Stellaris - 7 Hidden Mechanics That You Probably Didn't Know

Biggest one for me is setting army transport fleets to aggressive has them auto invade whatever is in the system they’re in

You missed most important hotkey imo that not everyone might yet know about - the Ctrl+Shift+RMB for science ship to force them to put something in their queue but with top priority. Let's say you already set 15 planets to be surveyed but got special project - you just use this combination and force ship to make it's next move the project instead continuing route, and when they end it - they just get back on their track and there's no need to set it again. I think I learnt it from you few years ago and it's literally most important thing in the game.

I never knew that trade routes are editable. Always just built a gateway at every important node so that pirate is impossible to spawn due to the suppression.

Don't forget to put admirals in that patrol fleets so that they get valuable experience before their first real combat! :)

You missed a crucial hit key: F which brings up a “find” function to find any system/ planet. Works great for finding those last couple system/planets you need to conquer to meet war goals.

Best thing I learned in this video is, that ships can get XP by supressing piracy. Good for peacefull times.

For the automation: the resources are vital, and needed to be mentioned. If you just turn on automation, nothing happens because you didn’t give it any resources to build with.

The point one exp / day for suppressing pirates was the only feature I was not aware of, and one that I def need to exploit next time I play.

I recommend for the piracy suppression that you make 2 or 3 fleets (depending on empire size) from about 10ish corvettes (don't bother upgrading them since they're not meant for battle) then set them to your main trade routes and set them to patrol. In my experience you'll usually have no more than 3 major trade routes before you get gateways up and running. Once you get gateways up and running piracy shouldn't be much threat anymore. From there you can either upgrade and join the fleets to a war fleet, set them to patrol areas that arent worth setting a gateway to, or you can disband them.

The greatest hotkey combo in the game is ctrl+shift+click to insert command IN FRONT of a queue. So for example when your science ship encounters anomaly that unlocks special project, you can tell your science ship to complete the project first and only then carry on with it's queued tasks. Also,automation looks good, but seldom works. AI is amazingly incompetent, and if you care at all about the efficiency, it will make you grit your teeth in frustration.

The piracy interdiction one is a mechanic I use all the time, I make sure I have a bunch of corvettes just for this; stations are good for this too, slap some hangar bays and missile turrets and they help too.

One trick I like to use that's not well known is that you can build defence platforms on outposts, and at least as of a few updates ago, the AI doesn't seem to take the added firepower into account when invading your territory. A very useful early to mid game boost, or also good when you have a certain system that frequently spawns pirates.

My piracy suppression is usually done by starbases with hanger bays at the mid to late game. Each bay adds more suppression and reach of that base, at citadel levels, a single hanger bay starbase can contain six or seven jumps in all directions at once, so unless your empire is 25% of the galaxy or more, you'll probably only need two, maybe three suppression stations. I also tend to have one of the stations neighboring systems have another starbase that has collection modules/buildings to gather up trade value in a wide area to funnel off to the capital.

I already knew most of these, but I agree that editing trade routes is VERY important and should be discussed more. It can be vital if you have a hole in your empire, like if you're surrounding a system that has a tough critter you're not ready to kill yet. Trade routes always take the shortest route to your capitol, by default, so you can be losing a lot of money through trade if it's going through one of these "lost" systems. A few other tips: If you don't want to use patrol ships to suppress piracy, like maybe you're doing a "no ships challenge," then upgraded stations are vital. Each weapon slot increases the amount of suppression as well as the radius of suppression, so if you have two guns on your station, it protects up to two systems out. Hangar Bays have the highest piracy suppression, so if your station is only being used for piracy suppression and NOT to protect your border, only use those. Defense platforms also add to piracy suppression, but I am not sure if they increase the radius or not because I typically only build them on my border stations. And lastly, the piracy suppression of your station goes through gateways, so you can stack the protection value of ALL of your stations if you want to, lmao.

Flipping from authoritarian to egalitarian mid game is probably the most underrated strategy. Authoritarian have bonuses/hidden features that really help early game especially with aristocratic elite and the ability to make deals with crime lords for a whopping + 20% stability with no real costs other than micro managing your crime rate to fall between 40-10%. Then as mid game comes you hopefully have a good surplus of consumer goods and an industrial base, so you can fully transition to utopian abundance and 10% specialist output.

First 11 from Montu, now 7 from ASpec, good videos to keep newcomers to the game informed :)

Aspec messing with anti-piracy,. clicking into the system view few times, and explaining about trade, really shows that the whole thing is messed up and hard to control. And also is one reason why my "trade routes" are just a bunch of Starbases forming a single line.

I feel like ASpec made this video just to bug the devs into making a better tutorial and hotkey options.

The only one that I don't know is text-to-speech. That one caught me off guard for sure. I was like what? it has text-to-speech? excuse me? As an RTS games player, discovering the shortcut key is basically my first thing to learn when playing games. One time I got so busy with my star bases, my friend thought I'm typing commands to cheat lol

Thank you ASpec for another great video! The game is fun but rather complex and has a steep learning curve, your tutorials really helped me when I started playing. Keep up the good work.