Stellaris returns with the Galactic Paragons expansion, introducing the new ruling council, and raising the question of whether it would be a good idea to leave absolutely everything in the hands of a single, glorious, eternal God King…
The answer turns out to be no.
Stellaris: Galactic Paragons on Steam – https://store.steampowered.com/app/2380030/Stellaris_Galactic_Paragons/
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Fanfare for Space, Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
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This game is basically crusader kings but in sci fi
The stupid high level cap undying leader build is actually pretty powerful.I’ve done it a couple times. Ps. You can 100% tech up lifespan faster than your leaders would die.
All hail High King Solus, the Enlightened Monarch, the Everliving, the Destined Ruler of All.
Bow to his Luminous Presence, and be given life eternal*.
* The Lonely Kingdom and High King Solus do not guarantee quality of life and cannot be held responsible if expectations do not meet up with reality. All hail the High King. Al hail the Lonely Kingdom.
I assume you need scientists in ships to stop people from just spamming the hell out of the ships to rush explore. That kinda makes sense to me.
"If I come to them and say, 'So, the first aliens we ran into, we're going to surrender!' I feel like in some ways, it would like, undermine my imperial majesty a bit."
Now I want to see a wacky comedy about High King Solus the Incompetent having to hide the fact that they've become vassals to his subject in that classic "Uh oh, this character has something he can't let his family/girlfriend/etc. know about and needs to do some wacky stuff to keep them from finding out!" style.
6:00 The one really good thing about the old scientist system was that there was a civic you could take that made a Scientist's specialty research appear 2x as likely, so if you wanted to bum rush like materials engineering or guarantee you get archeotech more often that's how you'd do it.
I love Stellaris. I hope you play more of this in the future. Great vid.
I do like to watch these stellaris videos but john always plays as a good guy so it would be way more interesting if he did try something else for a change
I like the idea of specialized scientists and wouldn't mind if you could expand into specialized seats, but it also felt weird you needed 3 scientists to handle research while head of state is always 1 guy. Council is a great direction where you still have the big head but also one super admiral for your first fleet and a head of science to handle all of it. Scientists are still very prominent to keep sci vessels running but governors are also important. Maybe if you play right you could have a line of military leaders? Next free expansion, allow military ethics to scout with fewer science ships. I don't know if you could have governors as scouts in pacifist or maybe have spiritualists have priest leaders that can do anything but only at a fraction the intended bonus (ex. Priests research well enough but only at 70% capacity while boosting unity gain. They can lead armies and fleets but give fewer bonuses, BUT retreat is less likely and recover 15%-25% quicker. They don't know a thing about running a planet wide economy but people like them, and of course you can cycle them around to other roles on the fly)
At first glance I thought the name of your starting system was "Eugene's Bacon".
At 10:54 where you're talking about scientists still needing to be in ships, I think it's because they still want you to have to pay a tax on your leader pool to limit your expansion speed. Because otherwise you'd just spam science ships and explore everything for a low cost to your energy. That, or Paradox just enjoys having your scientists die when they go into a system you didn't realize was hostile. I don't like either option tbh. My personal issue with the way things work now is that I don't get a choice of negative traits the leaders get and even with all the stuff to make them NOT get negative traits they still somehow wind up with the most annoying ones like '-5% unity'
I kind of think the point of the whole science ship to science counselor system was to work your scientists up giving them experience and then putting the best ones on the council having the best one right at the start kind of throughs that Dynamic for a loop. Just makes sense though as scientists are scientists first whereas politicians are always politicians but scientists that go into government basically have to Master 2 careers so it wouldn't make sense that every scientist would make a good counselor and some should just be in the field doing what they do best.
Last time I played this, I got a Galactic Paragon who was basically the Borg Queen if she was concerned only with being an admiral and fighting for anyone (I was a fanatic materialist/mechanist race.) Awesome admiral.
There is a guaranteed way to get your ruler killed. Declare war on an FE and surrender. You get the humiliated modifier for 10 years, plus they assassinate your leader. Idk if it works for vassals, though. When my vassal did it, my leader died.
Full Stellaris series in 2024????
In which an Englishman discovers the downsides of monarchy
🎉
It's been a fair few years since I last played Stellaris, but all of this looks really great.
I like the new character focus.
I might have to buy a couple of DLCs when they next come on sale. Haven't gotten any of 'em since Federations.
This is one of those games I still need to sit down with and learn to play. It looks fantastic.
I like this early access of Starfield! Do more Jon!
Sooooooo Jon, how much longer until we get the inevitable “stelaris: Kill everything” 0_o
if you make science ships able to survey without a scientist, then you run into an issue where people will spam out science ships to explore as much as possible (because surveying allows you to get control of systems before other empire) and I think it wouldn't be a great system. And I wouldn't call surveying, researching anomalies, and finding events and precursors 'nothing of note' those are some of the big moments of the early game
I'm laughing at the spiel about how weird it is for science ships to have to need scientists while planets now can have a governor each.
Also the most likely culprit about the scientist thing is with both how integral science ships our and how much ground they cover (scanning, Archeology, Anomalies) and with how much of that had different outcomes depending on the scientist's skills that ripping it out wholesale would mean removing at least 50% of the fluff established when it's just easier and cooler to have multiple scientist whose beliefs and skills can be incorporated into the system with more and new fluff and they can overhaul the old stuff over time.
This is how Jon expected the Impossible Run to go lol
"No, don't purge them! That's too xenophobic, we're not that xenophobic". I worry we just heard the future of British politics sometime in the next decade :-/
Stellaris and John ❤
Been waiting 4 u 2 do this dlc keep up the awesome content
High King Solus… you mean like Emperor Solus zos Galvus from FF14?
You have a choice Jon, you either do a full run as the crisis or I drop off my 6month old at your house so I can play Stellaris again 😅
Did Jon of all people get fewer and less mixed up or am I dumber than I thought
Today, Jon roleplays as Solomon-David from Kill Six Billion Demons.
I would love it if you continued this playthrough, just to see how things will turn out.
This game is so great, and Jon is one of the best presenters of it.
Cloaking might offset the propensity of scientist death, though I haven't tried it myself.
Play “Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator”
By my assessment, there are some pretty clear reasons to still require scientists manning Science Ships (and to still have secondary leaders not on the council in general, really) – it means there is still some strategic depth to the leader system for the players who actually enjoy micromanaging who is in charge to min-max the various bonuses, and it's a good way to ensure players, particularly new ones, will likely have replacements available when a councilor dies and they don't need to start over with a fresh recruit. There are probably more justifications, that's just what comes to mind off the top of my head.
I think Paradox still makes you put scientists in each ship is because the old competitive meta was to pump out as many science ships as possible, as early as possible to help claim as much space as possible. Placing harder soft caps on leaders slows down this early game race, which I appreciate because there's not as much pressure on micromanagement in my big slow strategy game anymore.
I also didnt know about Galactic Paragons…
The other weird decision is now that Leaders have a cap, it seems like in addition to sector Governor you can also have planet governors???
40:37 Since they're mushroom shouldn't it be a fruiting house?
This is just begging for a militaristic, xenophobe, tech fanatic empire and trying to emulate Warhammer's God Emperor and Imperium of Man. The council would be the Primarks.
Looks like I'm going to get addicted to Stellaris another two hundred hours or so..
FOR THE EMPEROR!
only thing I can think of around your comments about scientists, in science ships is it allows them to level up, so that should your head of research die, you can have a levelled replacement to pop on the council
Jon… That big speech at the 1:00:00 mark about 'encasing our bodies in steel to preserve our minds' sounds a whole lot like the origin story of the Necrons in Warhammer 40K, and that didn't turn out so well…
finally, a country run by Jon goes the way it should
So ends the reign of Solus the incompetent. An interesting plot twist in that making him live forever ruined the empire.
"Why are we purging them, thats too zenophobic" the panic in jons voice got me dying.
At first when Jon described what he was going for I was thinking is he going to create the Emeperor on his Golden Throne but a pacificst and Jon proceeds to become the Emperor looking for his Golden Throne. For the Emperor!
edit: Then he failed…