The Best Build for New Players in Stellaris
Experience is your greatest strength in Stellaris. With experience comes the ability to utilize the game mechanics to your advantage rather than weather the storm. The best way to increase your experience level is to play games from start to finish. Stellaris ramps up in difficulty very quickly. New players can find themselves defeated before getting a chance to experience the late game. Having a strong build at the start of the game; enables new players to play a game to completion.
The Best Build for New Players in Stellaris
I designed this build to give new players the best chance to reach the game’s end date for the first time. Reaching the end of a game is an achievement all by itself, and you should be proud if you manage it. The best build in Stellaris for new players is one that gives you the best chance of reaching the end game. This will be a standard species empire with materialist and xenophile ethics. Take civics/traits that boost research and resource production, and pick the Here be Dragon’s origin.
Table of Contents
- The Best Build for New Players in Stellaris
- Empire Creation Phase
- How to Play the Build
Empire Creation Phase
Empire creation is the first step when creating a new build. Feel free to follow along with the guide as everything is broken up into the steps they will appear in-game. The empire creation menus have four categories; Species, Home world, Empire, and Ruler. Each category has a collection of menus to navigate; some are more important than others when determining build.
Species
The species category has four sub menus; Appearance, Species Name, Name Lists, and Traits. Depending on what DLCs you own, will get access to different appearances. For our beginner build, we want to avoid any of the special species, as they change the game mechanics quite substantially. Take any appearance you like that is not Lithoid, Machine, Toxoid, Plantoid, or Fungoid.
The next option is species name. If you are not feeling creative, the game can make you one. The Name List menu is a collection of names the game will assign your planets and ships. Again, not a big deal. Pick one which you find easy to read and move on.
Last but most significant is traits. Traits effect how pops interact with the planet they live on and their job output. We want our first pops to be pumping out research as fast as possible, so we are going to take traits that enable that. The first trait to pick is Intelligent. This will improve all research by 10 percent when carried out by these pops. We want to take Natural Engineers as well to boost engineering research, but we have no trait points left. Taking a negative trait will give us more trait points to spend. The Slow Learner’s trait reduces leader experience gain by 10 percent. This cost is nothing and well worth it.
Home World
We can almost leave this section alone, as it is almost all cosmetic. This section is all about what kind of planet your home world is and the star system it is in. The two menus are Name & Class and City Appearance. In Name & Class, you name your home world, name your starting star, and select the climate of your home planet. You also have the option to select a preset solar system to start in. We are ignoring that feature for this build and starting in a random system instead. City appearance is not important. Choose whichever you like, and then you are ready to move on to the significant choices.
Empire
Without a doubt, the most important set of menus when determining build is the empire section. Here you will select your Origin, Government & Ethics, Advisor Voice, Empire Name, Flag, and Ship Appearance. Foremost, we must select an origin. An origin is the backstory of our empire, and there are a lot of great picks to choose from. The best of these for a beginner is; Here be Dragons. This origin will put a giant space dragon in your home system. This dragon is powerful and will defend your home planet from invasion. There are also some cool story elements to this origin that I will leave you to discover on your own.
Next is the Government & Ethics menu. There are a lot of choices to make here. Starting from right to left, they are: Authority, Ethics, and Civics. Your authority is the way your government is run. In our case, we want a democracy. This unlocks some civics we want to take and also makes interacting with the faction mechanic much easier. Your ethics are what your empire and its people believe in. These are all good, and this is the choice that will most determine your empire’s play style. Our aim is to maximize research, so we need the fanatic materialist ethic first. We also want to make the game easier for ourselves, and the best way to do that is gaining allies. With that in mind, we take the xenophile ethic. This will make other empires like us more, increasing the chances of creating alliances. Now we get to pick civics. Civics are the principles your government adheres to when ruling its people. You start with two civics and get to unlock a third later on in the game. The first civic we want is Technocracy. We want the bonus to research this gives and the extra research alternative. The Second is Meritocracy. Meritocracy improves specialist resource production by 10 percent. With the important things in the empire selection selected, the rest is all window dressing. Advisor voice, Empire name, Flag, and Ship appearance can be set it to whatever you like.
Ruler
This used to be the most irrelevant section in empire creation. With the release of the Galactic Paragons DLC, that all changed. There are two menus here. First is Ruler appearance, where you get to design the look of your empire’s leader. Set the appearance and name your leader whatever you wish. What gave this section some usefulness was the addition of the Ruler Traits section. You can now select a class and a trait for your first leader to take. We want our first leader to be a scientist with the Spark of Genius trait. This will provide another 3 percent research speed buff.
How to Play the Build
With the build complete, it is time to start playing the game. The build isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it mechanic, though. If you want to get the most out of it, you will want to adjust your play…