Lets Play Stellaris: Part 0 - Empire and Galaxy Set-Up!

It was pretty much inevitable that Stellaris would be one of my written let's plays given my love of both sci-fi and strategy. However one of the hardest parts already has been trying to decide what kind of civilisation I want to play, so after much pondering I finally got inspired enough to create a new empire for this written LP of mine!

So naturally the first thing I do is select the Fox species portrait and make sure my race are called Foxes because, why wouldn't I? I'll leave the biography blank for now until I have done everything else. As for the name lists I figured it'd be amusing to use the Human (SPQR) name list, Roman empire foxes I think that works! Ship prefix again I'll leave until later. I am however aiming for some kind of Megacorp type empire.

Now for the first important part of empire creation, selecting positive and negative traits, I've always felt this needs a bit more expanding on but we'll make do for now. First off we need some more points to play with so I select the negative trait 'Quarrelsome' the negative to unity production won't hurt us that much I feel. For the positive traits as I see it foxes love money and good ships, so thrifty will ensure our trade jobs make that much more trade value and natural engineers will help us make better ships down the road.

Next up we choose our home-world type and name it along with our home star! These aren't your garden variety foxes so I set their preferred world type to be Alpine, us foxes love our pine trees. Home-world name will be Vulpinus in orbit around the star our people call Capella. I'll just leave the city appearance as mammalian.

The next part is arguably the most important part of empire creation if you ask me, choosing your government and ethics. First off we are definitely choosing the Corporate authority, this means we will be building tall instead of wide at least to start with. Ethics wise I think what fits the concept for this empire for me is them being fanatic militarists with a point in materialist, they like ships and they care not for all that spiritual mumbo jumbo.

Finally we have the civics choices, the first and arguably most important of these I selected is the criminal heritage. They have few scruples when it comes to gaining wealth and power and are a fairly mercenary people which helped choose the second civic too, naval contractors given my last game as a megacorp having that larger navy is going to help when they get annoyed with all the crime I sow on their worlds.

The Fox Cartel begins!

With our race created and raring to go it only remains now to set-up the galaxy in which they will attempt domination. I go back and add in a basic biography and add my ship prefix, FCMV (Fox Cartel Military Vessel.)

I have set everything to default in a 600 star galaxy with the only exceptions being that this will be on captain difficulty and as always it will be an ironman game.

So it begins, near the galactic core on the north side of the galaxy, this is gonna be fun!