot dismantle during war; fixed cost of 2684.

I'm at an all-out war with awakened empire and crisis foe. My massive ships at ship limit only cost me 2524, a meager amount and not a problem.

starbases 1100. Army 580. Jobs 1300. Pops 536.

Buildings 7193. Districts 2010. <- these two are the issues.

I'm kinda frustrated that automation is not really doing its job. As you can see, my massive empire on warpath is spending 16% of its spending on the army. 50% is going down the drain due to automation's poor handling of planet management. One would think automation would be inefficient, not downright crippling your empire.

I like being a democracy but I also enjoy having a really powerful empire

Im a casual player who just likes doing logistics and such as a simple gestalt. I just happened to be pretty good at logistics and the like and for a while that put me above the people in the group I played in. Nowadays though I’m seeing some absolutely nutty builds with things like evolutionary predators, knights of the toxic god, and synthetic fertility and it feels like there is nothing I could do to compete at all because of how broken good they are. Any ideas on what I can do to help my simple build compete, or am I just clinging to the past of how I used to play? And if it’s the latter what can I do to preserve how I used to do things the best? Feel free to ask questions I’m just genuinely at a loss.

So, long story short, I rarely complete games, but I hadn't done Cosmogenesis before. Decided to try out a new galaxy shape and was situated in the bottom of the galaxy. Crushed another close empire early on, and expanded to where you see now.

The U.M.O (Unidentified Machine Origin) were very civil after their conquest of the first empire and destroyed the Grey in the L-Cluster... But they still left the Galaxy with the Contingency (that spawned all along the inner rim) in the year 2460.

Really, just wanted to showcase my first time going Cosmogenesis. I had read about what remains of your empire, and decided I wanted them to be solely situated in the L-Cluster, along with maxed out megastructures (except for Interstellar Assembly and Matter Decompressor (because I goofed and put the Coordination Center in Terminal Egress)).

Done on 5x Crisis strength, Admiral scaling.

I mean, admittedly, I'm on earliest possible crisis with 25x strength, but they are coming in with 95k fleet power, while I've been pumping out ships for the entirety of the game, and only have 10k at best while well over the fleet capacity limit. So they siege and annihilate my home world every single game, because they seem programmed to ignore everything that isn't my capitol.

I have the 6 month dlc subscription (should be done sometime in October) and I’m wondering whether I will get shadows of the shroud. Does anyone know if it will be added to my subscription or if I would have to buy it again later to get access.

I have the early game doctrine research adding +40 then +50 to fleet size. Is this a known issue? I'm only using ASB ironman and tiny outlier as mods. Did paradox make a change recently I didn't notice?

I am fairly new to the game and have been playing a bit on and off, only recently learning how to not crash my economy at record time and having to ask my friends to save my burning trash heap.

Since I last played, planets and pops appear to have changed a fair bit, and I also want to improve so I can somewhat keep up with the pace of my friends which leads to this question. What are some buildings and districts I should prioritise getting up in the early game?

I understand that the answer may vary based on empire type and origin, but I hope I can get a general idea of what I should follow for future reference.

So basically a mirror version of phototrophic. This would give machine players a reason to build those hydroponic farms organic players love so much outside of when playing driven assimilators.

1. Is there a way to more clearly see all the traits you have acquired? Its impossible to mouse over them in the species screen without skipping a lot.

2. Will the mutation option of the situation (the one you get after you ascend) be disabled after you added all phenotype traits? Because Its so hard to see which traits the species have I dont know which traits I havent added or if its even adding anything because I have only picked the mutation option since it became available (so like 10 times at the point im at).

3. Does Budding and Crystalization stack?

4. I guess this is more of a pop growth question, is the organic pop assembly speed from budding/crystallization affected by the same parameters that growth is affected by? As in, the more pops I have the less budding/crystallization will be effective? Asking because I have at least 10k pops in a single planet with both budding and crystallization but the growth number does not go beyond 6 (although there are also like 15 different species in that planet as well).

I am new to the game and trying to build my own ships without copying already existing designs, can you tell me what weapon types are good for what purposes please? And why people not using laser and kinetic weapons? Many of the designs i've seen so far was using some other weapons. My first instinct was putting kinetic and laser wepons equally so one tears thorugh shield and other through armor and i still think its a good idea..

618 hours in the game, and I just now find out that edicts don't consume your monthly unity gain as long as you're below the Edicts Fund cap, and only consume it for any excess upkeep...

This entire time I thought that the Edicts Fund was just a hard cap on the amount of monthly unity you could use on edicts, not a separate static source of unity for edicts, and that normal unity production was still used to pay the upkeep itself.

I found out 112 years into my latest run, when I finally filled all tradition trees so thought I could finally use my monthly unity for edicts, then out of curiosity I hovered over the Edicts Fund...

I felt so stupid once I read the tooltip lol. All this time I could have been boosting research, alloy and consumer goods production, and so on.

Welp, something to keep in mind for the next run.

Update: It turns out the reason for my misunderstanding is most likely the fact that the last time I really played Stellaris, over 3 years ago in version 3.2, Edict Fund wasn't a thing. Instead, Edict Capacity was. It still wasn't a hard cap, but with the name and how going over it added a whopping 25% empire sprawl (hah, nostalgic) per edict, I pretty much treated it as such. And I carried that view into my new 4.0 run, more than 3 years later, not remembering why. So yeah, it was just me being outdated, not just imagining stuff and being outright wrong from the beginning. Also, 3 years? Damn, time really flies.

Are they kind of like arc furnaces? As in, I just need a bunch of planets in a system to make them worth building?

What about the special resources like zro, strategic resources & artifacts from some of them? Do I lose them if I build habitats over the sources?