Stellaris | New DLC: Nemesis - Broken Parts

_{Stellaris Nemesis' Steam Page Cover}

---

If you have been following some of my posts, especially gaming-related ones, you might know that I really do love strategy games. Throughout the years (in the past 10 or so years) I've probably played almost every single Paradox 4X/RTS/Grand Strategy game (except Victoria and Imperator: Rome, no one likes them anyways)

Today (well, technically, yesterday) a new patch was released for the game, a new expansion pack called "Nemesis" where it added features to turn the player-controlled empire into an endgame crisis, rather than picking one of the pre-existing endgame crises, the player becomes one, against the whole galaxy. As well as adding the "Galactic Custodian" this position is the exact opposite of the endgame crisis, you are the saviour and protector of the galaxy. Think of it as forming a huge empire where you end up controlling the whole galaxy, and protect it from harm.

As soon as our games were updated, me and my friend @mrtats, went into a lobby and hosted a new game. The sad part is that I believe we have something like 5 different saves where we do end up playing until the mid-game but somehow give up and start over. No, it's not really because we are being decimated, it's just always one thing or another, a mod that we used becomes obsolete, so we have to restart. A friend of ours decides to join and play with us, only to give up after reaching the end game and never playing with us again. A new update is released which breaks old save games, yada, yada, you get the point.

Our last save together was a couple of weeks ago where in about year ~2400 I unlocked the L-Gate think of it as a portal to "another dimension-esque" place the game offers a few different options. You can get a faction that will destroy the whole galaxy, you can get a neutral faction that will give the first empire finding them some bonuses, you can find benevolent factions etc. However, thanks to our luck, we got the Gray Tempest faction, which is the faction with the aim of destroying the whole galaxy.

Almost all AI-controlled empires were completely wiped out, even our borders were under heavy fire. @mrtats was barely holding out while I was trying to pump three different fleets and reinforce them all at once. Since I was technologically superior (and had a superior fleet thereof) I asked @mrtats to send me all his available resources which then I poured into making even more ships, ended up having about 150k fleet power. Note that this is a lot for ~2400y. We destroyed the Gray Tempest and the galaxy only had about 5 maybe 7 empires left as opposed to 20+ in the beginning.

Unfortunately, the update completely broke our save game and we had to start over.

In this image above, you can see our galaxy map in the year 2248. It is relatively early in the game and the galaxy is not completely discovered. In this update, Paradox also added a new "First Contact" system where you have to contact, gather intel and build embassies in the factions you find, as opposed to discovering them naturally as the game progresses. I am playing as the empire of Primarium a gestalt consciousness made of machines. A robot empire, per se. This has its ups and downs, there are no factions (therefore discontent) in the empire. However, the pop production is so slow. As opposed to humans, machines have to assemble themselves in the machine assembly plants. (Yes, Skynet.) Unfortunately, species other than machines are also seen as "undesirable" and I have to purge them out because they love to riot and actually drop stability.

This means I get less production overall in the early game, unfortunately, until mid-game, machine empires are quite hard to build, it needs to expand fast and RNG is an important factor for the planets that pop up. Energy Credits and Minerals are very important sources for machines. Each machine uses Energy Credits (EC is the main "cash" in this game) and minerals to turn into alloys, which are then used to build buildings, ships, and of course, more robots.

One of the easiest way to develop a machine empire is to expand as much as possible, colonize different planets and build machine assembly plants (the game only lets you build one of them per planet) unfortunately, due to luck, all my surroundings were full of factions that conquered the vast empty space before I could. The only option that's left for me in those cases is nothing short of declaring war. You take my solar system, I take your empire.

@mrtats usually goes a relatively peaceful route until mid-game. That's why he usually beats me in terms of both economical and technological strength early on. Since I was pretty much "land-locked" I had to build up my fleet. Had about 5k FP (Fleet Power) ready with more ships in production. The goal was set, I had to conquer more planets.

Then, the battle began. There was one huge issue, after the release of Nemesis patch, you have to obtain intel on your enemies. You don't know if you are technologically superior or inferior to them. Of course, before waging war, I had already sent a spy to the faction I was fighting against, and according to my spy, their economy and technology was equal to mine, however, their fleet power was inferior. Though there was one issue, my enemy had allies. Allies that I had absolutely no information about. So I did my next best thing to counter them, close borders to every single neighbour that I had in the area. Just to make sure that I don't get hit in the back while fighting with my main enemy.

The battle was a success, I was able to obtain 2 planets and 5 different sectors.

---

Well, that was a piece of relatively long information about our first session after the Nemesis patch, it was really fun, but also intriguing. There is one feature in game called "Auto Development" where the AI will help you micro-manage your planets and sectors (because it gets quite tiring and hard to keep up after you get like 6 different planets running at the same time) before the Nemesis patch, the AI was always proactive and building stuff. Making sure that no downtime exists in your empire. However, this had it's shortcomings whereas the AI would not care about your economical situation and would spam Advanced Research Complexes early on in the game, which would completely cripple the energy credits income. Since you can't research stuff without electricity. I remember going down as far as minus 300 energy credits a month, mind you, that even 100 is A LOT. for mid-game.

After this update, I realised that most of my planets were idling. Even with auto development on, no actual buildings were being placed. I was quite up in terms of income (so upgrades could be made automatically since they would not put me in deficit) but the AI was so adamant about keeping still, making me having to micro-manage every single planet.

I believe that this is a bug. Since this update was also supposed to bring a "revamped Auto Development system for even better development."

Another fun bug that I have discovered while playing is that, one of the AI factions wanted to declare war to another faction that's right beside them and... wanted my permission? This should be systematically impossible as I had absolutely no relationship with this faction. Usually, a war "vote" happens whenever a federation would like to declare a war on an enemy faction. But forget federation, I did not even have the slightest connection with this empire. Not to mention that they were literally on the other side of the galaxy.

It seems like the patch brought some bugs with it. I am assuming this might've happened because of the "Galactic Custodian" system, maybe the game thought I had too much fleet power for the game era and somehow the empire had to ask my permission to wage war on another unknown empire? I don't know.

Alrighty then, this post got too long. But I am assuming you were able to comprehend how enthusiastic I am when it comes to strategy games.

Let me know what you think of Stellaris, and if you'd like to read more about my adventures in the vast, vast galaxy where I attempt to dominate other empires.