As well as giving you a whole new planet to gain additional resources, the border of your empire will grow around any planet you colonise, allowing you to collect the resources from surrounding systems. When you survey systems, you’ll not only uncover valuable resources but also uninhabited planets that you can colonise.
If you start off in a resource-rich area, It’s not a bad idea to focus your planetary buildings on food production to start off with, replacing the buildings once your population has reached full capacity. Minerals are what you use to build things such as planetary buildings and fleets, while food is what your ‘pops’ or population live on and any amount over your stored amount determines how quickly their numbers will increase.
The three main resources that you’ll want to prioritise at the start are Energy Credits, Minerals, and Food.Įnergy Credits are the currency in Stellaris and you’ll need them for the upkeep of your planetary buildings, fleet, mining and research stations and so on. There are a lot of resources that you’ll need to manage when playing Stellaris and you should know what each one is used for and prioritise accordingly. That way, they can deal with any threats leaving your Science Ship to, well, get on with the science bit.Īnd while you start off with one Science Ship, it’s probably a good idea to build a second as soon as you can, just to cover more ground – err, space – and get more systems surveyed. The easiest way to overcome this, as well as quickly scout out what planets might be out there, is to send out your fleet to do a flyby first. So when you’re setting out to explore unknown systems, the last thing you want to happen is to stumble across a hostile fleet that completely wipes out your Science Ship – along with the scientist aboard and any experience levels he’s gained. You’ll use your Science Ship to survey unknown systems to uncover minerals, energy credits, technology research, and anomalies. Science Ships are hugely important in Stellaris and you’ll start out with one at the beginning of the game, complete with its own s cientist. Once you’ve tried out various empires for yourself, you can build your own based on what you’ve learned and what your overall aim is. For example, on my first game, I colonised too many planets (not realising there was a cap) and recruited too many leaders, leaving me with no Unity.
If you’re anything like me, your first few games are likely to be filled with varying degrees of mistakes – ones that you’ll learn not to make again. You can have a random one chosen for you or you can create your own but h onestly, if you’re just starting out, I’d just pick whichever you like the look of and jump straight in. So, the first thing you’ll need to do is choose an empire that you want to play as. It seems that there’s a lot to learn when it comes to managing an empire in deep space and, while this is far from a comprehensive guide, it should at least give you a good starting point. There’s an option to turn on a full tutorial which will give you pop-up messages whenever you open a menu while the pop-ups themselves can be a little annoying, it’s well worth turning on for your first few games so you can get a basic grasp of what everything does. If you’re new to Stellaris: Console Edition – or strategy games in general – the amount of information thrown at you when you first boot up the game can be overwhelming.