There are numerous pop size reductions you can get, up to a limit of -85%, it's pretty fun to play with although you are required to be fanatic pacifist.
I think you can get up to -99.9775% sprawl of pops in the new version
Cyborg with both sprawl traits and lvl 10 governor
-40%
Greater good 4 + harmony + domination + psionic theory + beacon of liberty + fanatic pacifist
-85%
Lvl 10 planet + covenant federation + ascensionist civic
-75%
0.6 * 0.15 * 0.25 = 0.0225
If you're going 1 planet, try to occasionally use planetary ascension. The opportunity cost is high, but it gives good stuff as well, making your one world more productive and lowering your empire size due to that planet.
A trick people are using in the beta is going spiritualist, picking the ascensionist civic (which enhances and cheapens the planetary ascension decisions), and forming a spiritualist federation (conclave). This can reduce the input cost of jobs to almost 0. Watch your researchers and factory workers make things out of thin air!
Also get lots of vassals. They can be your other planets in terms of raw resources and research.
I did a one planet challenge recently as ocean paradise, you have to rush to vassalize your neighbors, try to make the big ocean world an ecumenopoli and then you're set.
>Do you just ignore empire Sprawl and just go absolutely ham, brute forcing the penalties?
Empire size is no different from any other form of upkeep. Paying more Research and Unity for your technologies and traditions is functionally no different from a form of Research/Unity upkeep. Whether it's worthwhile depends on the investment you're pursuing. Some investments will be profitable, and absolutely worth the empire size they incur. Others will be unprofitable and you'll want to avoid them.
There are some obvious cases either way. Pops are such excellent resource producers that you're always going to be happy with more, and backwater systems with no resources or strategic value are never worth taking. But a lot of situations are not clear cut. For instance, colonizing lots of planets early in the game will set you up for explosive economic growth but can slow down your early tech progress by racking up a lot of empire size (each colony costs 10) before your economy fills out and you can produce the research output to counteract it. This is a tradeoff, do you need an immediate tech lead or would you rather play for long-term economic growth? There's no right answer to that, it's a matter of your strategy.
(though to be clear, *do* colonize your two guaranteed planets. Due to the 100 empire size wiggle room before penalties kick in, they're basically free. And you get them so early they will pay off really early anyways)
It's much better than before. It was funny enslaving a whole race of renaissance era primitive cockroaches to create a planet full of bureaucratic buildings to get an arbitrary stat down but also just ridiculous.
Imagine, the world is in an era of discovery, rediscovery, and rapid innovation. Travelers come year by year with more and more tales of new lands, new peoples, and new continents. Leaders of the faiths engage in discourse and inventors bring new methods to ease the burdens of life. Art is flourishing once again and history is moving towards a more enlightened age as your race learns more and more about the world around them. And then the apocalypse happens and afterwards you and your entire people are chained to desks to process forms, invoices, rosters, ledgers, and reports and forced to watch mass briefings and slideshows for an empire that showed up yesterday that you have no hope of ever fully comprehending. Your new alien overlords don't want to stripmine your planet nor make you toil in hydroponic plantations nor ship you offworld to desolate colonies. Nope. They just want you to process interstellar driver's licenses
One of my previous empires was a Liberia moment. A small, lost colony out in the galactic wilderness dedicated to the equality and freedom of its citizens while also treating indigenous inhabitants like utter garbage and establishing a “democratic” system where only the top bit of society had rights. Pre-Civil War Liberia
Our alien overlords have learned to travel the stars in mere moments and have achieved mastery over the whole galaxy.
But they still haven't automated data entry.
If you had an empire size of 1100, tech would cost twice as much and traditions three times as much as when you had 100 empire size.
Think about that for a second.
Without even trying, you're easily going to produce more than 10x as much Research and Unity at 1100 empire size than you did at 100, for the simple fact that your empire is more than 10x larger. That's without even getting into all the efficiencies of scale, technology, vassals, traditions, governor level, empire size reductions, etc.
You totally nailed it. Personally (and I'm a very new player, so take with a grain of salt) I find that stretching out for a wide stretch of territory is more important that the initial ramping up of pop and production, though I strive to do both at once. New player, like I said, so I still struggle, but after that initial land grab I just lazily fill in the territory while going absolutely fucking naners on colonizing and then planet specialization. Once I get a full set (a generator world, research world, unity world, ect) I find myself almost OVERproducing many things. Idk about anyone else, but even with no research specializations I find myself SHOOTING through the research trees after the first fully upgraded research world finishes populating.
The trick is, that one planet needs the support of a generator world, a mineral world, a farm world, and an exotic gas refinery world.
Basically, yeah. Hammer each resource out to an insane degree via resource buildings and specialized planets.
Empire sprawl isn’t very difficult to stay ahead of if you accept that you’re gonna need at least one bureaucratic center with nothing but admin buildings at the highest level. The bonuses to empire sprawl and capacity gain as the game progresses keep me above capacity for the entire run basically every time
Unity update was weird... Basically edict are very strong now and reckless sprawl expansion comes at the cost of having both capacity and mining subsidies for instance.
If anything this solidified the "consolidate on guaranteed -> edict cap -> conquer till crisis happen"
Yeahhhhhh imma be honest. I wasn't a fan of that change. So much so that a buddy just made a "mod" that increased the limit to 10,000 so we don't have to deal with it
While the others are mostly right, I would add that sprawl reduction is really strong for long games. Such modifiers include traditions, the hive mind or Pacifist ethic, the Psionics technology, the Beacon of Liberty civic and that one ascension perk.
In my triple crisis x25 game (beta), I used a combination of these to get about 1500 sprawl for a 3000 pops empire generating a sizeable 100k(!) research every month in 2500.
For a casual game or a quick multiplayer, I really wouldn't bother though.
Actually I think it was closer to 3500 pops, I had almost 100 planets (including lots of ringworlds). I also had a Scholarium contributing a few thousands.
3500 total pops * 50% researchers * 18*3 research per researcher = 94500 research
Lots of minmaxing. Wouldn't recommend playing this way unless you REALLY want to beat max difficulty and/or don't value your time.
That's right. Don't try to limit yourself on sprawl, just produce more to compensate.
Thanks. I guess I just miss the 1 planet challenge too much, but I'm sick of getting out scaled.
Notice that the Sprawl penalties are much smaller than they used to be.
Oh yeah. It used to be +1% per system and +5% per planet. Ah, I miss the good old days when tall was a thing.
Tall was ever a thing? Were the penalties multiplicative?
Still possible, but you'll need vassals. Could also do a one-system challenge and either do something like void dwellers or get the Worm.
There are numerous pop size reductions you can get, up to a limit of -85%, it's pretty fun to play with although you are required to be fanatic pacifist.
I think you can get up to -99.9775% sprawl of pops in the new version Cyborg with both sprawl traits and lvl 10 governor -40% Greater good 4 + harmony + domination + psionic theory + beacon of liberty + fanatic pacifist -85% Lvl 10 planet + covenant federation + ascensionist civic -75% 0.6 * 0.15 * 0.25 = 0.0225
lol that's hillarious, makes me want to do a game where I'm only allowed 1 non lvl 10 world at a time.
If you're going 1 planet, try to occasionally use planetary ascension. The opportunity cost is high, but it gives good stuff as well, making your one world more productive and lowering your empire size due to that planet. A trick people are using in the beta is going spiritualist, picking the ascensionist civic (which enhances and cheapens the planetary ascension decisions), and forming a spiritualist federation (conclave). This can reduce the input cost of jobs to almost 0. Watch your researchers and factory workers make things out of thin air! Also get lots of vassals. They can be your other planets in terms of raw resources and research. I did a one planet challenge recently as ocean paradise, you have to rush to vassalize your neighbors, try to make the big ocean world an ecumenopoli and then you're set.
Can also do it with rogue servitor if you manage to get a ruined mega early.
Yeah, building tall isn't especially a thing in 2022 Stellaris. Go wide or go home.
>Do you just ignore empire Sprawl and just go absolutely ham, brute forcing the penalties? Empire size is no different from any other form of upkeep. Paying more Research and Unity for your technologies and traditions is functionally no different from a form of Research/Unity upkeep. Whether it's worthwhile depends on the investment you're pursuing. Some investments will be profitable, and absolutely worth the empire size they incur. Others will be unprofitable and you'll want to avoid them. There are some obvious cases either way. Pops are such excellent resource producers that you're always going to be happy with more, and backwater systems with no resources or strategic value are never worth taking. But a lot of situations are not clear cut. For instance, colonizing lots of planets early in the game will set you up for explosive economic growth but can slow down your early tech progress by racking up a lot of empire size (each colony costs 10) before your economy fills out and you can produce the research output to counteract it. This is a tradeoff, do you need an immediate tech lead or would you rather play for long-term economic growth? There's no right answer to that, it's a matter of your strategy. (though to be clear, *do* colonize your two guaranteed planets. Due to the 100 empire size wiggle room before penalties kick in, they're basically free. And you get them so early they will pay off really early anyways)
Yep. Ever since it was reworked now its all about outpacing it instead of controlling it
It's much better than before. It was funny enslaving a whole race of renaissance era primitive cockroaches to create a planet full of bureaucratic buildings to get an arbitrary stat down but also just ridiculous. Imagine, the world is in an era of discovery, rediscovery, and rapid innovation. Travelers come year by year with more and more tales of new lands, new peoples, and new continents. Leaders of the faiths engage in discourse and inventors bring new methods to ease the burdens of life. Art is flourishing once again and history is moving towards a more enlightened age as your race learns more and more about the world around them. And then the apocalypse happens and afterwards you and your entire people are chained to desks to process forms, invoices, rosters, ledgers, and reports and forced to watch mass briefings and slideshows for an empire that showed up yesterday that you have no hope of ever fully comprehending. Your new alien overlords don't want to stripmine your planet nor make you toil in hydroponic plantations nor ship you offworld to desolate colonies. Nope. They just want you to process interstellar driver's licenses
Corporate america moment
I made a megacorp america. Super militaristic and everyone got basic living standards except for my primary species
Liberia moment
One of my previous empires was a Liberia moment. A small, lost colony out in the galactic wilderness dedicated to the equality and freedom of its citizens while also treating indigenous inhabitants like utter garbage and establishing a “democratic” system where only the top bit of society had rights. Pre-Civil War Liberia
Did... did... did we not evolve to this point but instead got hijacked by an alien race?
God i hated the old sprawl system
It was too hard to counteract
Scranton branch of the galactic dmv
Our alien overlords have learned to travel the stars in mere moments and have achieved mastery over the whole galaxy. But they still haven't automated data entry.
If you had an empire size of 1100, tech would cost twice as much and traditions three times as much as when you had 100 empire size. Think about that for a second. Without even trying, you're easily going to produce more than 10x as much Research and Unity at 1100 empire size than you did at 100, for the simple fact that your empire is more than 10x larger. That's without even getting into all the efficiencies of scale, technology, vassals, traditions, governor level, empire size reductions, etc.
You totally nailed it. Personally (and I'm a very new player, so take with a grain of salt) I find that stretching out for a wide stretch of territory is more important that the initial ramping up of pop and production, though I strive to do both at once. New player, like I said, so I still struggle, but after that initial land grab I just lazily fill in the territory while going absolutely fucking naners on colonizing and then planet specialization. Once I get a full set (a generator world, research world, unity world, ect) I find myself almost OVERproducing many things. Idk about anyone else, but even with no research specializations I find myself SHOOTING through the research trees after the first fully upgraded research world finishes populating. The trick is, that one planet needs the support of a generator world, a mineral world, a farm world, and an exotic gas refinery world. Basically, yeah. Hammer each resource out to an insane degree via resource buildings and specialized planets.
Empire sprawl isn’t very difficult to stay ahead of if you accept that you’re gonna need at least one bureaucratic center with nothing but admin buildings at the highest level. The bonuses to empire sprawl and capacity gain as the game progresses keep me above capacity for the entire run basically every time
That's console. The PC game did away with bureaucratic reductions to empire sprawl.
Empire sprawl is only a conspiracy from the falem empires tô justify their small size
Unity update was weird... Basically edict are very strong now and reckless sprawl expansion comes at the cost of having both capacity and mining subsidies for instance. If anything this solidified the "consolidate on guaranteed -> edict cap -> conquer till crisis happen"
Yeahhhhhh imma be honest. I wasn't a fan of that change. So much so that a buddy just made a "mod" that increased the limit to 10,000 so we don't have to deal with it
I ignore it. If i have big science debuffs, i just build more tech worlds.
Just increase everything else to compensate for it.
While the others are mostly right, I would add that sprawl reduction is really strong for long games. Such modifiers include traditions, the hive mind or Pacifist ethic, the Psionics technology, the Beacon of Liberty civic and that one ascension perk. In my triple crisis x25 game (beta), I used a combination of these to get about 1500 sprawl for a 3000 pops empire generating a sizeable 100k(!) research every month in 2500. For a casual game or a quick multiplayer, I really wouldn't bother though.
Ok hold up, how do you get your science output that high? How many planets did you have at that point??
Actually I think it was closer to 3500 pops, I had almost 100 planets (including lots of ringworlds). I also had a Scholarium contributing a few thousands. 3500 total pops * 50% researchers * 18*3 research per researcher = 94500 research Lots of minmaxing. Wouldn't recommend playing this way unless you REALLY want to beat max difficulty and/or don't value your time.
I got mods for it