Just finished my first game!
Picked up stellaris on sale a few years ago with utopia, leviathans and plantiods but got scared away and overwhelmed after half an hour by the sheer complexity.
Came back a few weeks ago to give it a try and after some trial and error with several restarts I got the hang of it.
My faction were short lived, rapidly breeding plant people who I intended to use to murder everybody.
Game started off terribly, ran out of every resource and spent about 10 years scraping by but managed to sort myself out, little did I know this was only the first time of many consumer goods would haunt me.
I thought things were going fine until I accidentally released an estrich horror which destroyed one of my systems and them chilled there until the game ended (I had no idea what to do about him)
Fast forward a bit, I'm genociding neighbour's left right and center, naturally I dont join the galactic federation because I'm a genocidal plant man.
And then some alien on the other side of the galaxy declared war on me, I figured I dint have to worry since he was on the other side of the galaxy and several other factions were between us but no... next minute about 4 fleets of 18k came along on the one side of my faction that was undefended. In the time it took my fleet to cross my empire they'd taken a good 20 systems!
Anyway, battled them back and almost ruined myself financially. The energy upkeep of fleets is nuts man. Had 100k fleet strength at the height of my fight back and was sitting at -650 energy.
Fast forward and we get hit with the contingency, I see it pops up in my arch rivals system on the other side of the galaxy so I'm pretty happy... for 5 minutes until one pops up right in the middle of my empire too! Anyway was wild, these 65k fleets are popping up left right and center, 16k starbases are getting pooped out in every system they take, I'm barely able to muster 10 to 15k fleets. And there home systems got like 200k worth of defences?? How the hell am I ment to deal with this, a 100k fleet financially ruined me and I'd need several of those.
Anyway, a friendly fallen empire came along and wiped out the contingency without even trying. So in the end the damage was pretty minimal.
Then 2500 came along and I was expecting something big, but no it was just a game over screen.
I came 4th, had about 26k points. Occupied about 1/3 or maby even close to 1/2 the galaxy. My rival on the other side of the galaxy came 3rd despite having well under half the systems I did.
Anyway, felt I did good for my first fumble through not understanding much.
Couple of Q's:
How do I get a crazy strong fleet? My best individual fleet was around 20k but the fallen empires were like 200k or more. Am I doing something wrong, I thought I'd researched lots of shop upgrades. Do I just need to spam like 50 battleships?
How do I have high fleet strength without financially crippling myself?
Is there any point to have garrisoned armies/strongholds on core worlds away from risk of invasion?
By 2500 I had about 400 research in each category, is this bad? I feel I had a lot of research planets and whatnot but some of those research options were taking upwards of 100 months, was my empire just too wide?
When I'm building a orbital habitat is there any way of knowing how many energy districts it will have? When I was in the red for energy I started building them around stars etc but a lot had 0 energy districts or only 2 or 3 which barely broke even.
Is there really any benefit of landing armies on a planet when you can just indiscriminately bombard them into submission?
Consumer goods are my archillies heel, I feel most of my planets were just consumer goods factories and I was still barely breaking even! Is this just because my pop was disgustingly high? How can I minimize this issue in future
Any advice for a noob?