Been playing a lot of Stellaris since its 1.3 update. Right know I'm in a game where I'm in a bit of a consolidation phase. Mainly strengthening myself from within by terraforming planets (only Tomb Worlds are a no go at this moment) and subsequently colonizing them and building them up to full population and production.
As I've got a good influence income plus all kinds of discounts to resettling my pops I can quickly populate planets by just taking one pop from each fully developed planet and moving them towards their new home. This is usually a step by step process as I need to make sure enough food is produced to feed all the pops. Still, it is a very fast way of increasing my power.
And powerful I am. I'm only utilizing 400 of my 700 fleet capacity atm (oh those crazy begin times, when you only had 10) and still there's only 1 other empire in the game considered my equel (though only in tech and fleet capacity, his actual fleet is deemed weaker). That's also because I excluded Fallen Empires from this game, I wanted an equal playing field vs the AI this time.
That's not to say the road to this has been easy. This is actually the fifth (!!) play I've attempted with this particular race and I'm finally at a point where I'm comfortable that I won't be ganked any time soon.
Seems like most other civilizations don't like an Empire that enslaves aliens (only aliens though) and purges aliens. Especially some active purging can quickly sink other empires their opinion of you. Found that out the hard way during those earlier 4 playthroughs where each ended with me being overrun by multiple enemies.
It was a bit of a surprise as up to this I had only played civs that were xenophile or neutral in stance to other races. Still, with every failure I learned and this brought me to where I am now.
Lessons learned:
1) Suck up to alien races that do not absolute loathe you from the start. Turn that dislike in a like by bribing them with gifts. A simple 1 mineral/month for 30 years deal can work wonders.
2) Your agenda may be to exterminate all other sentient life in the galaxy but keeping a false front is a necessity at start. Use those good relations to go for defensive pacts and then even a Federation.
3) The Federation is your shield and your first means of conquest. Use the combined power to target weaker neighbours. Don't start purging yet, keep it at enslavement without right of procreation, otherwise your Federation buddies will likely kick you from the team.
4) Only when its use has gotten to an end should you step out of the Federation. Start a little bit of purging against the more problematic/useless slaves.
5) Get powerful enough to purge as you see fit, everybody hates you anyway by now (this is where I'm at, there's only a single xenophobic race on the other side of the galaxy that only mildly dislikes me, the other would like to see me dead).
6) Don't fuck up and actually manage to win
Step 6 can still be a challenge. There's still an end game crisis to come and while individually my opponents are weaker they are a force to be reckoned with when combined. Most of them are also part of powerful federations. If they hit me hard enough others will start jumping in which may result in me basically being stun-locked into endless wars versus different alliances (so never a chance to recuperate during the mandatory 10 year truce after a war). That's what eventually happened in game 4 when I thought I was established enough when I covered about 1/5th of the galaxy. Wasn't even an end game crisis in play back then either, just regular AI that murdered me. What did I ever do to them??? Oh right...
One thing that has turned up during my consolidation phase is that it seems there are more random events triggered while I'm colonizing planets, or maybe it's just my rapid colonization that makes it seem so. So far I've had the familiar walking trees (burned them all), some strange alien factory (for which I subsequently got a later pop-up saying that it continued to work fine, I'm still waiting for it to go haywire or maybe that was actually the good ending of the event chain), finally I got one where I could salvage an alien Cruiser buried beneath polar ice, which not only gave me the expected Cruiser but also an empire wide 10% evasion modifier for all of my ships.
Playing as a Collectivist, Militarist, Spiritualist empire bend on purging the galaxy is a wonderful challenge, I can recommend it to everyone.
